Latest news with #U.S.Olympic&ParalympicCommittee
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Shiffrin says in essay she feels 'like myself again' after recovering from ski racing crash, PTSD
FILE - United States' Mikaela Shiffrin reacts on the podium after winning the women's slalom at the World Cup Finals, Thursday, March 27, 2025, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (AP Photo/John Locher, File) Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. World Cup alpine skier, is interviewed at a NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. World Cup alpine skier, is interviewed at a NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) FILE - United States' Mikaela Shiffrin reacts on the podium after winning the women's slalom at the World Cup Finals, Thursday, March 27, 2025, in Sun Valley, Idaho. (AP Photo/John Locher, File) Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. World Cup alpine skier, is interviewed at a NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Two-time Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin finally feels 'like myself again' after recovering from a ski racing crash last season and lingering post-traumatic stress disorder. Shiffrin described in an essay for The Players' Tribune released Friday the physical and mental hurdles she needed to clear after her serious spill during a giant slalom race in Killington, Vermont, on Nov. 30. In the crash, something punctured Shiffrin's side and caused severe damage to her oblique muscles. Advertisement 'Everyone knows what it feels like to have a bad cough. But PTSD … it's not like that,' the 30-year-old from Edwards, Colorado, wrote. 'It comes in all shapes and sizes. Everyone experiences it in their own way, and no two cases are exactly alike.' Shiffrin was leading after the first run of the GS that day in Killington. With the finish line in sight on her final run, she lost an edge and slid into a gate, flipping over her skis. The all-time winningest Alpine World Cup ski racer then slammed into another gate before coming to a stop in the protective fencing. To this day, she doesn't know what led to the puncture wound, only that it was "a millimeter from pretty catastrophic,' she told The Associated Press. Shiffrin wrote in The Players' Tribune it was 'difficult to explain what the pain felt like. But the closest I can get would probably be, it was like … not only was there a knife stabbing me, but the knife was actually still inside of me.' In late January, Shiffrin returned to the World Cup circuit. The giant slalom, though, remained a cause of anxiety and she skipped the event at world championships. Advertisement Ever so steadily, she's working on overcoming the mental trauma surrounding the GS as she gears up for the 2026 Milan-Cortina Winter Games. She won an Olympic gold medal in the discipline at the 2018 Pyeongchang Games. She's been working with a psychologist to conquer her mental obstacles. 'I can admit that there were some extremely low moments," recounted Shiffrin, who won her 100th career World Cup ski race in February. "Times when I started second-guessing myself, or was critical of myself because I felt like I was letting what happened mess with me so much. It was like: Come on, Mikaela, people have had way worse crashes than that, way worse injuries. Those people got through it. What is wrong with you? "On particularly bad days, I'd question my motivation, or whether I still wanted to do this anymore. In my head, I'd be saying to myself: You know what, I kind of couldn't care less if I ever race again.' Advertisement She and the therapist began looking at her recovery through the prism of PTSD. 'With me, I also think it's possible that the crash I had at the beginning of 2024 in Cortina, and then Killington happening. … that those two crashes maybe built on one another,' Shiffrin said. 'I talked with my therapist about that, and she let me know that past trauma, or a history of traumatic events, can sometimes affect your reaction to new traumatic events.' She lost her dad, Jeff, five years ago in a home accident. Her fiancé and fellow ski racer Aleksander Aamodt Kilde of Norway is still recovering from a serious ski crash on Jan. 13, 2024. 'Maybe when I crashed and got that puncture wound, maybe that was kind of a perfect-storm situation for PTSD to take hold," Shiffrin wrote. Advertisement Shiffrin said one thing that's helped is 'getting back to a place of joy.' She closed her essay with: "All I can do is smile with appreciation. Because, finally .... I feel like myself again.' ___ AP skiing:
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
After NFL approval, LA28's Wasserman is optimistic MLB players will also find a path to the Olympics
Chloe Kim, a two-time U.S. Olympic snowboard gold medalist, arrives at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, in Los Angeles, Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Oksana Masters, a Paralympic nordic skiing athlete, speaks at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. World Cup alpine skier left, and Mike Tirico, NBC Olympics primetime host meet at a NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, in Los Angeles Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA 2028, the organizing committee for the 2028 Summer Olympics, is interviewed at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA 2028, the organizing committee for the 2028 Summer Olympics, is interviewed at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Chloe Kim, a two-time U.S. Olympic snowboard gold medalist, arrives at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, in Los Angeles, Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Oksana Masters, a Paralympic nordic skiing athlete, speaks at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Mikaela Shiffrin, U.S. World Cup alpine skier left, and Mike Tirico, NBC Olympics primetime host meet at a NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, in Los Angeles Wednesday, May 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) Casey Wasserman, chairman of LA 2028, the organizing committee for the 2028 Summer Olympics, is interviewed at an NBCUniversal and U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee press preview event to promote the upcoming Milano Cortina 2026 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games, Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes) LOS ANGELES (AP) — The organizers of the Los Angeles Olympics remain optimistic that Major League Baseball will find a way to join the NFL in sending the world's best athletes in their respective sports to the 2028 Games. LA28 president and chairman Casey Wasserman said he has been in close contact with MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred about the decision that must be made by both the league and the players' union on whether to send players to the Olympics in the middle of the 2028 baseball season. There's no current timetable for the decision. Advertisement 'I'm optimistic because it's the right thing for the sport of baseball, it's the right thing for the players and it's certainly the right thing for the Olympics,' Wasserman told The Associated Press on Wednesday. 'I think when things make sense for everybody, you can usually find a way to get things done.' LA28 was buoyed last week by the NFL owners' unanimous decision to approve the players' participation in the inaugural Olympic flag football event, with Wasserman calling it 'an awesome day." The Los Angeles organizing committee is hoping for similar news on baseball, whenever the decision is made. 'We're very engaged with the commissioner,' Wasserman said. 'I talked to him in anticipation of the NFL announcement so they knew what was coming. They have a different challenge because it's in the middle of their season, but we are very engaged in ongoing discussions with the hope to get to a good result.' Players' union head Tony Clark has said his players want to vie for Olympic gold — particularly those who got a taste of international competition in previous World Baseball Classics. Several superstars have expressed public interest in playing in the Los Angeles Olympic tournament, including reigning league MVPs Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani. Advertisement But the decision is much tougher for baseball because the Olympics fall in the heart of the regular season, necessitating major scheduling changes similar to the quadrennial disruption of the NHL season when the league participates in the Winter Olympics. Baseball also isn't a pillar of the Olympic program like ice hockey, being only intermittently included in the Summer Games for decades. The NFL players who make their nations' 10-man flag football teams are unlikely to miss more than a few days of training camp in July 2028, but MLB would have to make a dramatic adjustment to its normal competition schedule. Manfred spoke about the decision last month in New York at a meeting of the Associated Press Sports Editors. Wasserman has been pitching Manfred for over a year on the benefits of putting his sport under the Olympic spotlight. 'It's a complicated issue for us,' Manfred said at the APSE event. "Lots of major league players would be involved because of the different countries that would likely be involved, massively disruptive to our season given the timing, and we're trying to sort through all that. ... We do see LA28 as a real opportunity from a marketing perspective.' Advertisement The sport long known as America's Pastime was played only as one-game Olympic exhibitions until 1984, when it joined the Los Angeles program as a demonstration sport. Baseball became an official Olympic sport in Barcelona in 1992, but U.S. professionals weren't allowed to compete until 2000, when minor leaguers were allowed to play. The absence of the world's players was one reason cited when baseball was subsequently dropped from the London and Rio de Janeiro Games. The sport returned in baseball-mad Tokyo in 2021 — but only for MLB players not on a 40-man roster. Japan's top league shut down its season, and Japan won gold. Baseball was dropped once again in Paris, but restored for LA28. The tournament will be played at historic Dodger Stadium, the same venue that hosted the 1984 Olympic tournament. Advertisement Wasserman spoke about his baseball aspirations after an event that should remind MLB of the Olympics' unmatched marketing power. NBCUniversal has taken over a large soundstage complex in suburban Sun Valley to create extensive multimedia content to be used in the Milan Cortina Winter Olympics broadcasts in nine months, feeding the broadcast machine that boosts winter stars including Chloe Kim, Mikaela Shiffrin and Lindsey Vonn to international celebrity. ___ AP sports:
Mint
25-04-2025
- Sport
- Mint
US Olympic and Paralympic officials fire coach and director after report on sexual abuse
New York, Apr 25 (AP) The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee has fired a coach and a director after The Associated Press reported that the coach was accused of sexually abusing a young biathlete, causing her so much distress that she attempted suicide. 'Following our thorough internal evaluation, we can confirm that Gary Colliander and Eileen Carey are no longer affiliated with the USOPC," spokesman Jon Mason told the AP. He refused to provide a reason, saying only that Colliander was put on administrative leave from the Paralympic team in December — days after the AP report on the alleged misconduct. The two were fired on March 14. Colliander was accused of sexually abusing Grace Boutot, a biathlete he coached at the Maine Winter Sports Center over four years beginning in 2006 when she was 15, the AP reported. Colliander quit the job after Boutot's October 2010 suicide attempt and was later hired by the U.S. Paralympic Nordic team. Carey was the Maine center's vice president at the time of the abuse and had discussed it with Boutot's mother. After leaving the center in December 2010, Carey was hired as a coach and later promoted to director of the Paralympic team. She was there when Colliander came onboard. Mason declined to say whether Carey hired Colliander or how the Paralympic team vets the coaches they hire. The U.S. Center for SafeSport, created to investigate sex-abuse allegations in Olympic sports in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar U.S. Gymnastics scandal, launched an investigation into Colliander in December. 'Please note that Mr. Colliander's case remains active with SafeSport,' Mason told the AP. Colliander's lawyer, Simone Montoya, said officials did not tell Colliander why he was fired and he 'adamantly denies any wrongdoing or inappropriate behavior, as alleged.' Colliander "is committed to full and transparent cooperation into this matter,' Montoya told the AP in an email. 'He denies any conduct in violation of the SafeSport Code or applicable laws and policies and maintains that he has always upheld professional standards throughout his career.' AP phone and email messages seeking comment from Carey were not immediately returned. Boutot was among a half-dozen Olympians and other biathletes who came forward after the AP reported last year that Olympian Joanne Reid was sexually abused and harassed for years, according to SafeSport findings. Biathlon is a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing with target shooting. The AP generally does not identify victims of sexual abuse except in cases where they publicly identify themselves or share their stories openly. Boutot, 34, told the AP that when Colliander began coaching her, he gave her a lot of attention, including inappropriate touching. The conduct escalated after she turned 18 to 'kissing, sexual fondling and oral sex,' according to a treatment summary by her therapist, Jacqueline Pauli-Ritz, shared with the AP. Boutot said she begged Colliander to stop but he ignored her. She became severely depressed and started cutting herself, according to the therapist's notes. In September 2010, Pauli-Ritz contacted Colliander and told him Boutot was suffering from major depression and he should stop coaching her, the treatment summary said. 'He did not do this until after the suicide attempt,' Pauli-Ritz wrote, referring to Boutot's Oct. 7, 2010, overdose on antidepressants during a Utah training camp. Colliander resigned the next day. He took a coaching job in Colorado and was hired in December 2016 by the U.S. Paralympic team. He was associate director of high performance for U.S. Paralympics Nordic Skiing before being fired. Boutot tried to keep racing but faced discrimination by the center's staff and teammates, who blamed her for his departure, according to a letter she wrote to the Maine Sports Center's board in January 2011. Boutot's mother, Karen Gorman, had repeated discussions and email exchanges with Carey and the center's CEO, Andy Shepard, about the abuse her daughter suffered, Gorman told the AP. In an Oct. 22, 2010, email, Gorman told them, 'the issue of any coach-athlete relationships ... must be scrutinized" by the Maine sports center. Carey responded that she was 'working really hard' to make that happen. 'I am very supportive of having positive things come out of this situation for everyone involved,' she said in an Oct. 25, 2010, email. But, Boutot told the AP, no investigation was ever conducted. In a 2011 complaint she filed with the Maine Human Rights Commission, Boutot accused the Maine sports center of failing to prevent Colliander's sexual misconduct and retaliating against her when she reported it — denying her coaching and ending financing of equipment, travel, athlete housing and other U.S. Biathlon competition-related expenses. The center settled for $75,000 in September 2011 and Boutot quit racing. (AP) AM AM AM First Published: 25 Apr 2025, 09:58 AM IST
Washington Post
17-04-2025
- Sport
- Washington Post
USA Football named national governing body by USOPC ahead of flag football's Olympic debut in 2028
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee already has sprints, swim strokes and somersaults under its umbrella. Now, it's adding touchdowns. USA Football joins the likes of track and field, swimming and gymnastics as a national governing body after being certified Thursday by the USOPC. It's a significant moment for flag football ahead of its Olympic debut at the 2028 Los Angeles Games.
Yahoo
16-03-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Leading sex-abuse litigator suing women's sports advocate — it's a tangled tale
In the newest twist of the under-the radar skirmishes in the area of coach sexual abuse in youth sports programs, one of the most outspoken and effective critics of the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee, its national governing bodies, or NGBs, and the U.S. Center for SafeSport has sued a leading women's sports advocate for allegedly defaming him and harming his law practice. The plaintiff, Jonathan Little, asserts that Nancy Hogshead, the 1984 gold-medal swimmer who now heads the advocacy organization Champion Women, was in sync with the harassment of Little by the SafeSport Center. SafeSport spent more than two years investigating a false claim that Little failed to report abuse allegations to the agency, as well as to police. The story of SafeSport's perplexing case against Little was told by Salon in 2022. That article is cited in Little's 84-page complaint filed Feb. 28 in Florida state court, which can be viewed here. Last year SafeSport dropped its investigation of Little, not on the merits but with an explanation that he wasn't in the center's jurisdiction since he's not a member of an NGB. Named as defendants in Little's lawsuit, along with Hogshead, are Champion Women and the group's COO, Alistair Casey. A native of Scotland, Casey has coached the U.S. Olympic badminton team, and after working for Little's Indianapolis law firm, was on the staff of USA Badminton when Hogshead was on its board of directors. The Little suit drops during yet another period of descent into chaos by Olympic movement bodies in their efforts — or at least their P.R. gestures toward — stemming widespread abuse in youth sports programs. Last month, the expected new CEO of USA Swimming, Chrissi Rawak, currently the University of Delaware's athletic director, abruptly withdrew "due to unforeseen personal circumstances." The swimming news site SwimSwam broke the fuller context: USA Swimming had learned that a complaint against Rawak had just been lodged at the SafeSport Center. "These matters, which we are only now coming to understand, were previously unknown," USA Swimming said in a statement, and had not been disclosed to USA Swimming during its vetting of Rawak. For those of you keeping score, we have also reached the first anniversary of a surprisingly strong report from a congressional commission — on which Hogshead served — calling for a comprehensive revamp of the U.S. Center for SafeSport and for wresting control of youth sports programs at the grassroots levels away from USOPC and the NGBs. These recommendations were years in the making but have received next to no news media coverage. (The New York Times didn't even bother to report the release of the commission's work.) Little's lawsuit is a thorough overview of his history of fighting abuse by going to court on behalf of survivors and, in many cases, extracting large undisclosed settlements from the Olympic entities for what could be described, at the very least, as their ancillary culpability. Whether his defamation action will be successful remains to be seen. Hogshead represents a different and, as seen in this case, feuding business model of using legal pressure to extract concessions from sports entities under Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equality. * * * The Little complaint lays out the same basic facts of the 2022 Salon article, but adds the charge that Hogshead falsely and damagingly piggybacked on SafeSport's retaliatory investigation of Little, one of its leading critics. (Hogshead acknowledged receiving Salon's request for comment but has not otherwise responded.) Here's some important backstory: Little was on the track team at Indiana University from 2001 to 2003. His girlfriend at the time was Indiana swimmer Brooke Taflinger. Their friends at the Bloomington campus included two other swimmers, Susan Woessner and Meghan Ryther. Woessner would become USA Swimming's founding director of SafeSport before resigning in disgrace in 2018 amid reports of her alleged relationship with Sean Hutchison, a swimming coach who was the subject of her department's first high-profile investigation. In 2011, USA Swimming exonerated Hutchison, but it later settled a lawsuit by former Olympian Ariana Kukors over her accusations that Hutchison had groomed and abused her from a young age. Ryther has served on the boards of both the SafeSport Center and USA Swimming, and also of swimming's offshore self-insurance subsidiary, the United States Sports Insurance Company, which was created to ward off abuse lawsuits. Officially incorporated in Barbados, USSIC was put into 'run-off mode' and its assets were sold a decade ago. Among the Little lawsuit's sidebar charges are that Woessner, Ryther and SafeSport have lied about the long-running allegations of former swimmer Sarah Ehekircher, which were dormant for decades but have finally reached a court docket in Colorado. According to Little, Olympic and swimming officials derailed a police investigation into the circumstances of a late-1980s sexual encounter in California between Ehekircher and her coach, Scott MacFarland, by falsely stating that Ehekircher was above the age of consent at the time. After Taflinger, Little's former girlfriend, helped send Brian Hindson — her age-group coach in Kokomo, Indiana — to prison for, among other things, operating peeping-tom video cameras in his team's locker room, it launched Little's career as one of the country's most prolific and successful litigators on behalf of youth sports coach abuse victims. The Saeed & Little law firm, in which his wife Jessica Wegg also practices, has sued — along with USOPC, SafeSport and USA Swimming — the NGBs for tennis, taekwondo, fencing and other sports. It was Little and Wegg who were largely responsible for breaking the billion-dollar scandal of former USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar, who committed hundreds of acts of sexual abuse against young gymnasts. In 2010, the new lawsuit complaint states, Nancy Hogshead began consulting for Little. In his experience fighting the sports powers over abuse and related coverups, Little came to appreciate that both the law and the most effective tactics for policy changes called for reporting illegal acts to law enforcement, rather than to sports organization functionaries. Little, according to his complaint, 'began advising his clients to report sex abuse within their sport to actual law enforcement first, before reporting to SafeSport, and to wait until law enforcement gave the go-ahead to report to SafeSport.' This position was reinforced, he says, when he learned that Woessner and Ryther had tipped off Hutchison about the complaint against him, allowing Hutchison to flee the Seattle area and remove incriminating evidence before the Department of Homeland Security could organize a search of his home. In 2018, former Olympic badminton coach Casey began sharing information with Saeed & Little on abuse cases. Saeed & Little formally hired him as a researcher the next year. During the same period, in an extraordinary takeover, USA Badminton's board was stacked with athletes rather than Olympic bureaucrats. In response, the lawsuit says, USOPC moved to decertify USA Badminton as an NGB, evidently a step that had not been undertaken in recent history, even with scandal-plagued USA Gymnastics. In 2019, USA Badminton hired Little as legal counsel, in part to thwart the decertification threat, which USOPC eventually abandoned. In 2020, Casey joined the badminton staff. According to Little, his aggressive style eventually brought him into conflict with Hogshead. He further claims that Casey, who later left to join Champion Women, conspired with Hogshead by sharing Little's confidential law-firm emails and records with her. Hogshead, Little alleges, used his words out of context in communications with various outside parties, including major news media, to create the impression that Little had suppressed information in SafeSport cases — a gross distortion of his position regarding providing all such information to police agencies first and only later to SafeSport. SafeSport opened its investigation of Little in 2021 before closing it on technical grounds last January. Shortly thereafter, USA Badminton dropped his legal services. Before that, the complaint says, the false charges against Little were reported to the FBI, according to Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, though the status of the investigation spurred by Grassley 'is not known at this time.' Little says he responded to Grassley's bizarre accusation that he was suppressing knowledge of child rape by providing "hundreds of pages of emails and documents and accompanying privilege logs" to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The lawsuit details multiple examples of Little's modus operandi: promptly reporting sports coach sexual abuse allegations to law enforcement first and to SafeSport second, often almost says he and Hogshead were at loggerheads when he disagreed with her tactics in confronting universities and entities over violations of Title IX, the federal law mandating gender equality in higher education sports programs. According to Little, Hogshead and Casey came up with a plan to instigate claims against major college sports conferences, and then to settle them by creating more scholarships for women athletes through the creation of new badminton clubs. Little believes that after the USA Badminton board stalled this plan, in response to his advice that it was legally and practically flawed, Hogshead and Casey were angry at the loss of their projected consulting fees for masterminding the Title IX compliance process. The conflict between Little and Casey-Hogshead came to a head over reports from ESPN and in the Washington Post that USA Badminton CEO Linda French had fired Casey over his purported insistence on reporting to SafeSport the abuse accusations against a coach named Don Chew. A March 13, 2023, Hogshead email blast that was widely circulated — Little himself received it directly — alleged that 'USA Badminton General Counsel Jon Little and CEO Linda French directed Casey not to report' child rape allegations. Little says that he's suing now because his subsequent dismissal by USA Badminton has cost his firm upwards of $100,000 in fees, and damaged his reputation among prospective clients.
