Bodies have been under close scrutiny on Netflix this year. Famous bodies, young bodies, superhuman bodies. First there was the all-or-nothing small-town devotion of Cheer, then the social history of The Last Dance, and lately, the devastating, sinister revelations on Athlete A. These sports documentaries use bodies – pushed, contorted, idolised, violated – to confront uncomfortable truths.
As Athlete A begins, Team USA gymnast Maggie Nichols is having her feet bandaged roughly; they will soon propel her into the air. She tells us about her love of the sport – she giggles as she remembers climbing out of her crib, her parents taking her to classes to give her a safe environment for all her energy. On old YouTube videos, childlike in manner as well as the tiny body her sport seems to demand she preserve unnaturally long into adulthood, she chats her fans through her favourite sparkly leotards.
By the end of Athlete A, which traces the exposure of the sexual abuse that was allowed to rot for decades within USA Gymnastics – the biggest scandal in the history of sport – we have almost forgotten the innocence of that young girl and her dream of the Olympics. With the scale of the harm done to her by the national team doctor, Larry Nassar, and all of those who manipulated her and her family into silence, we have almost forgotten the sport itself. She was only one victim – the “official”, first, to come forward – initially known as Athlete A. There were 500 more.
Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film is deeply upsetting, but I felt compelled to watch. I love gymnastics. I stare, enthralled, as humans defy gravity, marvel as they transform into stars – and the Americans have long been the most exciting, most famous, most celebrated of all. But if we are to revere these women and their talent and skill, it is also our responsibility to know that in this pursuit of greatness, their innocence and trust were abused, molested by the man “protecting” them – and he was protected by hundreds of others within the governing body.
At every tournament, we now know, Nassar was the man on the sidelines, in plain sight, rushing to the mat if a girl went over on her ankle, massaging a limb while she lay in anguish. Under the regime of trainers Béla and Márta Károlyi, the environment was so severe that by comparison, “funny” Larry was the only person the girls felt they could trust. “I looked forward to treatment; he was the only nice adult there”, says one former Olympian.
Athlete A weaves testimony from victims with footage of the investigation at the Indianapolis Star. The paper first reported in 2016 that high-ranking officials at USA Gymnastics had a policy to dismiss allegations of abuse as hearsay unless they were signed by a victim or victim’s parents. It had protected 54 coaches, at least. Women who had long left the sport and who had buried their memories began to realise they, too, had been abused as children, and came forward. With each brutal, graphic detail a woman discloses in the film, the clearer the insidious effects of this abuse become. Nassar was sentenced in 2018 to 175 years in prison, during a hearing at which more than 150 of his victims read impact statements to him directly. It was a reckoning that shook the world: women unified by their love for gymnastics, their trauma, and now their bravery.
But hundreds who facilitated Nassar, whose methods of cruelty were the gold standard for so long, who abused girls’ dreams to build a brand, have yet to face justice. “We had so many eyes on us”, says Nichols. These girls: watched, used, touched, cheered, commodified, but never listened to – still, only bodies.
