Sports-abuse agency promises new reforms, after years of failing young athletes
The Milan Cortina Winter Olympics offer as good a platform as any for contemplating the next stage in the evolution of the failed U.S. Center for SafeSport. That body was supposed to protect young athletes from sexual abuse by their coaches, but instead has largely been deployed to mitigate the legal exposure of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and the national sport governing bodies, or NGBs, which have harbored too many abusers.
The last Olympiad was the 2024 Summer Games in Rome. From there, the SafeSport agency’s since-departed CEO, Ju’Riese Colón, dispatched a letter to the editor of the Chicago Tribune. In an op-ed for that newspaper, I had rcently promoted a proposal by a congressional commission to turn SafeSport into a federally funded agency, free of the underwriting and interests of USOPC and the NGBs. The Tribune had come in behind my essay with an editorial of its own, making similar points about the widespread disgrace of America’s youth sports system.
As part of her response, Colón made sure Tribune readers knew she was leading a delegation from SafeSport to cheer on U.S. athletes at the Olympics. Colón did not explain how many investigations of abuse could have been funded by money spent on the airfare and accommodations for her entourage.
The notion that the SafeSport center chief’s job should primarily concern supporting kids vulnerable to sexual predators, rather than cheering the U.S. medal count from the grandstands, seemed alien to Colón. In fairness to her and SafeSport, that’s the way it always seems to go in the tribal politics of sports rah-rah.
As I’ve written previously for Salon, the same D.C. legislators who created the Commission on the Future of the USOPC, such as Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington and Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both Democrats, subsequently helped to deep-six the commission’s 2024 report and its commonsense recommendations.
Shielding kids from the worst predatory coaches was “non-negotiable,” a spokesperson for Blumenthal platitudinously proclaimed last year. But the senator’s statement said nothing about the commission’s specific measures for getting there. One of those was to completely restructure SafeSport as we know it. Another was perhaps more important: Divorce grassroots sports extracurricular programs from the USOPC entities by upending the skewed priorities of the Ted Stevens Amateur and Olympic Sports Act, which dates back to 1978.
What that second proposal boils down to is this: Let those parents who choose to expose their wannabe-elite athlete children to unaccountable authority figures, in pursuit of college athletic scholarships and Olympic glory, do so on their own dime. That should happen in dedicated private programs that are no longer subsidized by below-cost rental of public facilities, or by the free labor of volunteer parents of the millions of kids who are there for life skills, a little competitive fun and a tiny edge on their college applications.
But any politicians who seek to rein in — or at least pretend to rein in — the out-of-control Olympic movement quickly come to understand that they have no standing to comment unless they preface every critique by emphasizing how loudly they’re cheering for Team USA against the Russians, the Chinese, the Iranians and any other world-stage enemy of the moment. This is similar to what I’ve encountered in covering the public health harm inflicted on American males by the football industry, all the way from pee-wee leagues to high schools to colleges to the too-big-to-fail NFL. Criticism of football may only be uttered, if at all, in the wake of a gimmick bet with a fellow politician over the outcome of the NCAA championship or the Super Bowl.
One important proposal: Let parents who choose to expose their wannabe-elite athlete children to unaccountable authority figures, in pursuit of college athletic scholarships and Olympic glory, do so on their own dime.
Colón, the second SafeSport CEO since the USA Gymnastic scandal around serial child molester Larry Nassar led to its formation in 2018, was canned last spring against the background of another black mark: SafeSport investigator Jason Krasley was arrested on charges of rape, sexual assault and involuntary sexual servitude relating to his earlier career as a police officer in Allentown, Pennsylvania.
That was pretty ugly, but sensational headlines might be the least of SafeSport’s problems. The agency has a lengthy backlog of cases that will likely never be addressed at current funding levels. Worse yet, that funding comes from the USOPC apparatchiks who only seem to want outcomes that take care of abuse survivors when those cases have extensive law enforcement backup and can serve as effective advertisements of SafeSport’s diligence.
The challenge to do better now falls to Colón’s successor, Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, a 1984 Olympic gold medalist in the 100-meter hurdles. After she assumed office on Feb. 1, I asked Fitzgerald Mosley whether she supported the congressional commission proposals.
Her response came through Hilary Nemchik, the center’s vice president for external affairs. That in itself marked a notable improvement: I could count on one hand the number of times SafeSport had previously acknowledged any of my queries. Back in 2018, PR for the agency was handled by Dan Hill, an outside contractor who sometimes trolled victims on social media if they complained about their treatment by SafeSport. Hill claimed to be working pro bono, although the center’s IRS filings revealed hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees, and on one occasion he invented a phone conversation with me that never happened. Nemchik told me that Hill no longer works with SafeSport.
Fitzgerald Mosley “stands by the recommendations” of the congressional commission’s report, Nemchik said,
and is currently leading her own examination of the organization relying on input from both internal and external stakeholders as she prepares to chart SafeSport forward with a new strategic plan. Having just started in this role, she is in the discovery phase to identify the Center’s areas of strength, opportunities, and areas for improvement. Diversifying funding is a priority, however, it will take some time.
It would be fair to say that “diversifying funding” isn’t the commission’s central message. Its members, who included both sports law experts and former Olympic athletes, want SafeSport to receive full federal funding, bringing the U.S. model closer to the way sports ministries work in many peer countries. In other words, they want to separate the intensely nationalist and heavily commercialized Olympic movement from the crucial mission of preventing abuse in amateur sports.
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Fitzgerald Mosley will need the help of her ostensible supporters if she wants to say just that. She will also need major media organs to step up their game, starting with the New York Times, which never even reported the release of the commission findings two years ago.
Prior to Jeff Bezos’ recent evisceration of its sports desk, the Washington Post had been doing somewhat better in this space, even if investigations of alleged abuse in sports almost always followed formal legal action by a victim. After my book on the historic and systematic abuse problems in American swimming was published, Post sportswriter Rick Maese told me he was “chipping away” on reporting a related story. Maese appears to have survived the purge, at least so far; he’s in Milan right now covering the Olympics.
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