Aly Raisman

Chelsea

It’s not the pomp and circumstance that get me most about the Olympics, Paralympics, and Special Olympics. It’s not even the moving backstories that sometimes make me cry. It’s watching athletes brush up against the limits of human persistence, over and over again, just to see what they can do with their artistry, unimaginable strength, speed, focus, and years of training. Sometimes those years start before the athletes even remember. Born in Needham, Massachusetts, in 1994, Aly Raisman was just two years old when she began training as a gymnast. By fourteen, she was already considered an elite athlete. It was to the surprise of no one in her close-knit family that she qualified for the 2012 U.S. Women’s Gymnastics Olympic team the same year she finished high school. In London for the Olympics, Aly helped lead a team known as “the Fierce Five,” which included Gabby Douglas and McKayla Maroney, to a gold medal. And then she and her teammates cheered Gabby on to victory for the all-around gold.

Aly once again led an all-star team to gold in Rio de Janeiro in 2016. She and her teammate Gabby Douglas are the only Americans who have won consecutive team gold medals in gymnastics. It was thrilling to watch them compete and create history. I’ll also never forget watching Aly and her teammate Simone Biles perform their floor routines; I was mesmerized. When Aly finished her routine, she immediately began to cry, in a mix of exhaustion, relief, and pride. Simone won the gold, and Aly, the silver.

“I have both power and voice, and I am only beginning to just use them.”

—ALY RAISMAN

Some athletes fade from public consciousness after their Olympic careers end, but Aly made history once more, in January 2018. Two months after telling a reporter at Time that former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar had sexually abused her throughout her childhood and career, Aly was one of more than 150 women to testify against him at his trial. Aly courageously used her recent fame as a multiple medal-winning Olympian as a platform from which to decry her abuser and the system that had enabled him for decades. She also launched a campaign, Flip the Switch, to train adults to notice signs of sexual abuse and the ways in which trauma manifests in child victims. Thanks to the brave testimony from so many gymnasts, including Aly, Nassar was sentenced to over forty years in prison after he pled guilty to charges involving more than three hundred athletes. Also in 2018, Aly filed a lawsuit against U.S.A. Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee over their failure to protect her and other athletes from Nassar. U.S.A. Gymnastics has filed for bankruptcy and is facing decertification efforts as the sport’s national governing body. Its past practices are also being scrutinized by the U.S. Senate.

Aly continues to speak out about all that went wrong for so many years in the training of elite American gymnasts, and about what needs to be done to ensure that all gymnasts are treated with care and respect and given the protection they deserve. “There are so many people out there that are survivors, but there are few that have a voice,” she told ESPN’s Mina Kimes. “I know that I’m one of the few that are being heard, so I just want to do right by people.”