Words Matter
In an era where powerful marketing teams are a staple of nearly every major institution in the country, that simple phrase is more important than ever. With just a couple of carefully orchestrated words, an institution can respond to a scandal by whitewashing its own misdeeds, skewing perceptions, twisting the version of events, and masking its true intentions.
Often times it involves a public relations team making small word changes to their statements that may appear trivial at face value, but significantly alter the context of what is being said. Other times they craft alternative explanations in an attempt to explain away scandalous behavior. Framing it as if nothing scandalous had ever occurred in the first place and their intentions had always been pure.
USA Gymnastics during the Nassar scandal is a perfect example of this. As Mary Lou Retton, Steve Penny, and other members of the organization tried to spin it, they didn’t meet with members of Congress in an attempt to block a bill aimed at trying to curb sexual abuse in sports, but rather, they just wanted to highlight how solid the federation’s existing policies were. As if the implication clearly wasn’t “the current rules are fine, we don’t need more rules.”
Mary Lou Retton isn’t just a perpetrator of this tactic, she is a master of it. She appeared to do it again in an interview that was published in late June of 2020. This time it had nothing to do with the topic of sexual abuse within gymnastics, but the 1984 victory that made her famous. During the interview she said the following:
For those who don’t want to watch the YouTube video, the quote is below:
“And before he left he trained Ecaterina Szabo who was the World Champion going into my 1984 Olympic Games. She was supposed to win.”
So what exactly is wrong with this quote? The problem is that while it is correct to assert that Szabo was the favorite to win the 1984 Olympic All-Around (AA), it comes with the caveat that Szabo was the favorite only among gymnasts who didn’t boycott. Women’s artistic gymnastics (WAG) was hit rather hard by the 1984 Olympic boycott. Boycotting nations accounted for roughly 66% of the WAG medals won at the 1983 and 1985 World Championships.
Amongst the casualties was the famed Soviet WAG team which is arguably the most successful dynasty in Olympic history, having won the team gold medal in all ten of its Olympic appearances. Not even in the current era where they are allowed to use NBA players has USA basketball matched the Soviet WAG feat of ten consecutive gold medals.
Mary Lou Retton asserts that Szabo was “the” World Champion. While it is true that Szabo was the World Champion on floor, Retton was clearly stating it in regards to the AA, the most prestigious event in gymnastics. It wouldn’t make sense for Retton to say this in regard to floor-exercise as Szabo was the gold medalist on floor in both 1983 and 1984.
By calling Szabo “the World Champion” Retton is asserting that Szabo won the AA gold medal at the 1983 World Championships and as a result, was considered the top ranked gymnast in the world. But that wasn’t the case as Szabo finished third. So who finished first and second?
Two Soviet gymnasts.
Perhaps Retton misspoke, but she most likely didn’t. During the 2016 American Cup Retton gave an interview with NBC where she said virtually the exact same thing:
“Ecaterina Szabo was World champion, and she was supposed to win that [Olympic] title.”
It isn’t so much a mistake, but a repeat pattern where Mary Lou Retton has rewritten gymnastics history so she can tell the story of how she beat the #1 ranked gymnast of the era. It is hard to believe a high-level gymnast could ever get through her career without knowing who two of the top gymnasts of her era were. Retton almost certainly remembers, she just doesn’t care. For Mary Lou Retton, it wasn’t enough that Olga Mostepanova and Natalia Yurchenko had 1984 taken away from them, she wants to take 1983 away from them as well.
What Mary Lou Retton had done was a brilliant crafting of a narrative to suit her agenda. The statements “Szabo was the favorite” and “Szabo was the defending World Champion” sound so similar that if one were to mix them up, it could be chalked up as an innocent mistake. It was such a minor difference that even NBC Sports would publish the comment without realizing the significance of the change in words.
But it almost certainly was an intentional choice of words as one is a truthful statement whereas the other represents the total erasure of the 1984 boycott that was vital to her win. Retton mixes truth and lie while omitting key context to produce a deceitful version of events that makes her 1984 win look far better than it actually was. Going beyond downplaying the possibility Yurchenko and Mostepanova could have won medals in Los Angeles, but acting as if the 1984 boycott erased their non-Olympic accomplishments as well.
It is classless behavior and poor sportsmanship, but it wasn’t even the most outrageous part of the interview. In this exact same interview Retton fielded a question where the interviewer incorrectly introduced her as an advocate of the very same bill she is alleged to have actively tried to block from passage.
Retton simply went along with the question and in doing so helped spread the message that she and her USAG associates never worked to block a bill aimed at protecting children from sexual predators. In an interview featuring lies that were used to rewrite gymnastics history, what was one more?
Note: The full interview can be found here.
An Old School Gymnastics Blog 
Wow, what a horrible woman
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One can only imagine what sort of parent she was to her unfortunate 4 daughters… 😱
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Mary Lewd WRETCHED is a permanent stain on gymnastics in every way. Retton needed both a massive (and unfair–massive cheating with inflated scores) home field advantage and 70% of the competition boycotting the event just to “win” at all. And her “win” came only due to the score carryover rule (changed a few years later) although Szabo, a multiple World AA and individual medalist (Wretched never went to a Worlds or ANY major international competition–SCAM Cup is neither major, unbiased, nor truly international) was vastly and clearly superior and, in fact, won AA finals. Wretched’s beam routine was not only hideous, it was absurdly simple other than the dismount–and she still wobbled in it.
The truth is, Wretched probably wouldn’t have finished in the top TEN had the Olympics not been boycotted and had they not been in amurrIKKKa. With Yurchenko, Gnauck, Mostepanova, Szabo, Ricna, Stoyanova, and scads of other clearly superior gymnasts in event finals, Wretched would have won ZERO medals.
I could go on for days about Wretched’s excrementality both as a “gymnast” and as a human. I’ll close by saying that of course Wretched is a MAGAturd of epic proportions (like her fellow overrated, overhyped mediocrity Kerri Strug)–it explains a lot about her SUBHUMAN behavior.
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You are an idiot and jealous of her accomplishment.get a life!
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She “accomplished” winning by default pretty much because 75% of the best competitors were boycotting and she had home field advantage. She was blown way out of proportion. Even when I was 11 years old watching her on TV I knew she never would have won if the Soviets had been there.
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I am pretty sure she knows and even conceded that she wouldn’t have won if there wasn’t a boycott. But I have to say that this anger and hatred is more of a reflection of yourself than it is on the gymnasts you are denigrating.
Both Retton and Strugg, if anything, provided the USA with some national pride at times when it was sorely needed. What are you doing for your country other than living in the past?
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Ew what a wretched being you are. What a hypocrite.. Mary Lou Retton is just human, but you are a literal ghoul. Get right with God, honey
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In terms of the gymnastics she actually did at the 1984 Olympics, and in terms of her having been the foremost person to take Power Gymnastics to a new level in the early 1980s, Retton has a very deserved place in the history of the sport. The zeitgeist may be against her now, as it has become increasingly so for about the last 15 years, but if there is any justice, her reputation will undergo a good bit of repair, and we will also, before too much longer, hopefully, see a different Retton than we have, to date.
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Yes we will…pushing up daisies.
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LOL. All she meant by that statement was out of the two, Retton and Szabo, Retton had never competed or medalled in a world championship let alone received a gold metal from one. But everything else, I don’t know and I don’t really want to know. I enjoy watching her in ancient competitions but I have no interest in her beyond that.
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I grew up about 70 miles from Mary Lou’s home town. She’s still basically a goddess in the state of West Virginia.
I watched later Olympics and thought: “These girls do lots of stuff that Mary Lou never did.” The sport has gotten tougher.
Mary Lou is a beloved female gymnast for one simple reason. She smiles more in one hour than the average gymnast does in one year. She’s probably smiled more than entire USA teams have. She’s an athlete in a sport where most of the athletes never smile.
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Sadly it appears to be a deliberate false statement. Mary Lou could have just as easily said “Szabo the European champion on floor” or “Szabo a European champion”. Certainly to those who wouldn’t know the truth Retton implies Szabo was the European AA champion. By boosting Szabo she is boosting herself. Maybe this is because Retton knows she won against the weakest field of any modern champion. None of her competitors held or would go on to hold an Allaround title in a major competition (Olympics, World Championships, World Cup, European Championships). In her entire career she never once competed compulsories against a Soviet or East German gymnast. She could have gone to the 1985 World Championships but Retton refused to test herself against the best gymnasts around at the time.
Mary Lou probably learnt to rewrite history from her coach Bela Karolyi.To Bela is granted a talent even the gods are denied – to alter what has already happened. Bela reconstructs history in his own favour and reports events the way they never happened. It’s akin to the “Newspeak” of George Orwell’s famous novel 1984.
Another Champion who has on occasion made false statements when she could easily and quickly verified them as untrue is Nadia Comaneci. On occassion she seems to borrow Bela’s lies and her faulty memory does the rest. For example in her biography Nadia wrote that she won the 1972 Druzhba (youth friendship) tournament and defeated Liudmila Turischeva there. A simple checking of the facts shows that Nadia actually finished 8th and that Turischeva didn’t compete there. In relation to the 1980 Olympics “ She notes that if the preliminary rounds were not carried through to final competition, as is the case today, she would probably have won gold”. In fact under the present Olympic AA scoring system – New Life – Elena Davydova would not only have still won the 1980 AA title but she would have won it by a larger margin. The scores on the night of the AA final in 1980 were Davydova 39.65, Comaneci 39.55, Shaposhnikova 39.45, Gnauck 39.3. Under this scoring system – brought in in 2003 – with only 2 gymnasts from the same nation qualifying to the AA final Nadia wouldn’t have made it as her team optional score of 39.2 (tied with Ruhn) was lower than that of Grigoras (39.3) and Eberle (39.5). Nadia wrote “Bela believed the judges had conspired to have Davydova perform her bars routine before I competed on the beam so that they could score her higher and ensure her the gold medal. Personally, I don’t believe that’s true, but I can’t know for certain”. Neil Admur, New York Times, July 25 1980, A17, ”The drama on the final rotation added to the suspense. Miss Gnauck was second among the 9 gymnasts on the vault, Miss Davydova seventh on the bars and Miss Comaneci eighth on the beam”. So Nadia was drawn by lot to finish after Davydova, which is exactly what happened.
It is difficult to know if champions make these statements out of carelessness or a deliberate attempt to deceive.
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