US politicians are now getting involved in an effort to avoid a repetition of the Larry Nassar scandal. But questions over funding remains

Has Congress finally taken up the leadership reins in combating sexual abuse in Olympic sports? Or are we seeing just another round of grandstanding to make people think the issue is finally being taking seriously?

Last week, US senators Richard Blumenthal and Jerry Moran released a 235-page report summing up an 18-month investigation into sexual abuse in sports, prompted by the crimes of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. The senators are also releasing a bill that goes far beyond the benign legislation of the past, instead issuing a demand and a threat. Firstly, the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee must give $20m a year to the US Center for SafeSport, the organization set up to stop the sexual abuse of young athletes. The Center opened its offices in March 2017 and got a new CEO in July – Ju’Riese Colón, who has a background in children’s safety issues that critics say previous leaders have lacked.

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Secondly, Congress will grant itself power to dissolve the USOPC board and fire staff. Lawmakers could also terminate national governing bodies, such as USA Gymnastics. That organization has been widely criticized for its mishandling the Nassar case, in which dozens of young athletes were sexually abused.

Neither senator’s media staff responded to questions on whether such a move would violate the Olympic Charter’s insistence on autonomy, and the International Olympic Committee declined to comment.

While the bill is decisive and has been lauded by some survivors of sexual abuse and media pundits, it has a diverse array of critics. The Committee to Restore Integrity to the USOPC, a group of more than 200 Olympians and advocates also known as Team Integrity, released a statement saying the bill doesn’t include several of their recommendations and does not adequately address “fear of retaliation and a lack of power balance between the elite athletes and the USOPC.”

Another issue is whether the money USOPC must pay to SafeSport will come out of the pockets of the very athletes the bill intends to protect. The USOPC typically runs a deficit of tens of millions of dollars in non-Olympic years and an equivalent surplus in Olympic years. Its biggest expenses are on training facilities ($28.9m in 2018) and supporting the national governing bodies. The $110m it paid out in 2018 to the governing bodies ranged from $6.09m to US Ski and Snowboard to $131,000 to USA Badminton.

“Virtually every Olympian at some point goes through a training center,” said Eli Bremer, a 2008 Olympian in modern pentathlon and a member of Team Integrity’s executive committee. “In survey after survey, the athletes say that’s the number one benefit they get.”

Bremer worries that the SafeSport money will either come out of the training center budget or support to the national governing bodies, who would likely end up cutting their own athlete programs. “[The lawmakers] didn’t think through the consequence of this,” Bremer said.

Speaking last week on the ESPN’s Outside the Lines, Blumenthal said athletes will not bear the brunt of the costs. “That will not and should not happen,” the senator said. “There is plenty of money for athlete training, for facilities, for fields.”

Bremer supports previous legislation. He and other Olympians were at a June press conference in which Representative Diana DeGette, a Colorado Democrat, introduced a bill calling for a commission to investigate issues in Olympic sports, including sexual abuse, diversity and overall effectiveness.

On its surface, the legislation seemed rather milquetoast despite the forceful rhetoric from speakers such as Judge Rosemarie Aquilina, who gained a legion of admirers and a few critics for her dramatic handling of Nassar’s sentencing. Cory Gardner, a Republican senator who also attended DeGette’s press conference, had introduced a nearly identical bill in January that was languishing in committee.

But Bremer says a commission would have a chance to dive deeper into tangled governance issues and come up with top-to-bottom reform that Congress lacks the capacity to discern. “Let [a commission] look at these things and say how much the Olympic Committee can afford to spend,” Bremer said.

The difference between DeGette’s bill and Gardner’s is that DeGette’s would explicitly ask whether the Center for SafeSport has the staffing and fiscal resources to do its job. Those who are close to the Olympic movement already know the answer. It doesn’t.

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As of May, the Center had eight full-time investigators and eight contracted investigators. From March 2017 to March 2019, it handled 2,711 reports, a Center spokesperson said. “The Center for SafeSport needs additional resources to conduct modern day investigations,” the Blumenthal/Moran report says.

But from whom? Several people and groups – Hirshland, Deadspin’s Diana Moskovitz and a commission led by former WNBA president Lisa Borders – want Congress to back up its rhetoric with money.

The Blumenthal/Moran report says the Senate wanted to add funding of $1m a year over five years to a February 2018 SafeSport law, but the House stripped it out. Instead, the Center was allowed to apply for smaller grants that, perplexingly, could not be used for investigations.

The government funds another investigator, the US Anti-Doping Agency, which gets an annual grant of $9.5m from the Office of National Drug Control Policy and conducts a staggering number of drug tests. In 2018, Usada conducted 12,262 drug tests, with many athletes being tested more than 10 times a year.

The USOPC also chips in for Usada, paying $5.1m in 2018. But that’s certainly a different ratio than Blumenthal and Moran are expecting for SafeSport, raising the question of whether Congress is simply using the USOPC, even if it were to purge any remaining staff and board members who were anywhere near the sexual-abuse reporting chain of command, as a punching bag.

Meanwhile, USA Swimming was added last month as a defendant to a California civil suit, and prominent athlete attorney Bob Allard specifically accused the organization’s CEO, Tim Hinchey, of taking no action on a sexual abuse report. Then just this week, figure skater Ashley Wagner accused fellow skater John Coughlin, who took his own life in January after a SafeSport suspension, of sexually assaulting her 11 years ago.

Whether the tide will turn with a new expenditure or new commission remains to be seen.