Last week, four days into a marathon court hearing that has exposed a
hidden history of sexual abuse in American gymnastics, the two-time
Olympian Aly Raisman joined the growing ranks of female athletes who have
testified against the national team’s disgraced former physician, Larry
Nassar, for decades of almost unimaginable offense. Nassar, who
pleaded guilty to several counts of first-degree criminal sexual
conduct, and on Wednesday was given a sentence of forty to a hundred and seventy-five years in prison, had also received, in December, a separate sixty-year
federal term for child-pornography crimes (which he has appealed). The certainty of his
sentencing for that charge, which was already likely to insure his lifetime
imprisonment, allowed media attention to focus on the brave and
devastating accounts of his survivors. In a year dominated by righteous
and long-overdue expressions of female anger, the collective
condemnation of not just Nassar but his many alleged enablers, among them officials at USA
Gymnastics and the United States Olympic Committee, has assumed special
significance as a lasting demand for accountability. Raisman’s
cathartic, excoriating victim-impact statement was one of more than a
hundred and sixty delivered, but it carried a special potency, infiltrating the
signage of last weekend’s Women’s March and appearing, in its entirety, in the Times. “The tables have turned, Larry,” Raisman said. “We are
here, we have our voices, and we are not going anywhere.”

To fans of gymnastics, it is no surprise that Raisman, who was twice
voted the captain of her country’s Olympic team, has emerged as the
spearhead of this communal movement, applauding the statements of
fellow-survivors and calling for independent investigations into
governing athletic organizations that she claims are “rotting from the
inside.” Though Raisman is a legendary independent talent—with laurels
that include Olympic individual-event medals of every color, as well as
a silver in the Rio Games’ all-around competition—her greatest
contribution to American gymnastics may be a steadfast style of
leadership that makes her an apt icon for the current reckoning. Known
fondly, by her teammates and the “Gymternet,” as Grandma Aly, the
twenty-three-year-old was the eldest member of Rio’s self-proclaimed
Final Five, in 2016, and London’s Fierce Five, four years before, when
she guided the American women to clinch their first team gold since the
Magnificent Seven of the Atlanta Games, in 1996. Along the way, she has
offered invaluable mentorship to younger athletes, who have delivered
her handwritten notes of adoration and praised her positivity in the
press. “She’s sort of the one who’s always looking out for everybody,”
Gabby Douglas, Raisman’s longtime teammate, said in 2016. Like her
loyal, expressive
parents,
Raisman has shouted from the sidelines of some of the sport’s most
memorable victories in recent history, many of them achieved by
teammates, including Douglas, whose revelations about Nassar have
since joined her own.

One of the special horrors of Nassar’s tenure as a gymnastics physician
is that his repeated episodes of abuse coincided with moments of immense
athletic pressure. Among Raisman’s heartbreaking revelations was her
discussion of the London Olympics, where Nassar served as the official
doctor for female gymnasts and, rather than offering care, molested her instead. Despite his sickening abuse, the American
women made history that year by winning the United States’ first team
gold medal on international soil. The polished showmanship essential to
the sport was perhaps Nassar’s best cover—Olympian gymnasts, after all,
are trained to make the excruciating look effortless. In her
award-winning floor routine’s first tumbling
pass, Raisman connects a
roundoff to a one-and-a-half stepout, another roundoff, a back
handspring, and then an Arabian double-front, punching through her feet,
upon landing, to complete a final layout—it gets me every time—as
straight as an exclamation point. Raisman’s visible relief after
testifying last week reminded me of the more visceral release that
overtakes any gymnast after she sticks such a move, thrusting her arms
back and her hands up in an assured salute to the judges. “You are so
strong,” the judge of Nassar’s proceedings, Rosemarie Aquilina, told
Raisman. “You are that example to all of those other survivors that they can
be you, not just as an Olympian—as a woman, as a strong survivor, as a
voice.”

Aquilina, somewhat unexpectedly, has played a role perhaps as
instrumental as Raisman’s in promoting the voices of affected women. Though she had
anticipated a four-day hearing, her vow to accommodate every survivor
who wishes to speak—more than a hundred and forty in total—has helped
generate the momentum responsible for recent changes to the sport’s
national governing body. Last Thursday, USA Gymnastics announced plans
to sever ties with Karolyi Ranch, a rigorous training center owned by
the former national team coördinator Márta Károlyi, which was revealed to
have served as a frequent site of Nassar’s abuse. On Monday, as the
testimonies mounted, the organization announced that its chairman and
several board members had resigned. Neither change appeased Raisman,
who, heartened by Aquilina’s encouragement, has denounced each as
superficial and demanded further revamping. “A word of advice,” she
warned in her original testimony, pointing out that USA Gymnastics had
athletes training at the Karolyi Ranch on the day the organization
proclaimed its intention to renounce it. “Continuing to issue empty
statements of empty promises, thinking that will pacify us, will no
longer work.”

Last week, just days before Raisman delivered her testimony, I was stunned to spot her leaving the same spin class I'd just finished in a Boston neighborhood not far from her hometown of Needham. Had she really descended, from the heavens, to toil on an
indoor bike with mortals like me? “I come here sometimes to clear my head,” she told me, graciously willing to indulge a fan. Though she has yet
to begin official training for the 2020 Games, Raisman has told the
press that Tokyo is on her mind. Only a handful of American gymnasts
have graced three Olympics, but I would not be surprised to see Grandma
Aly elected to their ranks. As the national team continues to adjust to
a new coördinator, Valeri Liukin—whose own daughter, Nastia, won
Beijing’s all-around title and, in recent days, has praised
fellow-gymnasts for their fortitude—Raisman’s enduring presence
represents a promise that she will continue, on and off the floor, to
hold the sport’s American organizers accountable. There is work left to
do.