A decade has passed since allegations of sexual abuse by former USA team doctor Larry Nassar were first published, leading to his conviction after hundreds of women came forward. That case triggered wider scrutiny of how gymnastics allowed sexual, physical, and emotional abuse of young athletes in many places. Survivors and advocates recently gathered near the World Gymnastics Championships and voiced fears that the pace of reform remains too slow, even as governing bodies point to new safeguarding policies, training rules, and internal structures created in response.
If you ask me what that timeline really means, I hear a sport that treats accountability as a press release rather than a daily practice. Ten years is not a season of adjustment. It is long enough for a generation of athletes to cycle through the system while adults debate process. When people who lived the harm still feel the need to meet and warn that change is lagging, I take that as the clearest available signal. Their fear is not an abstract mood. It is evidence that the culture has not yet flipped from control to care.
I value speed when the harm is to children and young people who cannot easily leave. Delay is not neutral. Every year of half-measures is another year in which silence can still look like professionalism and toughness can still pass for coaching. If safety is truly the top priority, then the burden of proof belongs on institutions to show, in lived experience, that athletes feel freer to speak, rest, and refuse without punishment. Announcing frameworks is the easy part. Living them is the test, and the test is still failing too many people.
I am not impressed by the argument that culture takes time. Culture is what leaders reward. If compliance, isolation, and endurance remain the path to selection, then paper rules will sit on top of the old machine without stopping it. Conditional on whether clubs and federations still treat parents as obstacles and athletes as instruments, I conclude the machine is running. You can rename the committees. You cannot rename the atmosphere athletes breathe every day.
Here is my aside: I keep thinking about how often “we are working on it” becomes a shield instead of a plan with teeth.
Tradeoffs matter, and I will name the one I refuse. Protecting institutional reputation versus protecting athletes is not a hard moral puzzle. When those two collide, reputation should lose immediately. If liability anxiety makes bodies slow to admit harm, then that anxiety is itself part of the injury. A governing system that fears lawsuits more than it fears broken kids has already chosen its side. I judge that choice harshly because the power imbalance is total. Children do not negotiate culture with adults who control their sport and their sense of worth.
Some will say reforms prove seriousness. I say reforms prove that pressure finally forced movement, not that movement has finished. Conditional on survivors still describing controlling environments and emotional cruelty as ordinary, I refuse to call the pace adequate. Adequacy would mean the stories of dread becoming rare enough that gatherings of warning feel outdated. They do not feel outdated. They feel necessary, which is the indictment.
I also reject the idea that global complexity excuses drift. Cross-border movement of coaches and shared competitive norms make international leadership more urgent, not less. If the sport is structured so that harm can relocate when local heat rises, then slow national patches are a revolving door. Leadership that waits for perfect consensus will always arrive after another cohort has paid the price.
My standard is simple and personal. Success is not medals first and safety second. Success is athletes who finish their careers wanting the next generation inside the gym rather than rescued from it. Until that becomes the normal outcome rather than a lucky exception, I will keep calling the pace too slow. The reckoning opened a door. Leaving people waiting in the hallway is not progress. It is avoidance dressed as patience, and I will not praise it.
