Rachael Denhollander: More still to be done in gymnastics after Larry Nassar case

Nassar was accused by more than 330 women and girls of sexual abuse at USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University.

Denhollander’s account led to the testimonies of more than 200 women, including Olympic gold medallists Simone Biles, Aly Raisman and McKayla Maroney.

She said she believes there are thousands of gymnasts who have been the victims of sexual abuse in the United States.

She praised Biles, Raisman and Maroney for speaking out, acknowledging that it can at “a very significant cost” to them. “I’m deeply grateful that they did,” she said. “I would also like to see us get to the point where one little girl who isn’t a celebrity matters enough.”

In 2020, British Gymnastics launched an independent review after a number of gymnasts alleged there was a culture of mistreatment in the sport.

And Denhollander said “we need to start looking” at what “authority figures at the top” are doing in order to bring about the radical changes required for the sport to move forward, adding that the culture in gymnastics “absolutely” still needed to change.

“The verbal and emotional abuse, the psychological abuse, the physical abuse – that has lasting damage on children on their sense of self and their sense of worth and identity, lasting mineralogical damage, and we haven’t really grappled with the physical realities of trauma,” she said.

“We think of it like a thought wound or a feeling wound but it really causes deep neurological damage. That doesn’t just undo itself, and so when you grapple with the depth of the damage that comes from all of these forms of abuse, we cannot in good conscience justify not asking those hard questions and not making those kinds of radical changes.

“When the authority figures at the top are not asking those questions and not willing to submit to that process, what they’re communicating with their actions is, ‘we’re going to pay lip service to not liking child abuse, but we’re not going to care about them enough to actually do anything. Just listen to what we say, pay no attention to what we’re doing’.

“We need to start looking at what they’re doing.”