Last week, four days into a marathon court hearing that has exposed a hidden history of sexual abuse in American gymnastics, the two-time Olympian Aly Raisman joined the growing ranks of female athletes who have testified against the national team’s disgraced former physician, Larry Nassar, for decades of almost unimaginable offense. Nassar, who pleaded guilty to several counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct, and on Wednesday was given a sentence of forty to a hundred and seventy-five years in prison, had also received, in December, a separate sixty-year federal term for child-pornography crimes (which he has appealed). The certainty of his sentencing for that charge, which was already likely to insure his lifetime imprisonment, allowed media attention to focus on the brave and devastating accounts of his survivors. In a year dominated by righteous and long-overdue expressions of female anger, the collective condemnation of not just Nassar but his many alleged enablers, among them officials at USA Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee, has assumed special significance as a lasting demand for accountability. Raisman’s cathartic, excoriating victim-impact statement was one of more than a hundred and sixty delivered, but it carried a special potency, infiltrating the signage of last weekend’s Women’s March and appearing, in its entirety, in the Times. “The tables have turned, Larry,” Raisman said. “We are here, we have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.”
To fans of gymnastics, it is no surprise that Raisman, who was twice voted the captain of her country’s Olympic team, has emerged as the spearhead of this communal movement, applauding the statements of fellow-survivors and calling for independent investigations into governing athletic organizations that she claims are “rotting from the inside.” Though Raisman is a legendary independent talent—with laurels that include Olympic individual-event medals of every color, as well as a silver in the Rio Games’ all-around competition—her greatest contribution to American gymnastics may be a steadfast style of leadership that makes her an apt icon for the current reckoning. Known fondly, by her teammates and the “Gymternet,” as Grandma Aly, the twenty-three-year-old was the eldest member of Rio’s self-proclaimed Final Five, in 2016, and London’s Fierce Five, four years before, when she guided the American women to clinch their first team gold since the Magnificent Seven of the Atlanta Games, in 1996. Along the way, she has offered invaluable mentorship to younger athletes, who have delivered her handwritten notes of adoration and praised her positivity in the press. “She’s sort of the one who’s always looking out for everybody,” Gabby Douglas, Raisman’s longtime teammate, said in 2016. Like her loyal, expressive parents, Raisman has shouted from the sidelines of some of the sport’s most memorable victories in recent history, many of them achieved by teammates, including Douglas, whose revelations about Nassar have since joined her own.
One of the special horrors of Nassar’s tenure as a gymnastics physician is that his repeated episodes of abuse coincided with moments of immense athletic pressure. Among Raisman’s heartbreaking revelations was her discussion of the London Olympics, where Nassar served as the official doctor for female gymnasts and, rather than offering care, molested her instead. Despite his sickening abuse, the American women made history that year by winning the United States’ first team gold medal on international soil. The polished showmanship essential to the sport was perhaps Nassar’s best cover—Olympian gymnasts, after all, are trained to make the excruciating look effortless. In her award-winning floor routine’s first tumbling pass, Raisman connects a roundoff to a one-and-a-half stepout, another roundoff, a back handspring, and then an Arabian double-front, punching through her feet, upon landing, to complete a final layout—it gets me every time—as straight as an exclamation point. Raisman’s visible relief after testifying last week reminded me of the more visceral release that overtakes any gymnast after she sticks such a move, thrusting her arms back and her hands up in an assured salute to the judges. “You are so strong,” the judge of Nassar’s proceedings, Rosemarie Aquilina, told Raisman. “You are that example to all of those other survivors that they can be you, not just as an Olympian—as a woman, as a strong survivor, as a voice.”
Aquilina, somewhat unexpectedly, has played a role perhaps as instrumental as Raisman’s in promoting the voices of affected women. Though she had anticipated a four-day hearing, her vow to accommodate every survivor who wishes to speak—more than a hundred and forty in total—has helped generate the momentum responsible for recent changes to the sport’s national governing body. Last Thursday, USA Gymnastics announced plans to sever ties with Karolyi Ranch, a rigorous training center owned by the former national team coördinator Márta Károlyi, which was revealed to have served as a frequent site of Nassar’s abuse. On Monday, as the testimonies mounted, the organization announced that its chairman and several board members had resigned. Neither change appeased Raisman, who, heartened by Aquilina’s encouragement, has denounced each as superficial and demanded further revamping. “A word of advice,” she warned in her original testimony, pointing out that USA Gymnastics had athletes training at the Karolyi Ranch on the day the organization proclaimed its intention to renounce it. “Continuing to issue empty statements of empty promises, thinking that will pacify us, will no longer work.”
Last week, just days before Raisman delivered her testimony, I was stunned to spot her leaving the same spin class I'd just finished in a Boston neighborhood not far from her hometown of Needham. Had she really descended, from the heavens, to toil on an indoor bike with mortals like me? “I come here sometimes to clear my head,” she told me, graciously willing to indulge a fan. Though she has yet to begin official training for the 2020 Games, Raisman has told the press that Tokyo is on her mind. Only a handful of American gymnasts have graced three Olympics, but I would not be surprised to see Grandma Aly elected to their ranks. As the national team continues to adjust to a new coördinator, Valeri Liukin—whose own daughter, Nastia, won Beijing’s all-around title and, in recent days, has praised fellow-gymnasts for their fortitude—Raisman’s enduring presence represents a promise that she will continue, on and off the floor, to hold the sport’s American organizers accountable. There is work left to do.
