FILE - In this Aug. 9, 2016 file photo, United States' swimmer Ryan Lochte checks his time in a men's 4x200-meter freestyle heat at the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lochte's prosecution for filing a false police report during the 2016 Olympics is back on after a Brazilian court decision on Tuesday, June 26, 2018. (AP Photo/Michael Sohn, File)
SAO PAULO — The prosecution of U.S. swimmer Ryan Lochte for filing a false police report during the 2016 Olympics is back on after a Brazilian court decision this week.
During the games in Rio de Janeiro, the 12-time Olympic medalist and former UF standout told NBC that he and fellow swimmers were robbed at gunpoint in a taxi by men with police badges as they returned to the Olympic Village from a party. But prosecutors said Lochte invented the story to cover up the swimmers' vandalism of a gas station and an ensuing confrontation with security guards. The confrontation was captured by surveillance cameras at the gas station.
Lochte later acknowledged he was intoxicated at the time and his behavior led to the confrontation.
The initial claim appeared to confirm widespread fears before the Olympics that the event would be marred by rising crime rates in Rio de Janeiro, which has long struggled with violence. As Lochte's version of events began to shift, many Brazilians became annoyed that a false story about crime drew so much attention, when the city had hosted the games without major problems.
The scandal drew international headlines and grew to overshadow the final days of the games. Lochte ended up serving a 10-month suspension from the U.S. national swim team for his behavior.
Last year, a court dismissed the case against Lochte, but the Superior Court of Justice reversed that decision Tuesday. Prosecutor Rodrigo de Almeida Maia said Thursday that the next step is for Lochte's lawyers to present their defense. Lochte does not have to appear in person to defend himself, de Almeida Maia said.
Steve Lochte, the swimmer's father, said by telephone that he had no comment and directed questions to his son or his son's lawyers.
Jeff Ostrow, a lawyer who has represented Lochte in the past, did not immediately respond to an email and a voicemail message seeking comment. It was not clear if he would represent Lochte in this case.
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I'm rooting for him to be successful as much as anybody at Florida.
I was walking between the hotel and Memorial Gym last February when the Gators were in town. Ran into him in an obvious hurry. I looked up and said, Hey Coach! Welcome to Nashville! (Wearing Gator colors) He made a point of stopping and speaking to me, introducing himself. I was very appreciative and impressed.
We went to hear Mike White speak to the Pinellas County Gator Club last night. He was great--talked and answered questions for an hour. Didn't make any promises, but seemed cautiously optimistic about the team's potential. He said it's better for them to start out ranked lower to get them motivated to work harder in practice.
Florida head basketball coach Mike White. [Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun]
Every time a ball hits the floor and players follow it, Mike White winces a little bit. The Florida basketball coach is expected to field his deepest of his four Florida teams this season, but after last year, when he lost most of his frontcourt to injuries, White is a little paranoid about injuries. "I'm just hoping we can remain healthy until November," White said Thursday during the SEC coaches' summer teleconference. "I'm holding my breath every time there is a loose ball and guys are hitting the floor, every time there is a mosh pit under the basket and guys are fighting for a rebound. "We're trying to be creative in the longevity of practice and the physicality, but we also know we did very very little contact in last year's preseason and feel like it backfired a little bit from a defensive and rebounding standpoint. So healthier today hopefully we are as healthy in a month and so on and so forth." So go hard but not too hard. If the Gators can stay healthy, this will be a team that can come at you in waves. The Gators add three freshmen, including highly-touted guard Andrew Nembhard; Jalen Hudson chose to play his senior year rather than enter the NBA Draft; and both Chase Johnson and Isaiah Stokes are on the road back to playing. Johnson missed almost all of last year with a pair of concussions and Stokes the entire season after knee surgery. Add in the physical limitations of Gorjak Gak, who has surgery in April, (not to mention missing John Egbunu the entire season) and Florida was hurting on the frontline. "Stokes is cleared to play in the half court, and he has done a lot of competing," White said. "He's gotta get in much better condition. We're hoping that by November, he's a guy who can go through a two-hour practice. "Chase Johnson is terrific physically. He's ready to go. And Gak is working his butt off, and they are very optimistic he could perhaps be back a little quicker than expected, maybe early September." If all goes well, the Gators would have a full complement of 13 scholarship players built around the nucleus of Hudson, KeVaughn Allen, Keith Stone and Kevarrius Hayes. "There's no question about it," White said. "We'll have a much better chance at healthy competition. More productive practices. More depth hopefully. We will be able to play a couple of different ways which we weren't capable of doing last year." Last year, Florida reached the Round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament and finished third in a much-improved SEC that sent eight teams to the Dance. The league only promises to be better this season with so many players choosing to return to college and some of the nation's best recruiting classes coming in. "It's only going to make our league more powerful," said Vanderbilt coach Bryce Drew. "It's a great compliment to our league (the players coming back) because they know the league will be better next year and they will be playing against draft picks on a nightly basis." One of those returning players is Hudson, who led the Gators in scoring last year. "It's big for our program and even bigger for Jalen to get the feedback," White said. "He hears it from his coaches but it hits home when he hears it from the highest level. He's gotta play with more of an edge. Be better on defense and rebounding. He's gotta dig a little deeper."
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We went to hear Mike White speak to the Pinellas County Gator Club last night. He was great--talked and answered questions for an hour. Didn't make any promises, but seemed cautiously optimistic about the team's potential. He said it's better for them to start out ranked lower to get them motivated to work harder in practice.
Florida head basketball coach Mike White. [Lauren Bacho/The Gainesville Sun]
Every time a ball hits the floor and players follow it, Mike White winces a little bit. The Florida basketball coach is expected to field his deepest of his four Florida teams this season, but after last year, when he lost most of his frontcourt to injuries, White is a little paranoid about injuries. "I'm just hoping we can remain healthy until November," White said Thursday during the SEC coaches' summer teleconference. "I'm holding my breath every time there is a loose ball and guys are hitting the floor, every time there is a mosh pit under the basket and guys are fighting for a rebound. "We're trying to be creative in the longevity of practice and the physicality, but we also know we did very very little contact in last year's preseason and feel like it backfired a little bit from a defensive and rebounding standpoint. So healthier today hopefully we are as healthy in a month and so on and so forth." So go hard but not too hard. If the Gators can stay healthy, this will be a team that can come at you in waves. The Gators add three freshmen, including highly-touted guard Andrew Nembhard; Jalen Hudson chose to play his senior year rather than enter the NBA Draft; and both Chase Johnson and Isaiah Stokes are on the road back to playing. Johnson missed almost all of last year with a pair of concussions and Stokes the entire season after knee surgery. Add in the physical limitations of Gorjak Gak, who has surgery in April, (not to mention missing John Egbunu the entire season) and Florida was hurting on the frontline. "Stokes is cleared to play in the half court, and he has done a lot of competing," White said. "He's gotta get in much better condition. We're hoping that by November, he's a guy who can go through a two-hour practice. "Chase Johnson is terrific physically. He's ready to go. And Gak is working his butt off, and they are very optimistic he could perhaps be back a little quicker than expected, maybe early September." If all goes well, the Gators would have a full complement of 13 scholarship players built around the nucleus of Hudson, KeVaughn Allen, Keith Stone and Kevarrius Hayes. "There's no question about it," White said. "We'll have a much better chance at healthy competition. More productive practices. More depth hopefully. We will be able to play a couple of different ways which we weren't capable of doing last year." Last year, Florida reached the Round of 32 of the NCAA Tournament and finished third in a much-improved SEC that sent eight teams to the Dance. The league only promises to be better this season with so many players choosing to return to college and some of the nation's best recruiting classes coming in. "It's only going to make our league more powerful," said Vanderbilt coach Bryce Drew. "It's a great compliment to our league (the players coming back) because they know the league will be better next year and they will be playing against draft picks on a nightly basis." One of those returning players is Hudson, who led the Gators in scoring last year. "It's big for our program and even bigger for Jalen to get the feedback," White said. "He hears it from his coaches but it hits home when he hears it from the highest level. He's gotta play with more of an edge. Be better on defense and rebounding. He's gotta dig a little deeper."
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On Jun 21, 2018, at 9:25 AM, Ken Kirkley <ken@kirkley.net> wrote:
I would assume he meant can't pitch in all three, but can pitch in some. Byrne has pitched alot recently and as a closer his arm isn't used to that. He normally pitches in the 9th and part of the 8th. Her has gone something like 3, 4, 3 innings so he needs to rest his arm. If we win tonight, I'm pretty sure he would be available over the weekend.
O'Sullivan said junior closer Michael Byrne would be unable to appear in all three remaining games if the Gators were to advance, meaning other pitchers would need to step up out of the bullpen.
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I would assume he meant can't pitch in all three, but can pitch in some. Byrne has pitched alot recently and as a closer his arm isn't used to that. He normally pitches in the 9th and part of the 8th. Her has gone something like 3, 4, 3 innings so he needs to rest his arm. If we win tonight, I'm pretty sure he would be available over the weekend.
O'Sullivan said junior closer Michael Byrne would be unable to appear in all three remaining games if the Gators were to advance, meaning other pitchers would need to step up out of the bullpen.
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O’Sullivan said junior closer Michael Byrne would be unable to appear in all three remaining games if the Gators were to advance, meaning other pitchers would need to step up out of the bullpen.
Earlier this month, Rhonda Faehn, the recently ousted senior vice president of the women's program at USA Gymnastics, appeared in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security to talk about abuse of athletes in the U.S. Olympic program. Faehn was the only person testifying voluntarily—former USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny and former Michigan State president Lou Anna K. Simon were both there under subpoena—and she brought receipts with her. The emails and text messages Faehn submitted made it clear that Penny had misled her and others, including the victims and their families, that he had reported the allegations against Larry Nassar immediately to the authorities when in fact he had not. It also showed Penny urging all involved to remain silent about what gymnasts Maggie Nichols, Aly Raisman, and McKayla Maroney said that Nassar had done to them. The emails demonstrated that 15 people at USA Gymnastics, including former board chair Peter Vidmar and current COO Ron Galimore, were aware of the allegations against Nassar. None of them, Faehn included, ever made an independent report about Nassar to the authorities.
Beyond those receipts, Faehn's submitted packet contained several letters of support. Some came from athletes that worked with her during her long career as a college coach, first at the University of Nebraska and then at the University of Florida. Others are from coaches and gymnastics officials. The letters all attest to Faehn's good character.
It's not shocking that Faehn left out any hate mail from the packet she presented to Congress, but there was one surprise buried in all that predictable praise. One of the letters referenced an interesting gymnastics anecdote involving Faehn's stint as a 1988 Olympic team alternate and her years training with Bela and Martha Karolyi during the latter part of her elite career. Don McPherson, a coach of former national team members and a gym owner in Indiana, talked about Faehn's role in incurring a 0.5 deduction for the U.S. team when she was the alternate. "At the time, athletes were not allowed on the podium unless they were competing," McPherson wrote. If equipment needed to be moved—say, a springboard after a gymnast mounted the apparatus—only a coach could do that. "Kelly Garrison mounted the uneven bars. The springboard in place was still sitting. Springboards were not allowed in the field of play. So Bela sent Rhonda up on the podium to move the springboard."
Faehn did as she was told and pulled the springboard off the mat. The stairs to dismount the podium were on the other side. Faehn's options were either to cross the podium to get to those stairs, jump down on the side she was on, or stay crouched in the corner. Reaching the stairs would have required Faehn to cross in front the judges. That left jumping down or crouching, and Faehn opted to crouch in the corner until Garrison-Steves finished her routine.
In the broadcast, Bart Conner doesn't appear to make any mention of Faehn. He doesn't note that her presence was unusual in any way.
But Faehn's presence on the podium during the routine was unusual, and after video review and a vote, a panel voted 3-0 to apply a 0.5 deduction to the team; Jackie Fie of the U.S. was the head judge on the uneven bars and abstained from the vote. This was a significant deduction, equivalent to a fall in the sport's old 10.0 system, and it would end up bumping the U.S. team from bronze medal position to fourth in the team rankings. There was immediately some suggestion that this decision was politically motivated. It was instigated, in part, by Ellen Berger, the head of the women's technical committee. Berger was from East Germany and the immediate beneficiary of this was, as it happened, the East German team; they ended up with the bronze, just three tenths ahead of the Americans. But the rule that Berger cited was in the rule book. It wasn't a super well-known rule, but it was in there. "Bela never knew the rules in all the years he coached," McPherson wrote.
It would take some time for the news to reach the team, which was already back at the Olympic Village. Missy Marlowe, a member of the team, told me that the team didn't immediately realize there was a problem. "During the competition, no one thought twice about anything," she told me. The board needed to be pulled, and quickly—after the gymnast jump to the high bar off the springboard, she transitioned to the low bar, and could have collided with the board if it hadn't been yanked away. Marlowe said the team finished the rest of the compulsory competition, which was the first segment of the team event in those days, and went back to their housing at the Olympic Village thinking everything was fine.
It was not. According to Marlowe, Martha Karolyi appeared in their suite and the team gathered and told them about the deduction. Marlowe said she specifically blamed Faehn for what happened. "And I just remember Rhonda saying, 'No, I did what Bela told me to do. He said to go to the corner and just crouch down and make sure you're not in front of the judges' vision. And that's what I did.' And she [Karolyi] said, just said, 'No, no, no. Five-tenth team deduction, Rhonda.'"
"And then that was that," Marlowe said. "It [was] like, you know, she [Karolyi] gave her a kind of disapproving head shake and was like, 'Well, we can't do anything about it now.'"
Faehn confirmed Marlowe's account in a message to me on Facebook. "She [Karolyi] said because [of] my staying on the podium, I cost the the bronze medal for the U.S." Faehn wrote. "Of course, it was devastating for me to hear her say [these] things. I told her that I did exactly as Bela asked me to do and I had specifically asked Bela what to do after I removed the board, and he said, 'Just stay low behind it so that you aren't in the judges way.' Martha didn't want to hear that." Faehn said that the team comforted her after this and assured her that it wasn't her fault.
I asked Martha Karolyi about the springboard incident and the meeting that followed and received a statement from her attorney. "The gymnasts and coaches were disappointed when the half-point deduction was applied to our score, and we lost the bronze medal," it read. "Our alternate, Rhonda Faehn, removed the springboard used to mount her teammate onto the uneven bars so her teammate would not trip or land on it and stayed on the podium during her teammate's routine, which was common practice among gymnasts from other countries as well. But the President for the International Gymnastics Federation Technical Committee, Ellen Berger, applied the half-point deduction to us because she was East German. With the half-point deduction, the East German team was able to pull in front of the U.S. overall, narrowly taking the bronze medal."
Elsewhere in the statement, Karolyi disputed what Marlowe and Faehn said about what happened later at the Olympic Village. "I did not have any kind of confrontation with the team," Karolyi stated, "and absolutely did not blame Rhonda."
In case it wasn't clear: Faehn, who was then just 17 years old, was not to blame for what happened to the U.S. team. It wasn't her job to know the rule book backwards and forwards. Besides, the gymnasts weren't exactly encouraged to think for themselves; she was trained to listen to her coaches, and she did.
"The person to blame was Bela Karolyi," said Mike Jacki, who was the president of USA Gymnastics at the time. "Because he put Rhonda out on the floor to pull the board," Jacki said he spoke to Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was then the president of the IOC, about the ruling. Samaranch explained that it was a "field of play" decision and that the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) had jurisdiction. There was nothing to be done.
What happened to Faehn in 1988 has some striking parallels to what happened to Mattie Larson in 2010. Larson, a member of the 2010 silver medal world championship team, made two significant errors on the floor exercise, the last even for the U.S. The Americans lost to Russia by about two tenths. Larson, a Nassar survivor, said that Karolyi and the national team staff blamed her for the loss and that she was shunned by the coaches, including her personal coach, after the competition.
Not a lot of information was communicated to the team in the aftermath of the deduction. Marlowe remembered going with Kelly Garrison-Steves to speak with Bryant Gumbel and being wholly unprepared to answer his questions about the incident. "No one from USA Gymnastics talked to us about it at all," she said. (Kelly Garrison-Funderburk declined my request for an interview.)
Jacki told me that back then, his organization—the USAG was then the USGF—communicated with the gymnasts' personal coaches, all of whom were present in Seoul; it was up to the coaches to speak to their athletes. "Delene [Darst] talked to all of the personal coaches that were there," he said. Darst, like Fie, was a Brevet judge and part of the U.S. gymnastics delegation sent to South Korea. In a follow up email, he wrote that Darst also spoke to some of the gymnasts though not as a group and perhaps not all of them. "She was approached by the girls over the remainder of the Games," he wrote.
Jacki pointed that it was typical at that time for the federation to communicate with the gymnasts through their coaches. The federation sent mail intended for the gymnasts to their clubs. The coach was always the conduit. "That is what the coaches wanted," he said.
McPherson's 30-year-old anecdote has some interest in its own right, provided you're the right type of gym dork—it's a little glimpse into the politics of gymnastics during the Cold War, a time when the Americans were lucky to come away with one or two medals. (In 1988, Phoebe Mills was the only U.S. gymnast to medal; she won the bronze on balance beam.) But turn it another way and it's about more than just an Olympic medal lost to a country that wouldn't even exist a year later. It speaks to the culture of the time—one of secrecy and confusion, in which gymnasts were mostly left to handle tough situations alone and where the adults failed to do what they were supposed to.
That the kids shouldered blame that rightly belonged to the grownups, of course, was not just a product of that time. The athletes, who were mostly under the age of 18—the exception was Kelly Garrison-Steves, who was 21 and married when she competed in Seoul—were treated like adults when it came to competing and children without agency when it came to virtually every other aspect of their lives. They bore all the responsibility, and enjoyed none of the freedom.
This culture, as it happens, was part of what was under review by the Senate committee. Faehn, having seen it both as an athlete and as an administrator, was uniquely qualified to talk about it. "I would absolutely say, throughout gymnastics, that for each and every quad, every time period, I believe there was very, very difficult situations," Faehn said when questioned about the culture of gymnastics. She stopped short of talking in detail about her own experiences, even though Senator Bill Nelson from Florida directed a very inappropriate question to her in his opening remarks:
"I wanted to get her to answer directly did she know about the alleged abuse and was she ever, was there an attempt, if Nassar was there at the same time that she was, was she attempted to be abused?"
Faehn's elite gymnastics career didn't overlap much with Nassar's tenure at USA Gymnastics. He was just getting started as a trainer for the team, working the occasional event in the late 1980s. Still, it was an outrageous and oafish act for Nelson to ask a woman under oath to state whether or not she had been sexually abused as a minor. Faehn doesn't owe the public the details of her experiences as a gymnast, what pains or trauma she might've suffered. That truth, whatever it is, is hers alone, regardless of how much the committee may dislike her or believe she did something wrong.
Faehn was there to answer questions about what she knew and didn't know, and about what she did and more significantly didn't do in her role as senior vice president of the women's program when she became aware of Nassar's sexual abuse of gymnasts.
By and large, the survivors who spoke to the media after the senate hearing hadn't heard what they so desperately wanted to hear, which was someone, anyone, taking some responsibility for what happened. Penny, the former president of USA Gymnastics, pleaded the fifth repeatedly and left the hearing early. Lou Anna K. Simon defended MSU's horribly botched 2014 Title IX investigation into Nassar.
That left Faehn. She was the only one there voluntarily, and she brought along proof that she had been told to stay quiet after she brought the athletes' complaints about Nassar's abuse to her boss's attention. It seems, from her testimony and from the emails she supplied, that Faehn believed that Penny had reported the doctor to the FBI right away. Is that accountability? How do we evaluate what she did and didn't do?
Emily Stebbins, a former elite gymnast and Nassar survivor, doesn't think Faehn went far enough in accepting responsibility in her testimony. "When people come to you, like Rhonda, they feel like they've done their job but they sort of know in the back of their mind that nothing is being done about this," Stebbins said after the hearing. "They think they did their part. You just see all of these little people thinking they did their thing but no one took the one step that should've been taken, which is to go to the police or the authorities."
But Stebbins noted that once the first mistake was made—not reporting Nassar to the authorities right away—everyone was left to scramble, make excuses, shift blame. "This is survival for them now," she said. "They know they made the wrong decision. They know what they should've done because now they're reading it and saying, 'It wasn't my fault. I went to Steve Penny.'"
It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to even try to assess individual levels of responsibility for each of the actors—Penny, Simon, Faehn, Vidmar, Galimore, and many, many others. The responsibility for the sport's defining tragedy falls, however unequally, on a lot of people, even those who might've believed that they had done the right thing, that they had done enough.
"Is there one person who is responsible for this?" Stebbins said. "No, it's a collective whole. No one did the right thing as a group."
Woody
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I am not making excuses (maybe I am) but I think the delay hurt Florida more than TT. That was really late for the Gators to play.
jb
From: GatorTalk <gatortalk@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Jay Cicone <Jay.Cicone@RaymondJames.com> Reply-To: GatorTalk <gatortalk@googlegroups.com> Date: Monday, June 18, 2018 at 2:36 PM To: GatorTalk <gatortalk@googlegroups.com> Subject: [gatortalk] uf vs ttech
So, I didn't stay up to watch. What happened---other than the loss?
Jay P. Cicone | Investment Consultant Raymond James Financial Services, Inc. Member FINRA/SIPC
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Earlier this month, Rhonda Faehn, the recently ousted senior vice president of the women's program at USA Gymnastics, appeared in front of the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, Insurance, and Data Security to talk about abuse of athletes in the U.S. Olympic program. Faehn was the only person testifying voluntarily—former USA Gymnastics president Steve Penny and former Michigan State president Lou Anna K. Simon were both there under subpoena—and she brought receipts with her. The emails and text messages Faehn submitted made it clear that Penny had misled her and others, including the victims and their families, that he had reported the allegations against Larry Nassar immediately to the authorities when in fact he had not. It also showed Penny urging all involved to remain silent about what gymnasts Maggie Nichols, Aly Raisman, and McKayla Maroney said that Nassar had done to them. The emails demonstrated that 15 people at USA Gymnastics, including former board chair Peter Vidmar and current COO Ron Galimore, were aware of the allegations against Nassar. None of them, Faehn included, ever made an independent report about Nassar to the authorities.
Beyond those receipts, Faehn's submitted packet contained several letters of support. Some came from athletes that worked with her during her long career as a college coach, first at the University of Nebraska and then at the University of Florida. Others are from coaches and gymnastics officials. The letters all attest to Faehn's good character.
It's not shocking that Faehn left out any hate mail from the packet she presented to Congress, but there was one surprise buried in all that predictable praise. One of the letters referenced an interesting gymnastics anecdote involving Faehn's stint as a 1988 Olympic team alternate and her years training with Bela and Martha Karolyi during the latter part of her elite career. Don McPherson, a coach of former national team members and a gym owner in Indiana, talked about Faehn's role in incurring a 0.5 deduction for the U.S. team when she was the alternate. "At the time, athletes were not allowed on the podium unless they were competing," McPherson wrote. If equipment needed to be moved—say, a springboard after a gymnast mounted the apparatus—only a coach could do that. "Kelly Garrison mounted the uneven bars. The springboard in place was still sitting. Springboards were not allowed in the field of play. So Bela sent Rhonda up on the podium to move the springboard."
Faehn did as she was told and pulled the springboard off the mat. The stairs to dismount the podium were on the other side. Faehn's options were either to cross the podium to get to those stairs, jump down on the side she was on, or stay crouched in the corner. Reaching the stairs would have required Faehn to cross in front the judges. That left jumping down or crouching, and Faehn opted to crouch in the corner until Garrison-Steves finished her routine.
In the broadcast, Bart Conner doesn't appear to make any mention of Faehn. He doesn't note that her presence was unusual in any way.
But Faehn's presence on the podium during the routine was unusual, and after video review and a vote, a panel voted 3-0 to apply a 0.5 deduction to the team; Jackie Fie of the U.S. was the head judge on the uneven bars and abstained from the vote. This was a significant deduction, equivalent to a fall in the sport's old 10.0 system, and it would end up bumping the U.S. team from bronze medal position to fourth in the team rankings. There was immediately some suggestion that this decision was politically motivated. It was instigated, in part, by Ellen Berger, the head of the women's technical committee. Berger was from East Germany and the immediate beneficiary of this was, as it happened, the East German team; they ended up with the bronze, just three tenths ahead of the Americans. But the rule that Berger cited was in the rule book. It wasn't a super well-known rule, but it was in there. "Bela never knew the rules in all the years he coached," McPherson wrote.
It would take some time for the news to reach the team, which was already back at the Olympic Village. Missy Marlowe, a member of the team, told me that the team didn't immediately realize there was a problem. "During the competition, no one thought twice about anything," she told me. The board needed to be pulled, and quickly—after the gymnast jump to the high bar off the springboard, she transitioned to the low bar, and could have collided with the board if it hadn't been yanked away. Marlowe said the team finished the rest of the compulsory competition, which was the first segment of the team event in those days, and went back to their housing at the Olympic Village thinking everything was fine.
It was not. According to Marlowe, Martha Karolyi appeared in their suite and the team gathered and told them about the deduction. Marlowe said she specifically blamed Faehn for what happened. "And I just remember Rhonda saying, 'No, I did what Bela told me to do. He said to go to the corner and just crouch down and make sure you're not in front of the judges' vision. And that's what I did.' And she [Karolyi] said, just said, 'No, no, no. Five-tenth team deduction, Rhonda.'"
"And then that was that," Marlowe said. "It [was] like, you know, she [Karolyi] gave her a kind of disapproving head shake and was like, 'Well, we can't do anything about it now.'"
Faehn confirmed Marlowe's account in a message to me on Facebook. "She [Karolyi] said because [of] my staying on the podium, I cost the the bronze medal for the U.S." Faehn wrote. "Of course, it was devastating for me to hear her say [these] things. I told her that I did exactly as Bela asked me to do and I had specifically asked Bela what to do after I removed the board, and he said, 'Just stay low behind it so that you aren't in the judges way.' Martha didn't want to hear that." Faehn said that the team comforted her after this and assured her that it wasn't her fault.
I asked Martha Karolyi about the springboard incident and the meeting that followed and received a statement from her attorney. "The gymnasts and coaches were disappointed when the half-point deduction was applied to our score, and we lost the bronze medal," it read. "Our alternate, Rhonda Faehn, removed the springboard used to mount her teammate onto the uneven bars so her teammate would not trip or land on it and stayed on the podium during her teammate's routine, which was common practice among gymnasts from other countries as well. But the President for the International Gymnastics Federation Technical Committee, Ellen Berger, applied the half-point deduction to us because she was East German. With the half-point deduction, the East German team was able to pull in front of the U.S. overall, narrowly taking the bronze medal."
Elsewhere in the statement, Karolyi disputed what Marlowe and Faehn said about what happened later at the Olympic Village. "I did not have any kind of confrontation with the team," Karolyi stated, "and absolutely did not blame Rhonda."
In case it wasn't clear: Faehn, who was then just 17 years old, was not to blame for what happened to the U.S. team. It wasn't her job to know the rule book backwards and forwards. Besides, the gymnasts weren't exactly encouraged to think for themselves; she was trained to listen to her coaches, and she did.
"The person to blame was Bela Karolyi," said Mike Jacki, who was the president of USA Gymnastics at the time. "Because he put Rhonda out on the floor to pull the board," Jacki said he spoke to Juan Antonio Samaranch, who was then the president of the IOC, about the ruling. Samaranch explained that it was a "field of play" decision and that the International Gymnastics Federation (FIG) had jurisdiction. There was nothing to be done.
What happened to Faehn in 1988 has some striking parallels to what happened to Mattie Larson in 2010. Larson, a member of the 2010 silver medal world championship team, made two significant errors on the floor exercise, the last even for the U.S. The Americans lost to Russia by about two tenths. Larson, a Nassar survivor, said that Karolyi and the national team staff blamed her for the loss and that she was shunned by the coaches, including her personal coach, after the competition.
Not a lot of information was communicated to the team in the aftermath of the deduction. Marlowe remembered going with Kelly Garrison-Steves to speak with Bryant Gumbel and being wholly unprepared to answer his questions about the incident. "No one from USA Gymnastics talked to us about it at all," she said. (Kelly Garrison-Funderburk declined my request for an interview.)
Jacki told me that back then, his organization—the USAG was then the USGF—communicated with the gymnasts' personal coaches, all of whom were present in Seoul; it was up to the coaches to speak to their athletes. "Delene [Darst] talked to all of the personal coaches that were there," he said. Darst, like Fie, was a Brevet judge and part of the U.S. gymnastics delegation sent to South Korea. In a follow up email, he wrote that Darst also spoke to some of the gymnasts though not as a group and perhaps not all of them. "She was approached by the girls over the remainder of the Games," he wrote.
Jacki pointed that it was typical at that time for the federation to communicate with the gymnasts through their coaches. The federation sent mail intended for the gymnasts to their clubs. The coach was always the conduit. "That is what the coaches wanted," he said.
McPherson's 30-year-old anecdote has some interest in its own right, provided you're the right type of gym dork—it's a little glimpse into the politics of gymnastics during the Cold War, a time when the Americans were lucky to come away with one or two medals. (In 1988, Phoebe Mills was the only U.S. gymnast to medal; she won the bronze on balance beam.) But turn it another way and it's about more than just an Olympic medal lost to a country that wouldn't even exist a year later. It speaks to the culture of the time—one of secrecy and confusion, in which gymnasts were mostly left to handle tough situations alone and where the adults failed to do what they were supposed to.
That the kids shouldered blame that rightly belonged to the grownups, of course, was not just a product of that time. The athletes, who were mostly under the age of 18—the exception was Kelly Garrison-Steves, who was 21 and married when she competed in Seoul—were treated like adults when it came to competing and children without agency when it came to virtually every other aspect of their lives. They bore all the responsibility, and enjoyed none of the freedom.
This culture, as it happens, was part of what was under review by the Senate committee. Faehn, having seen it both as an athlete and as an administrator, was uniquely qualified to talk about it. "I would absolutely say, throughout gymnastics, that for each and every quad, every time period, I believe there was very, very difficult situations," Faehn said when questioned about the culture of gymnastics. She stopped short of talking in detail about her own experiences, even though Senator Bill Nelson from Florida directed a very inappropriate question to her in his opening remarks:
"I wanted to get her to answer directly did she know about the alleged abuse and was she ever, was there an attempt, if Nassar was there at the same time that she was, was she attempted to be abused?"
Faehn's elite gymnastics career didn't overlap much with Nassar's tenure at USA Gymnastics. He was just getting started as a trainer for the team, working the occasional event in the late 1980s. Still, it was an outrageous and oafish act for Nelson to ask a woman under oath to state whether or not she had been sexually abused as a minor. Faehn doesn't owe the public the details of her experiences as a gymnast, what pains or trauma she might've suffered. That truth, whatever it is, is hers alone, regardless of how much the committee may dislike her or believe she did something wrong.
Faehn was there to answer questions about what she knew and didn't know, and about what she did and more significantly didn't do in her role as senior vice president of the women's program when she became aware of Nassar's sexual abuse of gymnasts.
By and large, the survivors who spoke to the media after the senate hearing hadn't heard what they so desperately wanted to hear, which was someone, anyone, taking some responsibility for what happened. Penny, the former president of USA Gymnastics, pleaded the fifth repeatedly and left the hearing early. Lou Anna K. Simon defended MSU's horribly botched 2014 Title IX investigation into Nassar.
That left Faehn. She was the only one there voluntarily, and she brought along proof that she had been told to stay quiet after she brought the athletes' complaints about Nassar's abuse to her boss's attention. It seems, from her testimony and from the emails she supplied, that Faehn believed that Penny had reported the doctor to the FBI right away. Is that accountability? How do we evaluate what she did and didn't do?
Emily Stebbins, a former elite gymnast and Nassar survivor, doesn't think Faehn went far enough in accepting responsibility in her testimony. "When people come to you, like Rhonda, they feel like they've done their job but they sort of know in the back of their mind that nothing is being done about this," Stebbins said after the hearing. "They think they did their part. You just see all of these little people thinking they did their thing but no one took the one step that should've been taken, which is to go to the police or the authorities."
But Stebbins noted that once the first mistake was made—not reporting Nassar to the authorities right away—everyone was left to scramble, make excuses, shift blame. "This is survival for them now," she said. "They know they made the wrong decision. They know what they should've done because now they're reading it and saying, 'It wasn't my fault. I went to Steve Penny.'"
It's difficult, perhaps impossible, to even try to assess individual levels of responsibility for each of the actors—Penny, Simon, Faehn, Vidmar, Galimore, and many, many others. The responsibility for the sport's defining tragedy falls, however unequally, on a lot of people, even those who might've believed that they had done the right thing, that they had done enough.
"Is there one person who is responsible for this?" Stebbins said. "No, it's a collective whole. No one did the right thing as a group."
