The pursuit of competing in the Olympic Games has one constant: sacrifice.
For former Oklahoma gymnast Allan Bower, it meant putting off medical school to train for the 2020 Olympic Games.
Bower seemed to have everything to make his Olympic dream a reality and justify putting his other dream on hold. After helping the Sooners win three NCAA team titles, Bower was third in the all-around at last year’s U.S. Championships and was an alternate on the U.S. World Championships team. He continues to be coached by one of international gymnastics’ top mentors, Oklahoma coach Mark Williams, the 2016 U.S. Olympic team head coach.
And Bower had the financial support he needed to continue training for Tokyo 2020. As a non-NCAA member of the U.S. national senior men’s team, Bower received a $1,875 monthly stipend from USA Gymnastics.
That is until this month.
At a time when USA Gymnastics is asking a U.S. Bankruptcy Court to allow it to pay out $88,000 in employee holiday bonuses, U.S. men’s national team members have not received their monthly stipends from the organization, the Southern California News Group has learned.
“Allan really relies on that check to pay his rent and continue to train for the Olympics,” Williams said Thursday. “He was deferring medical school until after 2020, but if he doesn’t get paid soon he can’t pay his rent and he’s probably just going to go to medical school because he can’t afford to sit around and expect payments and then not get those.”
USA Gymnastics has also not paid bonuses to coaches for the men’s and women’s U.S. teams that competed at the World Championships last fall.
U.S. men’s national team members have been told by USA Gymnastics their support stipends have been delayed. Bower was unable to get an explanation. U.S. World Championships coaches were told last month they should file claims with the bankruptcy court if they wanted to receive the payments due to them under a financial agreement with USA Gymnastics.
Some U.S. men’s national team members have not been paid their monthly stipends since November and USA Gymnastics has repeatedly failed to follow a series of pay schedules in recent months.
The failure to pay athletes and their coaches as they enter a critical training period leading up to the 2020 Olympic Games has caused athlete morale to suffer, Williams said.
USA Gymnastics, facing dozens of civil suits filed by more than 220 survivors of Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse as well as decertification by the U.S. Olympic Committee, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court’s Southern District of Indiana on Dec. 5.
USA Gymnastics asked the bankruptcy court last month to approve an agreement with a consulting firm in which the organization would pay the company as much as $3,000 a day and another $30,000 for a strategic and executive planning agreement with an attorney who once worked at the same Colorado law firm where former U.S. Olympic chief executive Scott Blackmun was once a partner.
This week the organization requested that the bankruptcy court allow it to pay 40 employees a total of $88,000 in what it described as “December bonuses,” according to documents obtained by the SCNG.
One of the employees who would receive a bonus is national teams manager Amy White.
Rhonda Faehn, former USA Gymnastics vice president for the women’s program, said in a sworn deposition that White in March confided in her that then USAG President Steve Penny called her and told her to remove records from the Karolyi Ranch and transport them to USA Gymnastics headquarters in Indianapolis in November 2016.
Penny ordered the documents removed after Texas Rangers investigators, seeking medical records and other potential evidence related to their investigation of Nassar, were turned away from the Karolyi Ranch by employees, according to court documents. Rangers investigators were told they could not search the ranch without a subpoena.
White asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self incrimination at least 130 times in a Nov. 13 deposition in Olympic champion Aly Raisman’s federal lawsuit against USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee, Nassar and several other top USA Gymnastics officials and coaches.
“A lot of the decisions they’ve made in recent times don’t make sense,” Williams said referring to USA Gymnastics. “Like not paying the athletes but giving a bonus to this person who removed documents from the ranch.
“I don’t think they’ve really done a great job of fleshing out who knew about or whose finger prints were all over the Larry Nassar (scandal). And way before that there were so many cases where they just filed them away and didn’t do anything.”
USA Gymnastics in a statement to the SCNG Thursday night said it “is working diligently to address the performance-based direct athlete funding payments from the United States Olympic Committee for 2019 and the 2018 World Championships bonus payments for the coaches.
“The USOC’s Direct Athlete Support (DAS) funding is part of the Performance Partnership Agreement, which is reviewed and mutually agreed upon between the USOC and USA Gymnastics annually. At the beginning of each year, qualified athletes must renew the Performance Partnership Agreement for the coming year. DAS is paid directly by the USOC to eligible athletes and has not been affected by the USA Gymnastics Chapter 11 bankruptcy/reorganization filing. A very similar situation occurred in January 2018 as well, and the administrative process for renewing the payments for 2019 is in progress.
“Unfortunately, the coaches’ World Championships bonus payments had not been completely processed at the time of the Chapter 11 bankruptcy/reorganization filing, and they are now pre-petition claims. USA Gymnastics is evaluating the legal options regarding payment of these funds and will address the matter as promptly as possible. All USA Gymnastics 2018 World Championships athletes’ bonuses have been distributed.”
Williams is particularly upset with the proposed bonus to White.
“That’s pretty callous to survivors,” he said, “and the hopes that USAG can turn this thing around.”
Williams said USA Gymnastics officials have not lived up to their vow to top athletes and coaches that the Chapter 11 filing would not impact athletes training for the Olympic Games and 2019 World Championships.
“The athletes haven’t been treated particularly well when they told us that the bankruptcy wouldn’t affect the athletes,” Williams said. “And they said it wouldn’t affect the coaches. And then they have these (proposed) bonuses” for USA Gymnastics employees.
“The athlete morale is suffering. A lot of the time we aren’t sure if there’s going to be money in the budget to get to competitions (athletes) need to compete in, to do what we need to do to get ready for the Olympic Games. It’s kind of unsettled.”
