The disgraced doctor is behind bars after abusing dozens of youth athletes. But the effects of the scandal are still being felt across the sport

Gymnastics, on the surface, is thriving in the USA. Millions of kids participate. At the 2018 World Championships, Simone Biles demonstrated once again that she’s on a level above anyone else. Morgan Hurd and Sam Mikulak won the all-around titles at the recent World Cup stop in Tokyo. And business goes on as usual – St Louis will host the 2020 US Olympic trials.

Behind the scenes, things are a little messier. USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic Committee are trying to address dozens of lawsuits and blistering criticism for failing to prevent the atrocities of former national team doctor Larry Nassar, working together but also trying to avoid bearing the full brunt of the reckoning to come. The third major party in those lawsuits, Nassar employer Michigan State University, has settled its claims for $500m. USAG does not have that kind of money. Its annual revenue ranges from $22m in a lean year to $35m in an Olympic year. Most of its sponsors are gone. It’s in bankruptcy proceedings, and it’s battling insurers to subsidize payouts its financial documents estimate at $75m to $150m.

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On another front, USAG is both working with and defending itself against its parent organization, the USOC. The USOC moved late last year to decertify USAG, taking Biles and company through an abyss of uncertainty to a new governing body of some kind. Decertification is a rare process more typically used in smaller sports such as team handball and shooting, from which the National Rifle Association was removed as the national governing body a couple of decades ago.

These moves won’t appease the plaintiffs in the Nassar case, their lawyers and the USOC and USAG’s critics. Nor did the leadership purges. The USOC turned over several of its senior staffers, and USAG ditched even more, along with most of its board of directors.

USAG has a new CEO, former NBA vice president and American Ninja Warrior contestant Li Li Leung, who won’t need to go far to exceed the nine-month tenure of Kerry Perry or the weekend-long stint of Mary Bono. She has a long to-do list. USAG is trying to implement 70 recommendations – everything from bylaw changes to annual training for coaches and athletes on how to combat sexual abuse – from a June 2017 report by veteran prosecutor Deborah Daniels. It’s also digesting a damning report from Ropes & Gray, a law firm hired to perform an independent investigation. And all these duties fall on a smaller staff at USAG – down from 72 to 53.

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All the moves raise a question: Is the USA Gymnastics of 2019 the same as the USA Gymnastics of 2016, the one that failed to prevent Nassar from committing his crimes?

Lawyers certainly haven’t relented – Vince Finaldi, one of the lawyers representing many of the Nassar plaintiffs, pointed to the continued employment of Amy White, a national team manager accused in the Ropes & Gray report of carrying out orders to remove documents relating to the Nassar case, as an indication that USAG has not yet gotten the message.

In announcing the Olympic trials site, Leung expressed confidence that USAG would remain in place to run the event. Nothing is certain, though – Leung conceded that the deal included a clause to move the rights to the USOC itself if USAG is no longer the sport’s overseer.

But USAG wasn’t the only organization scorched by Ropes & Gray. The wide-ranging investigation raised questions for the FBI (letting the Nassar case languish) and the Texas Rangers (showing up at Karolyi Ranch, where Nassar is alleged to have commited acts of abuse, without a warrant, which the report alleges gave people time to move evidence). An Indianapolis detective in charge of the police department’s child abuse unit was accused of leaning on the Indianapolis Star, whose investigation into sex-abuse issues broke open the Nassar case, to back off.

The more relevant problem for Olympic sports was the considerable blame hurled at the USOC, which some claim gave USAG and other governing bodies – most notably USA Swimming – free rein to fail at self-policing. All of these organizations are accused of fomenting a culture in which accusations weren’t taken seriously.

Nancy Hogshead-Makar, an Olympic swimming medalist and founder of an advocacy group called Champion Women, puts it succinctly in an email shared with the Guardian: “The USOC KNEW that [national governing bodies] were doing a poor job of addressing sexual abuse, and did not intervene on behalf of athletes. I attended SafeSport workshops in 2013 in Denver, and there was no training as to how to conduct a complaint process … nor were those resources available online.”

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Given the USOC’s issues, the decertification threat draws a bit of skepticism – maybe a bluff, maybe a PR move. Michelle Simpson Tuegel, an attorney representing several gymnasts, reacted in November with a widely distributed shot at the USOC: “Today’s announcement by [the] USOC seeks only to deflect from their total failure over decades to protect the gymnasts in their care.”

Finaldi and partner John Manly don’t necessarily disagree, but they welcome the decertification effort nonetheless. Manly called for decertification in March 2017. In a statement to the Guardian, Finaldi reiterated that opinion while refusing to let the USOC off the hook: “We continue to support the decertification of USA Gymnastics in addition to demanding accountability from USOC for its continued failure to provide oversight over USA Gymnastics and other Olympic governing bodies in swimming, figure skating, wrestling and other sports that have had hundreds of complaints of child sexual abuse.”

But decertifying an organization the size of USA Gymnastics is a nearly unfathomable task. The membership rolls are small – 169,352 athletes, 209,710 total members – but still rising, and they reflect just a sliver of USAG’s reach. The federation’s member gyms – more than 3,500 – offer a wide range of programs for everyone from national team contenders to toddlers learning basic movement. Add it all up, and millions of kids and young adults learn gymnastics from USAG-affiliated coaches and clubs.

David Holcomb, owner of Ohio’s Buckeye Gymnastics and the new chair of USAG’s Nominating and Governance Committee, is skeptical that any organization could step in and provide sanctioning for meets – and more importantly, the insurance that comes with such sanctioning. “You’ll notice no one is stepping forward to be the new organization,” Holcomb says.

Paul Spadaro, president of the US Association of Independent Gymnastics Clubs, responded bluntly to a Sports Business Daily query as to whether his organization could replace USAG. “It would kill our program,” Spadaro said.

The Sports Business Daily story questions whether USAG’s member clubs would fall under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Center for SafeSport if the federation is removed from its duties. Without SafeSport resources, would the sport’s ability to protect athletes actually get worse?

In the interim, gyms keep training, with a renewed focus on avoiding misconduct. The US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs is unaffected, a USOC spokesman said. Ben Fox, head coach at the Bart Conner Gymnastics Academy in Oklahoma, thinks USA Gymnastics might be putting the brakes on new programs and some events, but the clubs are not yet affected at the grass roots.

“USAG has lost the trust in a lot of areas, but there are a still a lot of good people there,” Fox says. “The problem came from a small group of people in the women’s elite program. Not thousands of clubs.”

Fox, a CPA as well as a gymnastics coach, has also inquired as to whether a small sum of money USAG holds on behalf of state and regional associations would be in play in a settlement. The same goes for the $15.4m of assets in the National Gymnastics Foundation, which supports development programs. USAG says the foundation is a standalone organization and not a debtor in the bankruptcy proceedings. Finaldi cast doubt on that claim.

Local gyms go through a cycle in which enrollment booms after each Olympics. Holcomb has seen the usual drop-off a couple of years past Rio but nothing bigger than that. But his club’s tournament, the Buckeye Classic, continues to draw thousands of entries.

“The elite program is going gangbusters,” Holcomb says. “There are more elite kids coming to the qualifying events. The interest is very strong. I think the gymnastics competitive community is thriving.”

Gyms are also implementing safety measures that owners such as Holcomb have long considered common sense, such as never letting kids and coaches be alone in training, hotel rooms or anywhere else. “Some of us have been talking about that for two decades,” Holcomb says. “We have let parents sit and watch every minute of every practice for decades.”

Thanks to the bankruptcy process, the lawsuits against all parties are on hold. On the legal front, the next step is a 29 April claims deadline set by the bankruptcy court. The USOC will sit and wait on the decertification front as well.

“We believe that [the bankruptcy move] is a really important step for USA Gymnastics and don’t think that disrupting that in any way by pursuing a Section 8 [decertification] hearing, at this point, is helpful to that process,” USOC CEO Sarah Hirshland said in March. “So we reserve the right to go back to the hearing panel and request the process move forward, but we have not yet done that at this point.”

But still questions linger. What happens when the watchdogs (USAG or a successor organization) fail? And the watchdogs’ watchdogs (USOC)? And the watchdogs’ watchdogs’ watchdogs (law enforcement)?

Who will run the sport? How much money will be left for the next wave of gymnasts to learn the sport in a safe environment? And who will have the moral authority and the resources to make sure this never happens again?