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.
