Smith, the first player to win 100 open beach volleyball tournaments, has been suspended since May 31 and may not participate or attend USA Volleyball sanctioned events, according to USA Volleyball’s suspended list.

The reason for the suspension is listed by USA Volleyball as “U.S. Center for SafeSport administrative hold.”

When asked if the listing of Smith suspension was accurate and what was the reason for the suspension, Liani Reyna, USA Volleyball manager for SafeSport, said: “I have no comment.”

USA Volleyball communications manager B.J. Hoeptner-Evans also declined to comment.

Smith, in a series of telephone interviews and text messages since October 10, said he has “no idea why” he has been suspended by USA Volleyball.

Smith said he was unaware of the suspension until he was informed of it by SCNG more than four months after it went into effect.

“I’m not sure why you are hell bent on trying to mess with me?” Smith said in a text Thursday in response to a question about when he was last a member of USA Volleyball. “I think it is time to stop trying to find a way to tarnish my career. You must have better things to do?”

Smith on October 12 said he spoke with Reyna “who knows nothing.”

Smith said he is no longer a member of USA Volleyball. Nineteen persons on USA Volleyball’s suspended members list have “U.S. Center for SafeSport administrative hold” cited as the rule or code violation for their suspension. All 19 were suspended after their USA Volleyball membership had lapsed.

Smith said he does not remember when he was last a member of USA Volleyball.

“Don’t know,” he said. “Haven’t kept track.”

On Oct. 12, Smith also said he spoke to an official at the U.S. Center for SafeSport after speaking with Reyna. Smith said he did not recall the name of the U.S. Center for SafeSport official he spoke to.

The SafeSport official told Smith “they have no reason to investigate because I am not a USAV member,” Smith wrote in an Oct. 12 text. “She said USAV had no reason to post my name on their suspended list as I am not a member (of USA Volleyball). There is no suspension of non members. If I was trying to become a member, then they could open an investigation. I don’t have a reason to become a member.

“If for some reason there was a serious offense reporter, I am sure I would have heard something from other sources (of course there is not).

“If I decide to become a member of the USAV, I may find out what the issue is but like I said, no reason to do so at this time. Still, my curiosity is peaked!

“The gal at safe sport said there is a range of potential offenses that could be reported including verbal abuse all the way to much worse stuff which I think is listed on their site.”

Smith said the SafeSport official encouraged him to check back with USA Volleyball to see if they would remove his name from the suspended list. More than three weeks ago he said he contacted USA Volleyball again about the suspension. Smith said on Monday he still had not heard back from USA Volleyball.

A U.S. Center for SafeSport spokesman declined to comment on Smith’s status as suspended.

Hoeptner-Evans, USA Volleyball’s communications manager, initially declined to comment on the Smith suspension in early October. On Wednesday SCNG contacted Hoeptner-Evans again detailing Smith’s comments and asking for the reason for the suspension and if the national governing body would confirm that the suspension is still in place. Hoeptner-Evans said she would relay the questions to her bosses at USA Volleyball. In an email Thursday, Hoeptner-Evans wrote, “we do not have a response for your article.”

Smith, 66, has been involved in coaching and putting on clinics since retiring as a player in 2001. He coaches the Sinjin Beach Club, an age-group program based out of Santa Monica, adjacent to the Annenberg Beach House.

“Beach volleyball isn’t just a sport, it’s a lifestyle,” reads the Sinjin Beach Club website. “Our club embodies this by giving our players the tools to compete at the highest level and to have fun while doing so. We achieve this by offering elite coaches and drills that have been tested and proven by King of the Beach, Sinjin Smith. The most important thing to us is growing the sport and bringing it back to what it used to be.”

Smith has also run camps for the past 21 years. This past summer, Sinjin Smith’s Beach Volleyball Camps (BVC) operated camps in nine Los Angeles County communities.

Smith is the third current or former U.S. Olympic volleyball team member to be suspended by USA Volleyball in recent years.

Scott Touzinsky, a 2008 Olympic gold medalist with the United States volleyball team, was suspended by USA Volleyball in July 2018 in response to allegations of sexual misconduct involving an underage female athlete at a camp or clinic in Canada, according to U.S. Center for SafeSport and USA Volleyball documents obtained by the Southern California News Group.  

Beach player Taylor Crabb was suspended by USA Volleyball in 2017 for misconduct involving a minor-aged girl, according to USA Volleyball documents obtained by SCNG. USA Volleyball’s board of directors voted unanimously in May 2019 to extend the suspension through Sept. 28, 2021, after Crabb breached a settlement agreement for the first suspension by coaching at a camp for junior girls.

The decision was made with the clear realization that it would prevent Crabb from competing in the Tokyo Olympics, originally scheduled for 2020. An arbitrator later reduced Crabb’s suspension, clearing the way for him to compete in the 2021 Olympic Games. Crabb, however, missed the Tokyo Games after contracting COVID just days before the Olympics. He most recently teamed with Taylor Sander to win his first Manhattan Beach Open on Aug. 20.

Smith, a 1996 Olympian, led UCLA to NCAA titles in 1978 and 1979 and was a member of the U.S national team indoors from 1979 to 1982 before focusing on the beach game.

Smith won AVP International titles in parts of three decades. He was so dominant that the International Volleyball Hall of Fame called him the “King of the Beach” when he was inducted into the hall in 2003.

Smith even inspired an Electronic Arts video game fittingly called “King of the Beach.”

Smith was also influential off the beach, playing a leading role in the creation of the AVP, eventually serving as president and on the board of directors for the group. He was also a driving force behind the creation FIVB World Tour. Smith also served as president of the Beach Volleyball World Council.

ARLINGTON, Texas — Bryce Harper wants big leaguers to play in the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics. Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred says pausing the regular season to make that happen would be difficult.

“Everyone appreciates the challenges associated with major league players playing in a tournament that is in the middle of our season,” Manfred said before Friday’s World Series opener. “We’re an everyday game. We’re kind of big on the integrity of that regular season. It’s an important thing for us.”

Baseball and softball were restored to the 2028 Games after being dropped for next year’s Paris Olympics. MLB did not let players on active big league rosters participate in 2000, 2004 and 2008, and the sport was dropped for 2012 and 2016.

While baseball was restored for the 2021 Tokyo Olympics, only players not on 26-man active rosters and injured lists were eligible, and many clubs blocked top eligible prospects from heading to the tournament in Japan. Nippon Professional Baseball did let its top players participate, and Japan beat the U.S. in the gold medal game.

Harper, whose Philadelphia Phillies were eliminated from MLB’s postseason this week, said recently that it would be a dream to play for Team USA. The 31-year-old has long been an advocate of MLB taking a break during the season to let major leaguers play in the Olympics.

“You talk about growing the game, and that’s the way you grow it at the highest peak,” Harper said. “You let guys that are playing in the league take that break just like in the NHL and see what happens. I think it would be really cool. I think it would be a lot of fun. I don’t know if they’ll ever go for it, but I would love to put USA on my chest and represent it at the highest level.”

Casey Wasserman, the chairman of the Los Angeles Games organizers, also owns an agency that represents dozens of MLB players.

“Casey Wasserman has been supportive of getting baseball back in the Olympics, which we appreciate,” Manfred said. “We think it’s a great thing and we will continue to listen as to whether there’s some arrangement that could be worked out – I’m not saying one word about major league players – some arrangement that could be worked out to make it the best possible tournament.”

All alone.

He was full of run and confidence. The injuries and ulcer that had hounded him for the past 18 months were behind him. So here he was in the inaugural conference championships attacking the first in a series of climbs, the runner who had captured global attention for the second half of the 1960s, a grown up version of the scrawny teenager from Spokane who had upset the Soviets at the Coliseum in 1964, the world record-holder, already the winner of a record 10 NCAA titles, Gerry Lindgren, American distance running’s king of the freaking hill once again flying solo.

“When I ran cross country I would always take off like mad and get a big lead and then I could just coast and do whatever I wanted because it was over already,” Lindgren said in a telephone interview earlier this month. “So the first mile of the race I remember taking off like mad, being all by myself and going up this long hill and then I get almost to the top of the hill and then that damn Pre sprints by me. I can’t believe it. Nobody’s ever been there.”

Over the remaining miles of the 6-mile race Lindgren and Oregon freshman Steve Prefontaine would take themselves and the sport, the conference to places they had never been before, repeatedly attacking each other mile after mile, hill after hill, with a series of relentless bursts, both courageous and reckless, testimonies to their pride as much as their talent, until they crossed the finish line totally spent, literally shoulder to shoulder, colliding in combat and exhaustion in what remains the greatest cross country race ever held on American soil.

Lindgren and Prefontaine were so inseparable in the end, E. Garry Hill, the longtime editor of Track & Field News, recalled that it took “forever to adjudicate the finish picture.”

Eventually Lindgren was declared the winner although the outcome remains the source of debate in running circles more than a half-century later.

What remains clear is the epic nature of Lindgren and Prefontaine’s battle and the transformative impact the race had on college cross country and American distance running.

Hill covered 11 Olympic Games and 15 World Championships for Track & Field News, the self-proclaimed Bible of the sport. But in 1969 he was a former Washington State triple jumper who happened to be in the Bay Area interviewing for a statistician job with the Los Altos-based magazine.

“From the vantage point of today,” Hill said of the 1969 Pac-8 race “it remains in a three-way tie with a pair of Olympic races” as the greatest footrace he has ever witnessed.

The other two?

The 2000 Olympic Games 10,000-meter final in which Ethiopia Haile Gebrselassie, the defending Olympic champion and world record holder, came from behind in the closing meters to edge Kenya’s Paul Tergat, winner of five consecutive World cross country titles, by nine-hundredths of a second for the gold medal, and the 2004 Olympic 1,500 final in which Kenya’s Bernard Lagat pulled ahead of Morocco’s world record-shattering Hicham El Guerrouj halfway down the final homestretch only to have El Guerrouj to fight back to claim by twelve-hundredths the one major title that had previously eluded him.

End of a Pac-12 traditiond

The Prefontaine-Lindgren showdown was the opening act of an unprecedented more than half-century run by the conference that comes to a close with the breakup of the Pac-12 and the final conference cross country championship Friday morning near Tacoma.

“The Conference of Champions is no more,” Meb Keflezighi, a Pac-10 and NCAA cross country champion at UCLA and the 2004 Olympic marathon silver medalist. “It’s hard to imagine.”

“The history that has been written with all those great athletes and those great teams and coaches to a certain degree will be lost because when you had the conference meet every year it brings back those memories to everybody and now that’s gone,” said longtime UCLA coach Bob Larsen. “Or will be gone.”

The 1969 race would awaken a sleeping giant who would in turn provide a wake-up call for the rest of the nation, forever changing the autumn landscape, shifting the sport’s balance of power to the Pac-8 and later the Pac-10 and Pac-12 from the East Coast and Midwest, and in the process pushing American distance running to new heights.

“That Pac-8 in ’69 opened a few eyes to ‘hey, there’s some great runners out there and let’s get them all to nationals and see who can win,’” said Don Kardong, who ran for host Stanford in the 1969 race and later finished fourth in the 1976 Olympic marathon.

And for most of the next decade, the winners wore the iconic lemon yellow with green lettering singlet of Oregon or the maroon and silver of Washington State.Conference teams and runners would dominate college cross country for the next decade and beyond.

Pac-8/Pac-10 runners won eight of the next 11 NCAA individual titles, Lindgren in his final collegiate race, winning his third national cross country title, his 11th NCAA championship overall, 10 days after his duel with Prefontaine. Prefontaine and Washington State’s Henry Rono by the end of the coming decade had also joined Lindgren as the then only three-time NCAA champions. Oregon’s Edward Cheserek became only the fourth man to claim three NCAA titles, winning the 2013, 2014 and 2015 races. Stanford’s Charlie Hick’s victory last November clinched the 22nd NCAA title by a conference runner.

Pac-12 schools have won 12 NCAA men’s team titles.

“We were able to up the ante a little bit,” Lindgren said. “You had to run better in cross country to win than you ever had to before.

“It changed everything.”

How Bill Dellinger changed the sport

But perhaps the most transformative figure in the conference’s rise to national supremacy was Oregon coach Bill Dellinger.

The recent reflection on the conference’s history has shown a fresh light on a man who for too long was cast in the shadow of his mentor, iconic Oregon coach Bill Bowerman, the co-founder of Nike.

“He had immense influence on distance running in general and highlighting cross country and making it a more high profile sport in the United States especially on the West Coast,” Larsen said of Dellinger.

“He was a game-changer,” said Pat Tyson, Prefontaine’s Oregon teammate and roommate who has built his own national caliber program at Gonzaga.Dellinger was Oregon’s first great distance runner under Bowerman. Dellinger was a three-time Olympian, claiming a bronze medal at 5,000 meters in the 1964 Olympic Games. By 1968 he had returned to his alma mater to work as an assistant to Bowerman.

Between 1954 and 1962, Oregon runners won six NCAA mile or 1,500-meter titles. But Bowerman was not motivated to chase similar success through the autumn. Oregon had never sent a team to the NCAA cross country meet until 1962, a year after Oregon State won the national individual and team titles.Oregon finished second at NCAAs in 1963 and 1964. But in 1965 the NCAA increased the race distance from 4 to 6 miles and the Ducks finished a disappointing eighth place. Oregon wouldn’t send another team to NCAAs until Dellinger took over the cross country program in 1969.

“Bill Bowerman was not a fan of cross country, going to the nationals. It was rarely something he wanted to do,” Tyson said. “He wanted to use all fall as base training for outdoor track. But now that Bill Dellinger was in command and they had Pre. … Bill Bowerman gave the leash to Bill Dellinger to go with cross more at the national level.”

Dellinger guided Oregon to NCAA titles in 1971, 1973 and 1974. In the mid-70s he raised the stakes further by recruiting nationally to counter the pipeline of older Kenyan runners at Washington State, attracting schoolboy superstars like Rudy Chapa (Indiana) and Alberto Salazar (Massachusetts) and Manhattan transfer Matt Centrowitz to Eugene.

“Dellinger realized if you’re going to stay competitive you can’t just get guys that are 4:15 (mile) guys down the road and win against world-class competition,” said Rick Riley, a Pac-8 mile champion for Washington State and teammate of Lindgren’s on the 1969 team. “The game was really changing as far as high school times getting better and better and you had to reach out and look for talent. Oregon got Salazar, Rudy Chapa, all these guys. If you were going to win, that’s what you had to do. Plus in the scheme of things Dellinger upped the ante a bit of Bowerman’s training philosophy of alternating hard, easy days.

“There were more miles and the harder was harder and the easier was harder.”

Said Tyson “There was cross country before Dellinger but Dellinger was the first guy who made it honest. If we’re going to compete then we’re going to have to recruit. You bring Rudy in, you bring in Alberto and it just exploded.”

Jaw-dropping times

With a core group of runners that won the 1977 NCAA title and finished second to UTEP teams made up of predominantly older African runners in 1978 and 1979, Dellinger put together the greatest squad of North American college runners ever. Five members of the 1977 Oregon squad made Olympic teams and that doesn’t include Chapa, an NCAA champion at 5,000 meters and the American record-holder in the 3,000, who was hampered by injury in the Olympic year of 1980. Four of the first seven U.S. men under 13 minutes, 20 seconds for 5,000 were on that 1977 Ducks team.

“It would be hard to argue anything better honestly,” Washington coach Andy Powell said of the Oregon group. “That was next level. I think that has got to be the best” North American group.

That Oregon team had to run jaw-dropping times just to keep pace with rival Washington State.

In the early 70s, WSU coach John Chaplin opened up a pipeline of Kenyan runners.

“That changed the dynamic a lot,” Riley said. “That changed the whole character of the sport. Henry Rono was from another planet. I mean he did crazy stuff.”

In the space of 80 days in 1978, Rono set world records at 3,000, 5,000 and 10,000 meters as well at the 3,000 steeplechase. The previous world record-holder at 10,000 was his teammate and countryman Samson Kimombwa, runner-up to Rono in the 1976 NCAA cross country race. Rono repeated in 1977. Salazar won the 1978 NCAA race and then finished second to Rono in 1979.

Until 1983 the conference held Pac-12 Northern Division and Southern Division races two weeks before the league meet.

“Just to be good at the Northern Division meet you had to be world class,” Chapa said. “If you wanted to finish in the top four, top five, you had to beat a couple of world record holders.

“My position always was and it was Alberto’s position also was that (the Kenyans) made us better. You could not be a top three finisher in the the Northern Division cross country or the Pac-8 or Pac-10 meet unless you were world class. So they actually hastened our development to the point where by the time we were sophomores or juniors we were considered world class. The competition required that you had to be that good. And so I looked at it as a real benefit.”

But the optics of Oregon’s homegrown North American squad versus Washington State’s older, already established runners further fueled the sport’s most intense rivalry.

Chapa and Salazar made their college debuts against Rono in the 1976 Pac-8 Northern Division race at Seattle’s Green Lake.

“I remember that race very well. That was my first college race and we had all heard about Washington State and the Kenyans,” Chapa said. “First college cross country event ever and at the start of the race (Oregon’s) Terry Williams and Josh Kimeto (a two-time NCAA 5,000 champion for Washington State) got into it and they actually started fighting and the race started.

“That’s what I remember the most. It took already what was a tense situation being the first race and I knew I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. This was big time, this was not an Indiana high school cross country meet.

“Terry had certain issues … they were international athletes. Terry was a very vocal kind of guy and Kimeto took offense to it. And literally started pushing each other at the starting line.”

It wasn’t until Larsen’s UCLA squad won the 1980 Pac-10 race led by individual winner Ron Cornell that the individual or team conference champion didn’t come from Oregon or Washington State.

“It was a golden age, it truly was,” Riley said.

There would be other golden teams.

UCLA head track coach Jim Bush was so upset with the Bruins fifth-place finish in the 1969 Pac-8 meet that he vowed to never recruit another distance runner.

Over time Bush reconsidered but only slightly. Larsen and UCLA defended their conference title with just two scholarships.

Stanford All-American Greg Brock recalled a discussion he had with teammate Brook Thomas after the inaugural Pac-8 meet.

“Stanford could be really good in cross country,” Brock recalled Thomas saying. “And it took a guy from the East Coast to figure that out.”

Vin Lannana, a graduate of C.W. Post, coached Stanford to NCAA men’s titles in 1996, 2002 and 2003. Lannana and Powell, a middle distance standout at Stanford, guided Oregon to national titles in 2007 and 2008, the latter team featuring two-time Olympic medalist Galen Rupp and future Olympic 1,500 champion Matthew Centrowitz.Colorado won national titles in 2013 and 2014. In the 2014 race, Oregon’s Cheserek and Eric Jenkins went 1-2 and six of the top nine finishers were from the Pac-12.

“When you’ve got six of the top nine,” Powell said. “When you have a good school like Stanford, and Oregon and Colorado that was as dominating as it gets.”

The greatest cross country race

Prefontaine remains the most dominant distance runner in American history. He was the first athlete to win four NCAA outdoor track titles in the same event (3 mile/5,000). At the time of his death in May 1975, killed in a car accident, he held all seven American records at distances between 2,000 and 10,000 meters.

Nearly a half-century after his death, Prefontaine is still perhaps American track’s most transcendent superstar, the subject of two Hollywood feature films and countless marketing campaigns by Nike, the Oregon company he made world famous.

The 1969 Pac-8 race signaled Prefontaine’s arrival.

“It was the transition from when Lindgren was dominant as the best distance runner in the country and then Pre was taking over and they ended up essentially tying after battling each other all the way through,” Kardong said. “It was quite a spectacular race, an amazing battle between the two superstars.”

Lindgren was an unlikely superstar.

He was small with a squeaky voice, no match for his distant, sometimes violent father Myrl.

“My father rejected me because I was weak,” Lindgren later told Sports Illustrated’s Kenny Moore, a college rival at Oregon. “He was the tough drinker. I couldn’t be his son.”

The problem was that Lindgren grew to view himself the same way his father did.

“I never did have the confidence in myself,” Lindgren said in a Runner’s World interview. “I would always look at myself in the mirror, I would see that same wimpy kid that I hated as a child.”

So Lindgren ran, trying to put as much distance as he could be between his father, the broken home, the wimpy kid in the mirror.

“Running was the escape,” Riley said. “That’s what filled the hole in Gerry.

“Running was the vehicle for his self esteem and his escape from a terrible home life.”

He would claim to run as much as 50 miles in a day, 200 miles a week.

Or was it 300?

“He was just such an interesting guy,” said Kardong, who moved to Spokane after graduating from Stanford . “It was hard to tell when he was being serious and when he was just kind of clowning around because he had that antic way of approaching life. So he would tell stories that couldn’t possibly be true. Or he would tell you he had done things, ‘Well, you didn’t do that Gerry.’ It was just hard to figure him out. And yet he was such a spectacular runner.

“(People would say) ‘Oh, yeah, used to see him run by three times a day.’ It might have been true. It was a lot. More than anybody else was doing. If Gerry told you he ran X number of miles, I wouldn’t believe him.”

No matter how far, how fast he ran Lindgren could not shake his demons.

He spent 10 days in jail in Pierce County, Washington in 1978 for failing to pay child support after losing a 1976 paternity suit filed in Ventura County. In 1980 he vanished, leaving behind a wife, three young children, and a financially troubled running store in Tacoma. He remained under the radar until Moore tracked him down in Hawaii in 1987.

“His friends would basically say Gerry was damaged goods,” Riley said. “But there was never a kinder, more generous guy in the world for someone who had so little.

“I roomed with him my freshman year, I hardly ever saw him. He was very much a loner. A very different personality. I always said his problems later in life you had to separate his running from his personal life. “

Lindgren first emerged on the national scene just days before Christmas 1963. Competing against an all-star high school field In an indoor meet at the Cow Palace near San Francisco, Lindgren, a 17-year-old senior at Spokane’s John Rogers High School, shattered the national prep indoor 2-mile record by 21.9 seconds, clocking in at 9 minutes, 00.0 seconds and lapping the entire seven-runner field during 22-lap race including future world mile and 1,500-meter record holder Jim Ryun, who finished 22 seconds behind Lindgren.

A few weeks later Lindgren was back at the Cow Palace to take on Australia’s Ron Clarke, a world record-holder at multiple distances, in an open race.

“He was so little he couldn’t have looked more than 13 years old,” Clarke said later.

But the kid, all 5-feet-6, 118 pounds, was already world class, pushing Clarke all the way to the finish before finishing second but lowering his own indoor national high school record to 8:40.0, a record that stood stand for 49 years until Cheserek, running for New Jersey’s St. Benedict Prep, was clocked in 8:39.15.

That summer Lindgren set a national high school record at 5,000 meters (13:44.0) that stood for 40 years until finally broken by Rupp (13:37.91), then stunned a crowd of 50,519 including U.S. attorney general Robert F. Kennedy at the Coliseum by winning the 10,000 in the U.S.-Soviet Union by nearly a 150 meters in 93-degree heat. It was the first time an American had won the event in the U.S.-Soviet series. Kennedy, it was reported, was moved to tears by Lindgren’s victory.

“I still think it’s too bad that they didn’t do a big documentary or a movie of Lindgren’s coming up through high school and winning the Russia-America meet,” Kardog said. “Because that was an unbelievable performance. Just totally out of the blue. It was one of those things that kind of ignited the distance running scene in the United States.”

Lindgren went on to win the Olympic Trials 10,000 on that same Coliseum track.

“He knocked the world on its ear with his indoor times and then when he beat the Russians,” Riley said. “And then there was a thought that he might pick up a medal or even win the Olympics” in Tokyo later that year.

Instead, battling illness and a sprained ankle, Lindgren finished ninth in an Olympic 10,000 won by another American, unknown Billy Mills, in one of the biggest upsets in the Games’ history.

“When I was in high school, I wanted to go to Oregon and everybody wanted to go to Oregon,” Lindgren said. “But Bowerman wanted nothing to do with me.”

Bowerman and Washington State coach Jack Mooberry were good friends.

“And there was pretty much a gentlemen’s agreement between Jack Mooberry and Bill Bowerman that they kind of left each other’s guys alone (in recruiting),” Riley said.

So Lindgren headed 75 miles south on U.S.-195 to Pullman and Washington State. Freshmen were ineligible to compete in college competition under NCAA rules at the time. But the NCAA, engaged in a turf war at the time with the Amateur Athletic Union, then track’s national governing body, also prohibited college athletes from competing in the U.S. Championships. Lindgren, ignoring an NCAA vow to strip him of his college eligibility and dozens of death threats, defied the ban. He lost to Mills in the 1965 U.S. Championships 6-mile by a margin so small that both men were credited with the world record (27:11.6).

A year later he just missed breaking Clarke’s 3-mile world record, running 12:53.0 in the wind and rain on a muddy track in a nearly empty Husky Stadium in Seattle. His 11 NCAA titles were the most ever by a track and cross country athlete, eclipsing Jesse Owens’ eight national crowns, the previous record. He won the 1966 and 1967 NCAA cross country titles and then redshirted during the 1968 season to focus on the Olympic Trials that fall.

“I don’t think people appreciated the world-class running that Gerry did,” Riley said. “I don’t think people appreciate, A) he won 11 NCAA titles. The only one he lost was when Ryun outkicked him indoors (in the NCAA Championships 2-mile). He could not run as a freshman. There’s another three (NCAA titles) at least. The 12:53 was unbelievable, he just missed the world record, running in the vast empty, windy, crappy track at Washington. He just was the guy who did not have the personality that engaged people like Steve Prefontaine.

“He did not engage the public or excite the public like Pre.”

There was a buzz surrounding Prefontaine even before he landed on the Oregon campus in the fall of 1969.

Stanford’s Brock recalled cooling down with Oregon runners after beating them in the 3-mile in a 1968 dual meet in Palo Alto .

“All the Oregon guys could talk about was this kid Prefontaine,” Brock said.

Two Oregon runners, Arne Kvalheim and Roscoe Divine, joined Dellinger on a recruiting trip to Prefontaine’s hometown of Coos Bay on the Oregon Coast. Kvalheim had just set the collegiate 2-mile record. Divine was a world-class miler. But on a run on the beach, Prefontaine charged ahead of the two Ducks stars.

“Am I going too fast for you?” Prefontaine asked looking back at the pair. “I’ll slow the pace down. Can you keep up with me?”

Riley encountered that same confidence when he called Prefontaine in the spring of 1969 to make a recruiting pitch for Washington State. Three years earlier, Riley, running for Spokane’s Ferris High School, set the national high school outdoor 2-mile record (8:48.4).

“He was a little full of himself,” Riley said recalling the phone conversation. “Very confident, very confident and I appreciated that. He didn’t mince any words about what his goals were and what he wanted to do and what he thought he could do.”

Before hanging up, Prefontaine told Riley “I’m going to break your national high school record.”

“I remember thinking this kid is a confident kid, man,” Riley continued. “But most of the time he could deliver.”

True to his word, Prefontaine ran 8:41.5 in April 1969 to break Riley’s record. That July Prefontaine raced Lindgren in a 2-mile race in Honolulu, the WSU star winning 8:45.6 to 8:48.8.

They would meet four months later in Prefontaine’s collegiate debut at the Pac-8 Northern Division Championships in Corvallis.

The rain-drenched, leaf-covered 6-mile course at Avery Park was a soggy, sloppy mess. The course had several stretches of pavement so WSU coach Mooberry instructed his runners to wear racing flats. Prefontaine wore adidas spikes.

“Pre was a teenager, 18 years old still but fearless,” Tyson said. “Total 100 percent confidence, but total respect. I wouldn’t say Pre worshipped Lindgren but massively respected him.”

The Oregon freshman led early only to have Lindgren build a 60-meter lead in the second and third miles. But then the course hit a treacherous stretch and with Lindgren, already nursing a sore ankle, slipping and sliding, Prefontaine pulled away for a 29:13.8 to 29:41 victory.

Two weeks later they met again at the Pac-8 meet at Stanford.

“Lindgren wouldn’t say much,” Riley said referring to the Northern Division race. “He wouldn’t say I’m going to kick Pre’s ass next time. He just withdrew into himself. He did not like to lose. He was not demonstrative when he won. He’s a pretty humble guy. But you knew with Gerry that week, if Pre was going to beat him this time it was going to be a bloodletting. It was going to be one hell of a race, because Lindgren was that kind of guy.

“He didn’t exude confidence like Pre. He didn’t talk about himself like Pre, but you knew that during the week, you knew that he pushed his foot a little harder on the acceleration during training. He pushed the pace a little bit more. We ran our harder stuff a little harder. You basically knew as his teammate that he was going to go after it.

“You knew something special was coming.”

Prefontaine and Lindgren covered the first mile in 4:23 reducing the rest of the field to spectators.

“Just crazy pace,” said Kardong, who finished 14th that day. “Each of them was trying to put the other one away right from the gun.”

Riley, Brock and Oregon’s Steve Savage, later a 1972 Olympian in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, led the rest of the field.

“I was in the chase pack at 4:29,” Brock said. “My fastest ever through the mile on that course was 4:40. I thought, ‘Oh, boy, I just have to hang in for dear life.’”

As Lindgren started up the first hill he thought he had dropped Prefontaine.

But “all of a sudden I got up to that hill and I wasn’t ahead of everybody and that was something new to me,” Lindgren said. “That was something new to me. I was out of my element.

“So I had to hustle up to the top of the hill and then back down again and I got ahead of Pre and Pre’s fighting me off and I’m thinking my goodness this has never happened to me in cross country.

“And he kept me out of my element the whole race. Not once would he let me go. The whole race we were neck and neck. I’d go by him and try to get a little bit of a lead and he just wouldn’t let me have it.”

At one point the course took a U-turn.

“And you could glance across and see Lindgren and Prefontaine and it was epic,” Brock recalled. “They were shoulder to shoulder. They were so close together they bounced off each other a few times. You knew you were watching greatness.”

On they attacked.

“He kept me out of my element the whole race,” Lindgren said. “Not once would he let me go. And I sprinted several times as hard as I could go just to get away from him and boy did he fight back. The most I ever got away was three steps.”

Said Riley, “Lindgren and Pre were out front just hammering on each other.”

At the top of a final hill, Prefontaine led.

“Went up that last hill, he was a good step ahead of me and I thought it’s all over because he’ll just take off and then he didn’t,” Lindgren said. “He was tired. I was tired.”

Said Riley “when you got into a race and the chips were down, I would always bet on Lindgren. I don’t care who he was running against, I’d bet on Lindgren.”

So they battled on into the final 400 meters, through a gauntlet of screaming fans, neither giving an inch. In the closing meters they collided, their shoulders and elbows crashing into each other.

“My indelible memory is of the two of them in lockstep coming down the long finishing straight at the Stanford golf course,” Hill said. “And them leaning into each other in the closing strides.”

They crossed the finish line leaning into each, still inseparable, forever bonded together by a race for the ages. After a delay that seemed almost as long as the race, officials finally awarded Lindgren the victory. They were given the same time, 28:32.4 which shattered the course record by 74 seconds. Oregon’s Savage outkicked Riley for third (28:58.4 to 29:02.0) with Brock fifth (29:08.0).

“He was strong, using his arms to push me into the crowd on the left side,” Lindgren said. “Because he was using his strength that way instead of going toward the finish line I was able to get my nose to the finish line just before his did.

“It was that close.

“It was my toughest cross country race for sure. It was a real wake-up for me. Because I had never been challenged when I was feeling good and all of sudden this little guy is challenging me.”

Lindgren would go on to win his third NCAA cross country title at New York’s Van Cortlandt Park.

“I was scared, really scared,” Lindgren later told Prefontaine biographer Tom Jordan. “So I wanted to lead the whole way.”

Prefontaine, still feeling the effects of the Pac-8 race, was third. He would never lose a cross country race again.

He took the 1970 NCAA race and thought he had led the Ducks to their first team title as well. “We had the (first place) trophy with us on the plane home,” Tyson said. But after a protest, a controversial review of the finish resulted in Villanova being awarded a belated victory.

Prefontaine repeated in 1971 in a race he almost didn’t run. After Oregon finished second to WSU in the Pac-8 race Ducks athletic director Norv Ritchey decided to only send Prefontaine not the team to the NCAA meet in Knoxville.”Pre said if the team isn’t going, I’m not going,” Tyson recalled.

Ritchey gave in and Oregon won its first national title.

Bowerman, still dismissive of cross country, didn’t make the trip to Tennessee. A week after their victory the university took a photo of the national champions.

“It wasn’t a big deal and then we started winning trophies and it was a big deal,” Tyson said. “Bowerman actually popped in the photo of the NCAA championship team.”

Retired Olympic gold medal-winning gymnast Mary Lou Retton experienced a “scary setback” in her fight against a rare form of pneumonia this week, after showing remarkable progress towards recovery just days ago, her daughter said Wednesday night.

Retton is still in the intensive care unit and is “really exhausted” after the setback, her daughter Shayla Kelley Schrepfer said in a video posted to Instagram.

“At the beginning of this week, we were going on the up and up. We were so excited, seeing so much progress, and then yesterday we had a pretty scary setback,” Schrepfer said. “She is still in ICU, and we’re just working through some things as far as her setback goes.”

This month, Retton’s family announced the 55-year-old had a rare form of pneumonia that left her fighting for her life. Her daughter McKenna Kelley started an online fundraiser on behalf of Retton’s four daughters to help support the medical costs, noting that Retton is uninsured.

Earlier in the week, Schrepfer said that although 55-year-old Retton still needed intensive care, her breathing was becoming stronger, and she no longer had to rely so heavily on machines.

“Mom’s progress is truly remarkable!” Schrepfer wrote. “Prayers have been felt and have been answered.”

Pneumonia is a respiratory infection that can cause the lungs to fill with fluid, with symptoms that can range from mild to life threatening. Adults older than 65, children younger than 5 and those with other medical conditions are most at risk. The family did not specify the type of rare pneumonia her mother is diagnosed with.

“We hope that you guys will respect her boundaries, as we want to keep the details between her and our family right now,” Schrepfer said in an earlier Instagram post.

Retton won five medals during the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles – more than any other athlete at those games – making her a household name.

She was the first US woman to earn an Olympic gold in the individual all-around event and was inducted into the International Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1997.

McKenna Kelley, one of Retton’s four daughters, posted an update on Instagram Saturday that said the 55-year-old Retton’s breathing is becoming stronger and her “path to recovery is steadily progressing.”

“Though it’s a lengthy journey, witnessing these improvements is incredibly heartening,” Kelley wrote. “She’s beginning to respond to treatments.”

The family disclosed earlier this week that Retton — who became the first American female gymnast to win the Olympic all-around title at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics — was “fighting for her life” and unable to breath on her own after being diagnosed with pneumonia.

Donations have poured into a fundraiser the family set up to help offset Retton’s medical expenses after the family said she didn’t have medical insurance. There’s been more than 7,500 donations totaling over $415,000 by Saturday afternoon.

Retton was 16 when she became an icon of the U.S. Olympic movement during her gold medal-winning performance at the 1984 Summer Games. The native of Fairmont, West Virginia, also won two silver and two bronze medals at those Olympics to help bring gymnastics — a sport long dominated by eastern European powers like Romania and the Soviet Union — into the mainstream in the U.S.

Flag football is officially one of five new sports added to the Olympic program for the 2028 Summer Games in Los Angeles.

On Monday in Mumbai at the 141st International Olympic Committee (IOC) session, it was announced that flag football, baseball/softball, cricket, lacrosse and squash would be included at the Games.

It will be the first time that flag football and squash will be in an Olympic Games.

Cricket was included in the Paris Olympics in 1900, while lacrosse was included at St. Louis 1904 and London 1908. Baseball and softball have been in several Olympics, most recently in 2021 for the Tokyo 2020 Games.

“The choice of these five new sports is in line with the American sports culture and will showcase iconic American sports to the world, while bringing international sports to the United States. These sports will make the Olympic Games LA28 unique,” IOC president Thomas Bach said in a statement.

“Their inclusion will allow the Olympic Movement to engage with new athlete and fan communities in the US and globally.”

THE OLYMPIC PROCESS: Flag football set to be included at Los Angeles Olympics in 2028

The IOC explained that the process to decide upon the addition of the five sports took a plethora of different criteria, including looking at how popular the sport is in both the US and globally.

Flag football, baseball, softball and lacrosse are sports which are traditionally popular in the US.

Lacrosse will be competed in the ‘sixes’ format of the game – a fast-paced, compact version of the sport at the intersection of field and box lacrosse. According to World Lacrosse: “It offers an inclusionary opportunity to all lacrosse athletes and an easier entry point for new players, and is characterized by an accelerated, open style of play with quick transitions and non-stop, high-scoring action.”

It added: “Developed in 2018, sixes has advanced global growth, increased accessibility and approachability, created greater competitive balance, and reduced cost and complexity of participation and event staging. It is the next generation version of the game.”

Cricket, while a popular sport around the globe, has had little interest in the US until earlier this year when the inaugural season of Major League Cricket – a competition focused on the shorter format of the game – took place.

“I have long believed that we have an incredible opportunity in Los Angeles to create the most compelling Games, not just for us, but for the world. Our Olympic sport program, in its entirety, reflects this belief,” the chairperson of the 2028 Games’ organizing committee, Casey Wasserman, said.

“We are excited to embark on game-changing collaborations with major professional leagues that will unlock massive opportunities to amplify the Olympic and Paralympic story and captivate new audiences.”

Because of this lack of health insurance, the oldest of Retton’s four daughters said the family had to start a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the hospital bill. As of Wednesday night, the Spotfund campaign for Retton, a star gold medalist at the 1984 Olympics, had blown well past its original goal of $50,000, exceeding $330,000 and growing.

“My amazing mom, Mary Lou, has a very rare form of pneumonia and is fighting for her life,” Retton’s daughter McKenna Kelley wrote on Spotfund. Kelley also said her mother is not able to breathe on her own and had been in the ICU for more than a week.

“Out of respect for her and her privacy, I will not disclose all details,” Kelley said. “However, I will disclose that she not insured.”

Among people on social media, the idea that Retton’s family needs to ask strangers to pay for what’s expected to be an enormous hospital bill has incited a range of questions and reactions. At the top of the list: Why doesn’t Retton have health insurance? And, what kind of country is the United States if even a legendary sports figure like Retton can’t pay for an emergency hospital stay?

Thus far, Retton’s daughters are not providing many details “out of respect for her and her privacy.” The New York Times reported that Kelley, who was a gymnast at Louisiana State University, did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment on Tuesday. In an update Wednesday, Kelley wrote on Instagram that her mother remains in the intensive care unit, “continues to fight” and is “getting incredible medical care!”

With a dearth of information, the internet has been left to speculate on whether Retton, 55, chose to forego health insurance, or if she somehow lost coverage or wasn’t able to obtain coverage. People online also noted she had recently been living in a Houston mansion, citing a May 2022 report that she was selling her “luxury” 9,000-square-foot Houston home, which boasted six bedrooms, six bathrooms and a swimming pool.

In a thread on X, Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist with a large social media following, agreed that the situation “doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m not sure if she’s still wealthy. Something must have happened. Or else they wouldn’t be crowdfunding for her medical bills,” Feigl-Ding said. He agreed with many others in saying, “It’s sad a former Olympic champion who is famous like this now has to beg and crowdfund for medical care. I’m not sure if she is still a millionaire like some claim — people’s situations can quickly change.”

Since Kelley started the Spotfund campaign, nearly 6,000 people have donated varying amounts of money, from $10 to $50,000. Spotfund allows people to provide text messages along with their donations, and the site shows there has been an outpouring of support for Retton, with words of encouragement from thousands.

Forbes reported that crowdfunding for medical expenses has become a common occurrence in the 2020s, with many people turning to websites like GoFundMe and Spotfund to seek help in covering the costs of medical emergencies or even basic care.

A 2022 Kaiser Family Foundation study shows that roughly 10.2% of Americans under the age of 65 don’t have health insurance. The study said that the number of uninsured in the United States actually decreased by about 1.5 million people from 2019 to 2021, mainly due to policies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic. The policies were designed to help low-income people gain and maintain coverage during the pandemic, and they included enhanced subsidies in the marketplace and the requirement that states maintain continuous enrollment for people on Medicaid, which provides insurance to low-income people.

Most of America’s uninsured are people in low-income families in which at least one family member is working, the study said. Generally, people of color are at higher risk of being uninsured. Some 64 percent of adults surveyed said they don’t get insurance because the cost of coverage is too high, even with policy efforts to make coverage more affordable.

Whatever is going on with Retton’s health insurance, she definitely has many pulling for her. In 1984, she became “America’s newest darling” by winning five medals at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, including a gold that made her the first American to win an Olympic individual all-round event, the Washington Post reported.

Her victories landed her a spot on the Wheaties cereal box and raised the popularity of gymnastics — a sport once dominated by Eastern Europeans — in the United States. She also campaigned for Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984, served as an adviser to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness during the George H.W. Bush administration and delivered the Pledge of Allegiance with fellow former gymnast and 1996 Olympic gold medalist Kerri Strug on the second night of the 2004 Republican National Convention.

Retton also has appeared on “Dancing With the Stars,” a Dairy Queen commercial and an advertisement for Colonial Penn Life Insurance Company, which the company uploaded to YouTube last week, the Washington Post said.

Sasha Farber, her partner on “Dancing With the Stars” in 2018, offered an update on Retton’s condition after Tuesday’s episode, telling Entertainment Tonight: “She’s fighting.” Farber also said he had been able to talk to her. “She kind of wants to give up, but I’m sending her videos of her dancing and I’m telling her, ‘There’s only one Mary Lou Retton. You’ve got this!’”

Just before Retton was eliminated from “Dancing With the Stars,” she revealed that she had split from Shannon Kelley, her husband of 27 years. The retired gymnast said the divorce had occurred months earlier. Kelley is a former football quarterback turned college coach, who last worked as an assistant coach at Houston Christian University.

But as much as many people have been honoring Retton and fondly remembering her at the 1984 Olympics, her “America’s sweetheart” reputation isn’t universally observed. Some gymnastics fans point out that there’s an asterisk by her victory in the history books, given that the Soviet Union, then the most dominant force in women’s gymnastics, boycotted the Los Angeles games, as the New York Times reported.

More recently, Retton angered many in the women’s gymnastics community when she worked to counter a congressional bill, introduced by the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, which was designed to protect young athletes from sexual predators, according to The Medal Count blog, which covers women’s gymnastics.

Feinstein introduced the bill after Larry Nassar, the longtime team doctor for the U.S. women’s gymnastics team, was charged in 2016 with sexually assaulting at least 265 young women and girls under the guise of medical treatment. His victims included a number of high-profile female gymnasts.

A year later, Retton joined officials from USA Gymnastics to unsuccessfully lobby Feinstein against passing the bill, also known as the Safe Sport Act, which would make it mandatory for national governing bodies of Olympics sports, such as USA Gymnastics, to report sexual assault to the police, the New York Times reported in 2017. Retton, “the smiling, bubbly sweetheart from the 1984 Games,” was brought along for PR purposes, the New York Times said, to let Feinstein know that the federation’s policies were solid and that gymnastics “was a happy, safe place.” Through bipartisan support, the bill eventually became law, signed by Donald Trump in 2018.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport said it will investigate allegations by multiple parents that Colden Raisher, 35, has engaged in one-on-one texting with minor-aged girls he coaches at The Klub Gymnastics, a club in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake area, in violation of the U.S. Center for SafeSport and USA Gymnastics policies, according to SafeSport, USA Gymnastics and club documents.

SafeSport’s decision to investigate Raisher comes after USA Gymnastics referred the case to the Center last month citing the nature of the allegations, according to SafeSport and USA Gymnastics emails.

U.S. Center for SafeSport officials declined parents’ request to implement restrictions that would have prevented Raisher from having unsupervised contact with minor-aged athletes in the gym and elsewhere.

Raisher, director of the club’s girls competition team, was placed on paid leave by The Klub Gymnastics on Thursday pending the results of the gym’s own investigation into the allegations against him, club owner Mike Eschenbrenner told parents in an email.

“We are moving the case forward to our investigation’s (SIC) unit,” Jennifer Smith, U.S. Center for SafeSport intake coordinator, said in a recent email to a Klub parent. “A decision was made to NOT implement any temporary measure at this time, to include a no contact directive.

“For this reason, Mr. Raisher will not be notified at this time that we are investigating him, what the allegations are or who is talking with the Center. If he has heard there’s an investigation and reaches out, other than being told there is an open case, he will not be given any information at this time. Meaning, while the case proceeds, he will not be told right now that you and your daughter have anything to do with it.”

A USA Gymnastics investigator also confirmed in an email to another Klub parent that SafeSport has taken over the Raisher case.

“Due to the nature of the allegations, this matter was referred to the U.S. Center for SafeSport (the Center), an independent non-profit organization with exclusive jurisdiction over allegations of sexual misconduct, including child sexual abuse, as well as the authority to have discretionary jurisdiction over any alleged violations of the SafeSport Code for the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Movement,” April Clark, a USA Gymnastics investigator, wrote to the parent.

In addition to being a method to engage inappropriate conversations and transmit sexually explicit images, texting and other electronic communication are widely regarded as a way for predatory coaches or officials to groom young athletes for inappropriate relationships and contact.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport and USA Gymnastics have “prevention policies” stating that all one-on-one electronic communications between adult participants and minor athletes must be open and transparent and include another adult participant, whether it be another adult coach or parent or participant. Those communications include texts, emails, phone or video calls, social media, direct messaging and gaming platforms.

The Klub Gymnastics has a similar policy, Eschenbrenner wrote in the email to parents.

“One or more of our kids have been engaging in one-on-one text messaging with other their coach(es),” Eschenbrenner said in the email. “One-on-one text messaging is when your child/gymnast has a texting/DM conversation without at least one parent or adult coach on the text chain. Let me be clear, this is a violation of SafeSport policies and a violation of our TKB Team Policies.”

It is not clear whether Eschenbrenner or Klub employees were aware of the U.S. Center for SafeSport’s decision to investigate Raisher.

Raisher and Eschenbrenner did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

“I have not had the opportunity to review any possible text messages as of yet,” Russell Prince, an attorney for Raisher, wrote in an email to SCNG on this week. “However, it’s my understanding that the club requires the team coaches to provide their personal cell numbers to the families through the Team Handbook. It’s important to remember that if text messages do exist, they may not violate the one-on-one communication policy – and I am certain if any messages do exist they are not ‘grooming’ in nature. Certainly, I would expect that if inappropriate messages did exist the person who contacted you with their complaint would have provided them to you to elevate the nature of your reporting on it. If there are indeed text message exchanges between the family, athlete, and coach, they will be produced for review by either USA Gymnastics or the U.S. Center for SafeSport.

“It’s coach Raisher’s understanding that a complaint has been filed, but it remains unclear where that complaint was filed. We have reached out to the USAG and the Center to seek their assistance in determining who has jurisdiction of the matter and what investigator will be assigned to review any formal documentation related to the complaint. Finally, those text messages are confidential under federal statute and the release of the text messages publicly would likely be a proactive violation of the Code at the Center. It’s unfortunate coach Raisher can’t produce any potential messages outside of the formal investigation. It’s fundamentally unfair for the rules that govern sport to allow complainants the latitude to do as they wish in circumstances such as these, but disallows a coach the ability to publicly disseminate any exculpatory evidence that exists. In this case, that would likely be the text messages themselves.”

USA Gymnastics first received complaints from Klub Gymnastics parents about Raisher over the summer, according to USA Gymnastics documents.

A U.S. Center for SafeSport investigator has not been assigned to the Raisher case at this point, according to a SafeSport document. Such an assignment might not be made for up to 12 weeks, Smith wrote in an email to parents.

Raisher was suspended by USA Gymnastics in 2018 while he was being investigated by the national governing body for alleged inappropriate behavior. Under terms of the 2018 suspensions, Raisher was allowed to continue to coach but was prohibited from having any “unsupervised contact with minors.”

The Klub Gymnastics employees said at the time they were unaware of Raisher’s suspension or the allegations against him until they were questioned by SCNG about the investigation and sanction.

Raisher, in a brief interview with SCNG at the time, said he didn’t have time to go into the specifics of the allegations against him. The USA Gymnastics by-law his suspension is based on stated that his “continued participation could be detrimental to the sport or its reputation.”

“There was no physical or sexual abuse,” Raisher said. “I’ve never done anything questionable. I’m one of the good guys in the sport. USA Gymnastics is trying to cast a very wide net. They’re trying to catch a lot of bad guys. I agree with that. But now anybody can report anything.”

He said in 2018 that the allegations were made by officials at another gym. He previously worked at Golden State Gymnastics in Burbank.

“This has nothing to do with Safe Sport or anything sexual,” Raisher said. “I changed gyms a couple of months ago and they’re retaliating against me.”

Golden State said in a statement in 2018 that it “has not made any complaints against Colden Raisher.”

Raisher said in 2018 he would be willing to talk about his case and explain why he was innocent of the allegations when he had more time, but did not respond to subsequent requests from SCNG to do so.

A USA Gymnastics hearing panel in November 2018 chose not to extend Raisher’s suspension. “After four days of testimony, released a formal decision finding there was no reasonable cause to withhold or encumber Mr. Raisher’s professional membership,” Prince said in an email. “Mr. Raisher was asked to complete additional education regarding coaching techniques that USAG had just begun to use. The requirement was timely completed.

“That document is confidential under the rules.”

Raisher regularly posts coaching technique videos on YouTube that show him working with gymnasts.

“This is a very tough decision and one that we did not take lightly,” Eschenbrenner wrote in the email to parents last week. “There have been enough accusations that we feel this is the best and only direction to go in until we get more clarity.

“To be clear, Colden is innocent until proven guilty and yet I know it looks otherwise since he is on leave. For that reason, I am also asking for you to share your support for his return. You can do that by clearly communicating what you know of your daughter’s own one-on-one text messages especially if you find no issue.”

First, Taylor Swift. Next, the Olympics.

The NFL’s ongoing push for worldwide exposure got another boost Monday when organizers for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics delivered a proposal to put flag football on the program when the Summer Games return to the United States for the first time in 32 years.

The International Olympic Committee will vote on the proposal at meetings in Mumbai, India, that begin later this week. Also on the L.A. proposal were baseball and softball, which have been bouncing on and off the program for decades; lacrosse; squash; and cricket – a fitting contrast to flag football in that it is virtually unknown in the United States but immensely popular over wide swaths of the globe.

L.A. chairman Casey Wasserman said the new sports are “relevant, innovative and community-based, played in backyards, schoolyards, community centers, stadiums and parks across the U.S. and the globe.”

Though participation numbers have been declining, there is no bigger spectator sport in the U.S. than football. Bringing its less-violent cousin into the Olympics would mark a huge victory for the NFL, which has been staging a handful of games in Europe for more than a decade now and is always looking for ways to grow both its participation and its audience beyond western Europe and the U.S. One of this season’s biggest stories – one the NFL eagerly latched onto – has been pop megastar Swift’s trips to two Chiefs games to watch her friend, tight end Travis Kelce.

“The NFL is such a uniquely American sport and this is their big, global try,” said Dan Durbin, the director of the Institute of Sports, Media and Society at USC. “The NFL dominates in the U.S. You get 10 miles into the Atlantic or Pacific and it disappears. This gives it a chance to make it visible to a global audience.”

Flag football, in which “tackles” are made by pulling a flag off a belt worn by each player, would be a 5-on-5 affair played on a 50-yard field. There aren’t offensive and defensive linemen. At the World Games last year, the U.S. men won the gold medal while the women fell to Mexico in the final.

While flag football will feel familiar to the home fans, cricket will be a steep learning curve. It is almost a complete mystery in the United States. Bringing a sport with no roots in America onto the program could be viewed as a sweetener for places where it is popular, such as Australia, which is hosting the Olympics in Brisbane in 2032, and maybe even India, which is viewed as a potential host of the games in the future. A game called Twenty20 – a shorter version of the original game – is proposed for the schedule in Los Angeles. Cricket was played once before at the Olympics – in Paris in 1900.

“It’s a sense of diplomacy in that getting cricket in there makes it look like you’re getting a broader spectrum of sports,” Durbin said.

Not included in the L.A. program is breakdancing, which will be a one-and-done after its debut in Paris next year. Others not making the cut: motorsports, kickboxing and karate.

Unclear is whether other sports will have to trim the number of disciplines to help the IOC adhere to the limit it set of 10,500 athletes at a Summer Olympics. The addition of five team sports will inflate the number of participants.

How a new version of football will be received five years from now in an already crowded 17-day sports schedule is anybody’s guess. The Olympics, like the NFL, have been working hard to entice a younger audience. In recent years, the IOC has added skateboarding, climbing and 3-on-3 basketball to its schedule. Flag football fits into that mold, said Bettina Cornwell, a sports business expert at the University of Oregon who also believes getting the less-violent version of football into the games could be a winning move for the league.

“There are going to be hardcore NFL gridiron consumers who are not going to accept it,” she said. “But you have to recognize the fact that the danger of gridiron play is a talking point. It’s not popular. If there’s a play that could change things, this is it. Give them kudos for trying.”

ANTWERP, Belgium — Not even a slight stumble near the end could stop Simone Biles. Less than three months after returning to competition, the American superstar is back at the top of world gymnastics once again.

Biles overcame a late blip in her floor routine after an otherwise dominant performance to win the individual all-around title at the world championships for the sixth time on Friday. That made her the most decorated gymnast in history, two years after she put her career on hold to focus on her mental health following the Tokyo Olympics.

Even for someone who has now stood atop that world championship podium 21 times, that was enough to draw some tears during the medal ceremony in Antwerp – the Belgian city where Biles started her collection of titles a decade ago as a 16-year-old.

“You guys are actually never going to believe me, but I’ve had something in my eye for like four hours today that I could not get out,” Biles said. “So whenever I was staring at the podium, if I look up, it really hits my eye.”

Biles then acknowledged she was moved.

“Because 10 years ago, I won my first worlds. Now we’re back here. So it was emotional,” she said. “It means everything to me, the fight, everything that I’ve put in to get back to this place, feel comfortable and confident enough to compete.”

Biles scored 58.399 points across the balance beam, floor, vault and uneven bars to beat Rebeca Andrade, the Brazilian defending champion, by 1.633 points. Biles’ U.S. teammate Shilese Jones took the bronze medal with 56.332 points.

It was Biles’ 27th world championship medal – and 21st gold. It came two days after the four-time Olympic gold medalist led the U.S women to a record seventh consecutive win in the team event.

And it came after a two-year break following her appearance in the pandemic-delayed Tokyo Olympics, which was plagued by a bout with a mental block known as “ the twisties.” She was expected to repeat as the individual all-around champion in Tokyo but removed herself from the competition to focus on her mental well-being.

She said the therapy sessions and the breathing and visualization exercises she has been doing on a regular basis since have helped her recover.

“I was so much more nervous for team finals because that’s when everything occurred (in Tokyo), so I was a little bit traumatized from that. So today I felt a little bit more relaxed,” she said. “So I’m happy that that’s over.”

Biles now has 34 medals across the world championships and Olympics, making her the most decorated gymnast ever – male or female – at the sport’s two signature events ahead of the retired Vitaly Scherbo.

Her six all-around world titles also ties the all-time record,

“Every day I try to think about it, especially in therapy when we talk about it,” Biles said about her record-breaking achievements. “And I think that’s when all the emotions come up. And I really think about what I’ve done and what we’ve done to the sport and push that forward. So I think it’s really exciting. But all in all, I don’t think it will hit me until I retire and then look back and see everything I’ve done.”

Biles’ only blip came right at the end, as she was about to wrap up her floor routine. After a near-flawless display, she tripped near the end of her routine as she was about to enter a sequence of leaps. But she recovered in style, and it didn’t cost her enough of a points deduction to rob her of the gold.

“I know my parents had a heart attack,” Biles told her coach.

With the Olympics Games in less than a year in Paris, Biles is back to her very best. And despite the fierce competition from Andrade and Jones, she remains a cut above the rest – a full decade after she started her reign.

“She is like wine, she is better with age,” her coach Cecile Landi said.

After announcing her return, she impressed at the U.S. Classic in early August then added her eighth national title a few weeks later. She is competing at her first world championships since 2019 this week.

Biles received the loudest round of applause during the athlete presentation, with Andrade’s name also welcomed by loud cheers.

Biles, Jones and Andrade competed in the same rotation, kicking off their contest at vault. Jones got off a solid start, nailing a double-twisting Yurchenko with a small hop that earned her 14.233 points.

In her blue leotard, Biles then opted for a Cheng vault – not the more difficult Yurchenko Double Pike she pioneered during the team qualifying – and was nearly perfect in her execution, getting 15.100 points. Andrade, the defending champion, also attempted a Cheng but her execution was not as good as Biles’ and she had to be content with 14.700.

Even at her weakest apparatus, the uneven bars, Biles still managed a 14.333 that put her in the lead ahead of Andrade, who after a long wait produced a superb bar routine and reduced the gap to her American rival to just 0.233 points before they moved to the balance beam.

Biles looked a bit shaky as she mounted the beam, but the rest of her routine was excellent. Jones delivered a great display to move to second place overall and was warmly hugged by Biles after her effort.

Andrade bounced out of bounds seconds before she wrapped up her floor routine, a fluffed last step that marred an otherwise brilliant display. The mistake cost her three-tenths of a point, but not her silver medal.

Biles and Jones took pride in the fact that three athletes of color stood on the podium.

“We had our Black podium of girls,” Biles said. “So I thought that was amazing. Black girl magic. So, hopefully it just teaches all the young girls out there that you can do anything.”

Jones agreed.

“I feel like sometimes young girls are like, oh, I can’t do it because of my skin tone, but really just believe in yourself and anything is possible,” Jones said.

Biles’ competition continues this weekend with the women’s vault and uneven bars finals on Saturday and the balance beam and floor exercise finals on Sunday.

The floor routine that gave Simone Biles a record-tying sixth world all-around title.

She now holds the record for the most combined world and Olympic medals (34). pic.twitter.com/t7XqQUo2Us

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023

Just going to leave this Simone Biles vault here.

Enjoy.#Antwerp2023 | @peacock pic.twitter.com/p4bx3mqhX0

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023

Two down. Two to go.

Simone Biles is halfway through the all-around final and currently sits in first.#Antwerp2023 | @peacock pic.twitter.com/px0cOyZDBR

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023

It's a 14.433 for Simone Biles on the balance beam.

The homestretch to the podium is ON. #Antwerp2023 | @peacock pic.twitter.com/G32P4uCEv5

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023

SIMONE'S REACTION

The moment Simone Biles won her 21st world championship gold medal and a record-tying sixth world all-around title. #Antwerp2023 pic.twitter.com/wuluRfr2V6

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023

.@Simone_Biles' tumbling passes are even more epic in slow motion. #Antwerp2023 pic.twitter.com/HXTjmiEAIf

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 7, 2023

How it started vs. how it's going…@Simone_Biles x #Antwerp2023 pic.twitter.com/CoAVa1e3tx

— NBC Olympics & Paralympics (@NBCOlympics) October 6, 2023