Years after the Larry Nassar scandal, are Olympic athletes safe from abuse?

Transcript

ANDREW LIMBONG, HOST:

The 2024 Olympics start in just a few days. Hundreds of American athletes will be in Paris to represent Team USA. But at the same time, there is one part of the Olympic community facing scrutiny. It's an organization called the U.S. Center for Safe Sport, which was founded to address allegations of emotional and sexual abuse. ALL THINGS CONSIDERED co-host Ari Shapiro takes it from here.

ARI SHAPIRO, BYLINE: In 2017, the Larry Nassar scandal rocked the Olympic community. Hundreds of allegations of sexual abuse against the former USA Gymnastics doctor underscored how vulnerable athletes are, especially when they're minors. That year, Congress and the U.S. Olympic Committee came up with a solution. The U.S. Center for SafeSport was founded to investigate and respond to allegations of sexual abuse and misconduct. The goal was for predators like Larry Nassar to never harm young athletes again.

Well, seven years later, SafeSport is facing scrutiny of its own over whether it's made good on that promise. Louise Radnofsky is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thanks for coming into the studio.

LOUISE RADNOFSKY: Thank you for having me.

SHAPIRO: Describe how SafeSport works. Like, after an athlete makes an allegation of sexual abuse by somebody like a coach, what happens from there?

RADNOFSKY: Well, sometimes it's not an athlete. One of the other things that has happened in the last seven years is that most, if not all, adults who are involved in sport in the U.S. Olympic movement are mandatory reporters. If they hear something, they are in trouble if they don't come forward and say that. And so often, the center will hear reports from people saying exactly that. I'm not sure what's going on here, but I heard this, and I thought you should know.

But whoever gives the report to them, the center then assesses it. There's an intake process. There's some degree of triaging that goes on as well. And then what is supposed to happen next is that if they're going to proceed with a case, the victims who are the subject of the claims will receive a notice.

At some point, the person who's accused of the wrongdoing, the respondent, is supposed to receive a notice of allegations against them. There can be quite a considerable length of time before that arrives, and that's one of the complaints that a number of people who have been accused have had. And ultimately, if there's an investigation and there is a finding, then everybody is informed of that, although the report is supposed to remain confidential, and the only real public-facing part of it is that if somebody has issued a very serious sanction, that will appear in a centralized database on the SafeSport website.

SHAPIRO: Why, at this point, this year, has there been so much criticism, so much pressure for change, so many voices calling for a rethinking of how this organization works?

RADNOFSKY: There have been a number of high-profile cases where the investigation has seemed to take a very long time, or an investigation is still going on, and it's across a number of different sports. But that is one of the principal complaints that people who have brought claims have had, and people who had claims brought against them have also complained that this can take years. And during that period of time, it's not a good situation for anyone involved.

Victims want closure. People who are accused want to either clear their name or closure, and everybody seems to be suffering, including possibly confidence in the center as a result of the lengthy time frame. In March, the center said that they would be rolling out some other changes designed to bring more transparency, particularly around the outcomes, in addition to trying to improve the timeliness question.

And one of the greater steps towards transparency that they promised is that you'd get more clarity about the outcome of a case, not nearly as much clarity as everybody would want, but more clarity than they'd been offering before. And so, for example, in the cases that had been resolved through 2022 - there are about 1,800 of them...

SHAPIRO: That's a large number.

RADNOFSKY: Only about 15% of those cases actually resulted in a finding, and 4,800 of them resulted in a kind of bucket category that didn't give you a lot of sense of what had even gone on.

SHAPIRO: You've interviewed people who are critical of the organization in the past. Are they satisfied with the changes that SafeSport has made?

RADNOFSKY: It's very early days in the history of SafeSport, which has been operational for about seven years and where change has been a long and slow process. But what we are seeing is more and more data from athletes - survey data that suggests their confidence in the center is very low.

And so people both simultaneously recognize that the culture of sport and the awareness around these issues is significantly different from the way it was 10 years ago. But at the same time, athletes are not necessarily believing that the center can quickly and effectively handle their cases, which is a problem for the center - a problem that the center has acknowledged as well.

SHAPIRO: SafeSport says part of the problem here is resources. They've said they had a 32% increase in reports of sexual abuse last year, and they asked the U.S. Olympic Committee, which funds the center, for an additional $10 million a year to address this increase. Based on your reporting, is the problem that SafeSport faces one of limited resources, or is it a structural issue?

RADNOFSKY: There's certainly a resource problem that SafeSport has identified - 184 reports coming in a week, 30 investigators to handle the cases that the center does decide to take on, and then each investigator handling eight to 20 cases at a time. And so the tension there between doing the investigation thoroughly and doing it quickly is very, very real.

At the same time, there are critics of the center who've also said the center takes on cases that could be better handled by the national governing bodies of the sport. You'll hear people argue that the center was set up in part because the national governing bodies could not or did not want to or could not effectively handle these cases.

SHAPIRO: Just to give a specific example, earlier this month, the center came under some scrutiny over a case about a gymnastics coach, Anna Li, who was chosen to be a judge during the Olympic trials. Do you think this is kind of representative? Can this specific case tell us about the issues that this center faces more broadly?

RADNOFSKY: It potentially does. The way that that case has been reported and the way I've read about it seems to suggest that it's a case involving emotional abuse allegations, which are notoriously difficult to investigate. You have different perceptions. You have different ideas over time of what constitutes emotional abuse. You know, often the comparison is made between the U.S. Center for SafeSport and the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency.

But investigations to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, if you compare them to what you might be looking at in an allegation of emotional and physical abuse, is very different. It's so much more cut-and-dried. With doping...

SHAPIRO: Right. Either a chemical is in the bloodstream, or it isn't...

RADNOFSKY: Well...

SHAPIRO: ...But emotional abuse might be a more subjective question.

RADNOFSKY: Right. We know with doping cases, they are not easy. But we know that with abuse cases, those are really, really more subjective, exactly. And so those cases can take a long time, and you can also potentially have participants - and I don't know what's happening in this case specifically - but you can have participants who might be more reluctant, for example, to cooperate with the center. There are all reasons why these things can take a long time.

SHAPIRO: You know, I began by referencing the Larry Nassar case from 2017, which was one of the initiating factors behind the creation of SafeSport. Can you take a step back and just reflect on how the culture of Olympic athletes has changed since then? I mean, we're talking about the shortcomings of this organization, but has there actually been significant progress in this area?

RADNOFSKY: Well, I cover gymnastics, especially around the time of the Summer Olympics, and I've covered USA Gymnastics as an organization since 2015. And I have seen...

SHAPIRO: So before Larry Nassar.

RADNOFSKY: What we now know to be during...

SHAPIRO: Right.

RADNOFSKY: ...Many of the core allegations that were made, but, yes, before it was publicly known. And we've certainly seen a major attempt by USA Gymnastics to execute a culture shift that is making the sport look very, very different. So for example, at recent competitions, there's been a therapy dog to support the athletes. There have been counselors on hand to talk with athletes who do not make the Olympic Team.

And if you look back to the way things were about 20 years ago, when you had the Olympic team announced in front of the athletes on television so that you could cut in and see the faces of the athletes who didn't make the team versus the ones who did, this is a very different approach. You hear about this happening more behind closed doors, that the culture of coaching and what is considered to be an acceptable thing to say to an athlete has shifted over time. There is an open question. It's something I continue to report on a lot, about how much has changed in reality in the day to day.

But we certainly see the way people talk about coaching differently and what is considered to be a better standard - a lot more emphasis on being positive than perhaps in the past - a lot less emphasis on, well, that's just tough coaching. That's just how it's supposed to be. That's the only way you can get results. So it's starting to change, maybe.

SHAPIRO: Louise Radnofsky is a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you so much.

RADNOFSKY: Thank you.

LIMBONG: For a longer version of that conversation, check out the Consider This podcast from the team here at ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. Each episode, we break down one big story to help you better understand the news and what's driving it. You can find Consider This wherever you get podcasts. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.