...And let me tell you, I've known some wonderful Gay men that absolutely adored children, and would do anything and everything to protect them. I'll clue you in: you have an "Uncle" gay man responsible for his little covey of younger gym girls, HE WOULD KILL if anyone ever laid a disrespectful finger on them. Legal consequences would be the very least of an abusive pervert's worries.

I've known some wonderful STRAIGHT men who absolutely adored children, and would do anything and everything to protect them. I'll clue you in: you have a psychologically mature "Uncle" straight man responsible for his little covey of younger gym girls, HE WOULD KILL if anyone ever laid a disrespectful finger on them. Legal consequences would be the very least of an abusive pervert's worries.

as most people aren't. Thorough, comprehensive vetting would weed out those unqualified.

Doesn't seem like that was done at MSU.

I need to sort some things out with it but I also feel the need to just move along.

I live in mid-Michigan, and this has been a local story for quite awhile now. Several of these girls are from this area, and residents know them personally. It isn't just the gymnastic community that was complicit - MSU has much to answer for. Many knew, yet did worse than nothing, they actively worked to protect that monster. The fallout will continue.

The entire system appears to be corrupt. I'm not sure it can ever regain trust, frankly.

set in a rural environment where parents were forbidden to have contact with their children?

Exactly what kind of organization is US Gymnastics?

That's what kind.

There is something wrong here.

still too late. The women are now speaking out about the abusive coaches, and what they endured.

We dominate women's gymnastics and the Karolyi's are a big part of why. People will do all sorts of stupid things to "win" whether it's taking drugs or overlooking abuse like here or at Penn State.

Also women's gymnastics is a unique sport in terms of time lines for peak ability. Because basically most are considered past peak performance by 20 and the Olympics require a minimum age of 16 (in the case of China on paper), there's only a small window to get somebody up to the best they can be. And those girls are often home schooled and basically only do gymnastics, they can sometimes lack the skills to say no to an authority figure. I don't mean that they should have to, but that a predator can take advantage of that lack of experience and high level gymnastics is more vulnerable than most sports due to age.

At least at the Olympic level.

The claim IIRC was that they MUST go thru this to be strong enuff to compete and WIN..

From what I recall, there were major red flags all over the program. Authorities just didn't care. All they wanted was wins. They cared nothing about the girls.

Read fhe article a few days ago but can't find it again. It was horrifying. Would appreciate it if someone could find it.

Karolyi burst on the international scene during the 1976 Montreal Olympics, when one of his proteges caused a sensation and changed the look of women's gymnastics. Before that, it was done by actual women, smaller than average but still with actual mature bodies. Karolyi defected and by 1984 was training young females in the US - one of his pupils, Mary Lou Retton, got gold medals at the Olympics that year and the events have been slanted towards a particular body type ever since. By a strange coincidence ( ) it's the one Karolyi favors. And since he was known to produce winners subsequent judges (I hope) unconsciously favored his pupils in awarding scores, and the judging system became more and more weighted towards his kind of gymnasts. And now it's a vicious cycle: his ranch gets the winners so the people who go there are perceived to be the best so he (and his wife) can work them as hard as possible because there will always be someone waiting to take the places of those who can't cut it. And because the system he put in place controlled US gymnastics - you don't get selected for the team unless you please him and his wife - aspirants will do anything to keep in their good graces. I don't know how Karolyi himself feels about prepubescent women, but it was always kinda creepy seeing him hug his performers, who barely came up to his waist.

Difficult and physically demanding as it is, I don't consider gymnastics a sport because of the large subjective component in the judging. Unlike track and field, there's no easy measure of performance, like who covered the most ground in the shortest time or jumped the highest or threw something the farthest. Instead it's up to a panel of judges who are supposed to follow some system (and IIRC this is a fairly new development), and it often appears that favorites go in with an advantage. It hasn't been as blatant as the judging in figure skating, but I think that's because it's more subtle. We used to joke back in the Soviet days that their team got an extra point or two just by being from the USSR.

Joan Ryan's book, Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, examined women's gymnastics and figure skating back in the mid 1990s. Sexual abuse wasn't mentioned in detail, but the physical abuse was.

that would end the dream of competing in the Olympics for 100's of young girls and boys. Do systems need to be put in place to prevent this from happening again? Obviously. What happened was tragic beyond belief but ending the program is not the answer.

Really?

Fixing this will take a complete reorganization, at a minimum. There is going to be a break in continuity. New leadership will be required, but where will it come from? It appears that the entire gymnastics community has been tainted by this.

It is a far broader and larger problem than it appears to be. It will have to be shut down and then rebuilt from scratch, I believe.

Even those that just became members which I think is totally appropriate. I'm not clear on what role the school played in this. If they were complicit, to include gross negligence, I'm sure there are many other schools that would be happy to replace them. Actually, I think that is one change that needs to just happen because they were grossly negligent. Gymnasts have such a brief window to compete in the Olympics. That bastard stole so much from those young girls. I just don't want him to get away with stealing the dreams of even more.

The youth of the participants, the pressure to excel, and other factors make the young gymnasts vulnerable to abuse. That "doctor" is receiving his punishment, but that doesn't undo the damage. And, yes, the entire board should have been forced to resign, and was. The question is: Where does it all go from here. The lawsuits are going to tap into a deep well of finances, to be sure. Every organization involved is going to end up paying those victims for the damage they suffered. That's certain.

Personally, I think this is going to end US women's gymnastics for some time as a high-level competitive team. There will have to be major reorganization and perhaps an entire cycle of competitors will be left out. So be it.

Don't be surprised if this is just the first such scandal. I know I won't be.

but doesn't this sound similar to what happened in the Catholic church with their abuse scandal? Just like in the case of the Catholic Church, victims were told to keep quiet and there were threats of repercussions against those who would come out or inform law enforcement. It takes more than a single bad or a couple of negligent persons to let something like this go on for so long with so many victims. That makes me believe as well that there is something rotten within the organization and a complete overhaul might be necessary. Trying to prevent another single victim is worth more than any amount of medals.

My first thought was that the demand that no male should ever be a doctor for those young girls is an overreaction. But maybe that is necessary. After all, there are areas (I think intimate police examinations) where exams are done by persons of the same sex but that might depend on the country.

Specifically the long cover-up of such incidents.

After reading a few accounts from the victims of Nassar's abuse, I can come to no other conclusion about men being barred from such contact with gymnasts who are just children. He abused not only them, but the trust of everyone. That is not to say that women could not engage in sexual abuse, but I think the chances would be far less.

I don't know whether Nassar went into this expecting to abuse those young girls. Perhaps he did. Or, perhaps he discovered just how much power he had over them and began abusing them after that discovery.

All I know is that he caused psychological and physical injury to scores of children. The numbers may never be known.

Fixing this is going to require a complete overhaul of the program, its methods and conditions under which the gymnasts are treated by anyone. What happened cannot be allowed to happen ever again.

It should be banned from the Olympics. No parent should ever let their kids participate ever again.

The Karolyis belong in prison.

a few times. It always seems to me that most competitors have had their growth stunted to keep them short in stature. Many of the moves they make would be impossible for a taller person. Weight, too, is critical. I'm sure the pressure is on all the time for all of them.

It doesn't seem to me to be worthwhile, really. I know that dancers have similar pressure put on them, too, but gymnastics seems even odder than ballet dance to me, and I find that odd, too.

Many other issues involved in this, including the fact that these kids don't have normal lives at all.

But the abuse here is systemic and thus, not solvable by throwing one guy in jail and firing a few others. It requires overhauling the entire system, which means a generation or more of not winning medals. So what. Let kids be kids.

This scandal reminds me of the abuse of women swimmers in East Germany, given hormones (testosterone probably) in order to ensure they would out-compete their rivals. It was eventually discovered and stopped, but those women suffered physically for the rest of their lives. This is a different sort of abuse, and largely a thing of the past (well, except for Russian doping, but I'm not clear what kind of performance enhancing drugs were used there).

First high level gymnastics train for girls start far younger. Limiting it to age 13 would be rather pointless.

Secondly, it's killing a mosquito with a nuke. At this point, we know of 1 person involved with the actual molestation. You're effectively painting every guy as the same. Yes Nasser committed horrible acts, yes people helped cover it up, and they should pay legally and ethically. But by banning every man you would be saying every guy is guilty. As a guy who helps coach a special needs gymnastics class, I've somehow managed to not molest any of our athletes.

But more than that, all you would be doing is shifting where somebody like Nasser gets his victims. He could have as easily been a pediatrician, or an athletic trainer at a high school or a teacher. You can't realistically stop somebody determined to commit a crime, especially against kids. If I wanted, I could go near a school and grab a kid. That would be pretty easy to do once. Likewise if I wanted to commit rape against an adult woman, I'm a big enough guy, that it would be hard for most women to fight me off. Somehow I've avoided doing both. But if we take your approach no guy should ever be allowed near women or girls because we could commit a sexual crime against them.

The more effective approach to stop abuse against is to teach children to not just understand what is inappropriate touching, how to tell the correct people and believe it when a victim comes forward.

Claims of molestation against Nassar go back to at least 1997. They weren't believed by those who employed Nassar. Additional victims came forward in 1998, 1999 and 2000. They weren't believed because Nassar was a "good" guy, well respected etc. And you know what, the same shit happens today. And people still don't believe victims when they like the accused. Whether it's Republicans and Roy Moore or Donald Trump or Democrats and Al Franken. We find ways to justify what we want to be true rather than looking for the truth even if we don't like what we find.

Dealing with sexual violence, especially against kids is hard. It's messy and ugly and involves having to see people around us that we trusted in a new light. It's easier to look away and not deal with it. But we need to understand that makes us complicit. That once we know, we have a moral obligation to act. Running away, whether it's by not dealing with it, or by saying something as broad as no man should ever be around a young girl because we might molest them instead of dealing with our societal problems doesn't work.

The entire sport, at that level, involves incredible pressure on the young athletes in several areas. I'm not fond of the sport, in the first place.

Thanks for your reply and opinion.

Being Canada he got a traditional Canadian joke sentence.

There are predators it seems everywhere but I can't lock up my 8 year old and tell her no more swim team or my 3 year old new ballerina to turn in her shoes.

What would help is more parental oversight. The seemingly kind coach or instructor might genuinely be kind. Or they might be a goddamn pervert who should never see the light of day. But we don't know. So we can assume everyone is goddamn pervert (and I mean everyone) or we can gently wade in and see. There's not an easy answer except more parental involvement and fewer stay away camps and whatnot.

What's wrong with you? Have you seen the number of female teachers having sex with minor male students lately? Should we ban ALL females from the teaching profession then?

Makes total sense.

... if you honestly believe that the problem here lies with "one guy," then you're part of the problem.

Conversely, if you do actually recognize that the problem extends beyond "one guy," but you're pushing the "one guy" lie nevertheless, then you are overtly complicit in covering up the problem.

It is obviously the case that this so-called "sport" should be eliminated. And, while we're at it, the entirety of the MSU athletic program, every sport in which the university participates, should be "death penalty-ied."

The idolatrous fixation people have with "sport" generally points to the ongoing degradation of society. I would expect better from those who profess a liberal sensibility.

So I say we should take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

This abuse wasn't about one guy. It was about systematic ignoring of the abuse that went on for years. I'm sorry, but you don't seem to have been following the story very well.

...his last few paragraphs, where he demands the USAG be decertified and start over from scratch, among other things.

Because I avoid unfolding horror-stories of mass child-sex-abusers, I did not know the details of Nassar's assaults until I read Plaschke's article, and it made me sick. There were children at those gym camps as young as 8 y.o. "Sessions" with the doctor went on for as long as 40 minutes. Why were there no nurses in the room to chaperone patient and doctor?

Okay, I gotta quit.

who were unaware the abuse was going on right in front of them.

Sure makes you wonder

Why would you suggest that?

I have no doubt that there are outstanding female gymnastic coaches, sports medicine specialists and administrators. It is impossible to predict anyone's behavior. So, why not?

Do you not see anything problematic about doing that?

Not where young girls are involved, I don't. Not at all.

To cast aspersions on and raise suspicions against every male that works with children (which is essentially what you are doing) because of horrific crimes like this one is extremely disturbing and wrong.

Perhaps there should be a curfew for all men? Or maybe issued body cams?

It's like the Muslim ban- some Muslims are terrorists, so let's ban them all from coming to the US.

that covered for him to be tried as accomplices. The guarded the door while he raped the girls. When that starts happening these types of complaints will be taken seriously.

The whole program needs to be rebuilt with safe guards. IE no male or female left alone with the kids. Any child 13 and under must accompanied by a parent or legal guardian to these training camps.

Kids must be taught that not abusers are ugly strangers. They can be and most likely are someone they know and their parents trust with their care.