Ath­lete A

On 2 August, 2016, just a few days before the US Women’s Gym­nas­tic team won nine medals at the Rio Olympics, the Indi­anapo­lis Star pub­lished a sto­ry reveal­ing sys­tem­at­ic sex­u­al abuse with­in the indus­try. Hun­dreds of ath­letes over a peri­od of over 20 years had been assault­ed and abused while train­ing under USA Gym­nas­tics, the nation­al gov­ern­ing body, and as details emerged, it became clear that it was min­imised, dis­missed and rou­tine­ly cov­ered up by the high­est author­i­ties in the sport.

Ath­lete A, the third doc­u­men­tary from Bon­ni Cohen and Jon Shenk, who pre­vi­ous­ly direct­ed An Incon­ve­nient Sequel: Truth To Pow­er and Audrie & Daisy, details the inves­ti­ga­tion by the jour­nal­ists at the Indi­anapo­lis Star who worked tire­less­ly to uncov­er the truth, as well as speak­ing direct­ly to the women who ded­i­cat­ed their lives to gym­nas­tics only to be abused by the very men employed to care for them.

At the cen­tre of the scan­dal was USA Gym­nas­tics nation­al team doc­tor Lar­ry Nas­sar, a wide­ly-respect­ed pur­port­ed ​“nice guy” who began work­ing for the team back in 1986, and the gov­ern­ing body’s pres­i­dent Steve Pen­ny, who worked to cov­er up reports of abuse for decades, dis­miss­ing con­cerns from ath­letes and par­ents and going so far as to threat­en young women with being removed from the team.

Although Nas­sar is now serv­ing a lengthy prison sen­tence and will like­ly nev­er be released, charges against Pen­ny are still pend­ing, and a long shad­ow still looms over the sport, which has pro­duced some of the USA’s most cel­e­brat­ed athletes.

Cohen and Shenk’s approach is method­i­cal and lin­ear, detail­ing the shift in USA gym­nas­tics in the 1970s to emu­late the suc­cess of the Roman­ian Olympians, which ush­ered in harsh­er train­ing regimes and the prac­tice of groom­ing young women for the sport from ear­ly childhood.

Beyond the sex­u­al abuse that many women endured, it is obvi­ous that phys­i­cal and men­tal abuse became part of life with­in the indus­try, and this con­tributed to young women being either too afraid to speak out, or not real­is­ing they had been abused until much later.

It’s no sur­prise that the doc­u­men­tary makes for har­row­ing and enrag­ing view­ing, as numer­ous incred­i­bly brave women speak can­did­ly about the ways in which they were abuse and dis­cour­aged from speak­ing up. When gym­nast Mag­gie Nichols, aka ​‘Ath­lete A’, report­ed her expe­ri­ences with Nas­sar to USA Gym­nas­tics, Pen­ny and his asso­ciates worked hard to cov­er it up, pro­tect­ing their busi­ness above the young women it exploited.

With a focus on the pro­ce­dur­al ele­ments of the inves­ti­ga­tion and the vic­tims them­selves, Ath­lete A does a decent job at cen­tring the peo­ple who mat­ter most in this sto­ry, but the fair­ly strict focus on Nas­sar and Penny’s crimes doesn’t leave much room for the big­ger ques­tion: how unique is this story?

It stands to rea­son that Nas­sar was not the only man abus­ing his posi­tion with­in the US gym­nas­tics com­mu­ni­ty, and even a cur­so­ry glance at the sup­port­ing infor­ma­tion reveals that it goes much deep­er than two men and a hand­ful of indi­vid­u­als who assist­ed them.

How­ev­er, for Mag­gie Nichols and her gym­nas­tic col­leagues, it feels like a step towards jus­tice – and in telling their sto­ry, we have to hope that the cor­rect mea­sures are put in place across the indus­try (not just in Amer­i­ca) to pro­tect young women from predators.