Gymcastic and their Friends
I thought it was worth talking a bit about how the Gymcastic white wash of the show’s friends is a broader problem then UCLA and Miss Val but also extends to other people in the gymnastics community that have been “friends of the show” before.
For those unfamiliar, Gymcastic is an artistic gymnastics specific podcast that is celebrating it’s 10th anniversary this month having started up just afte the 2012 Olympic Games. Originally it was a panel show format hosted by a law librarian named Jessica O’Beirne, over time panelists cycled in and out as is natural for a project lasting this long and today it is primarily Jessica, Spencer Barnes (who also runs the website The Balance Beam Situation) and occasionally contributions from a self taught MAG specialist Kensley Behel. Jessica was laid off during the pandemic and has moved to making Gymcastic her full time job. They travel to meets including the Worlds and Olympic Games where they get press credentials and at 2021 Worlds in Japan they made up more than half of all foreign press at the meet (if they call themselves press or journalists depends on if you are criticizing their journalistic standards).
Gymnastics is a small community where everyone knows each other, there are often professional conflicts of interests and have to be friendly with people in order to get information. An example I’d give is that Tim Daggett owns a gym while being a commentator for NBC and he has several times had athletes on the floor of meets he was commentating. Nastia Liukin, the other NBC expert commentator is the daughter of one of the most prominent coaches in the US and was commentating through when her father was running the US program and continues to commentate on his athletes with very obvious personal bias.
Gymcastic’s most famous missteps involve the former UCLA head coach Valorie Kondos Field when a number of her former athletes came forward with stories about her mistreatment of them during the #GymnastAlliance movement following the release of Athlete A. Jessica’s husband (who works behind the scenes for the show) had co-written Miss Val’s book and Jessica had special access to the UCLA program (even acting as a guest judge at a pre-season exhebition one year). She handled it badly essentially implying that the gymnasts speaking out against Miss Val were mistaken in their impressions of her. Though she apologized for the incident the next week many didn’t find the apology sincere and she’s avoided addressing other Miss Val related issues by citing a conflict of interest.
Now I’d like to highlight two other issues that are pervasive in the show’s coverage.
1) Precision Choreography (and MyGymJudge). Precision is a gymnastics consulting firm which provides choreography services, camps, and through a subdivision MyGymJudge provides judging critiques to gymnasts at all levels including elite. The company is owned by Chellsie Memmel and Nicole Langevin (Langevin also hosts a podcast of her own interviewing gymnastics insiders which I also have opinions about but that’s for another time). They have heavily sponsored Gymcastic over the years and despite the fact that the show likes to highlight conflicts of interest within USAG has never looked at the tentacles of Precision (which besides being owned by one of the US programs 3 high performance leads also employs one of the others). They also have, at least to my memory, never given a note before interviews with Memmel or talking about her of her company’s support for the show.
I continue to believe that if Precision Choreography were being run by a figure less popular than Memmel it would draw a great deal of suspicion. It’s not the most corrupt looking structure in American elite gymnastics on the surface but that’s only because the International Elite Committee exists.
2) The Fairy Tale of Greg Marsden and 1987 Worlds. Greg Marsden is the now retired long time head coach of the University of Utah team. Incredibly successful in the early years of college women’s gymnastics and a master at building up a fanbase around the school. He is also opinionated and a bit of a drama queen and shit stirrer. And Gymcastic loves him.
One of the stories they repeat quite frequently (and use to justify telling people that gymnastics in the 1980s was incredibly corrupt) is a story about how Greg Marsden was asked to coach the US women’s team at 1987 Worlds. As Jessica tells the story he was invited to a party there where he saw judges and federation officials trading scores and was so disgusted with the corruption that he quit and didn’t want to have anything to do with elite gymnastics again.
Except that’s not what happened even by his own words in 1988 and the only other place besides Gymcastic that you will hear that version is the local Mormon press around the University of Utah.
Marsden quit the job at the US team for a number of bureaucratic and organizational reasons and on his way out the door told the LA Times in the spring of 1988 his version of this story. He was approached in a bar by a Romanian coach (who denied the incident occurred) who proposed that they swap score assurances. Score fixing in the 1980s is slightly complicated but essentially if your gymnast might et a 9.5 or a 9.7 the agreement would be to get the upper range of the plausible score. Marsden says he got the other members of the US delegation to agree (who also denied this to the LA Times) but the scheme fell apart because the US gymnasts falls meant that they couldn’t be plausibly given the agreed upon scores. They weren’t good enough to plausibly cheat.
Having investigated this in historical documents I suspect that the Romanian coach saw Marsden as a rube, knew the Americans couldn’t possibly get those scores in the first place and got a safety net for his own gymnasts without having to worry about returning the favor. Not only do we have Marsden’s own words to the LA Times but there were other journalistic accounts of this from the time which conform to this version of events (including an amazing article from Rolling Stone).
But Marsden is someone who is portrayed as a friend of the show (they occasionally will ask him questions as if they know he’s in the listening audience and can email them later). His marriage to one of his own gymnasts in the early 1980s is laughed off as being a product of it’s time (and he’s still married to her for the record). He’ll also be framed in their narratives as an advocate for reform within the NCAA rules, even being given credit for the recent edition of vault lines as something he’s wanted for years, while also being described as skipping the rules meetings in the off season where these things are decided.
I can’t help but feel like in the cases of Miss Val, Memmel, and Marsden there is a certain amount of hero worship on the part of Jessica. These were people who were huge figures in the sport when she was younger (and at least in Memmel’s case when she was a gymnastics coach briefly) and she is simply incapable of taking a step back and examining the mythology attached to these people.
But that’s what happens when you decide that feelings are more important than anything else.
