Mary Lou Retton - the legendary Olympic gymnast who tumbled out of favour

The puzzling case of Mary Lou Retton. News broke last week that the former Olympic champion gymnast was battling a rare form of pneumonia, fighting for her life in the intensive care unit of a Texas hospital. Worse, her daughters had to start a Spotfund page seeking donations to defray rising medical costs because the 55-year-old didn’t have health insurance. A depressingly familiar American tale. Everybody here knows somebody whose finances have been crippled by lack of cover or the treacherous small print of a policy somehow absolving the insurer from responsibility for certain treatments.

Some wondered aloud how a woman who earned $8 million (€7.58 million) and lives in a $2 million Houston mansion could end up needing charity, but plenty of others stepped up. Within seven days, nearly half a million dollars had been pledged by those who remembered the magical Los Angeles moment in 1984 when Retton, all 4ft 10in of her, unfurled the vault of her life, scoring a perfect 10 to become the first American woman to win individual all-round gymnastics gold. At the height of the cold war, her compatriots were never unduly bothered by the absence of the Soviet Union and Natalia Yurchenko, her greatest rival, from that most Hollywood of Olympic Games.

America fell hard for the bubbly 16-year-old from coal-mining country in West Virginia (almost heaven) who soon stared down at them from the Wheaties box in the cereal aisle of every grocery store in the country. The first woman to reach a lofty and lucrative commercial perch only afforded the truly iconic. With her effervescent smile, clad in stars and stripes leotard, she transformed her sport in the national consciousness and became as emblematic of the 1980s as Mr T, Hulk Hogan and Madonna. Even after she stepped away from gymnastics shortly before Seoul, there were cameos on everything from Knots Landing to Baywatch.

The work never stopped. She fronted a children’s TV show encouraging exercise called Mary Lou’s Flip Flop Shop, wrote a best-seller called Mary Lou Retton’s Gateways to Happiness, and enjoyed celebrity of such wattage that she starred in a Super Bowl commercial a full three decades after her win. In 2018, she remained famous enough to compete on US TV show Dancing with the Stars, a telling barometer of enduring public recognition. That was probably the last time most people came across her until this present episode, a rather curious tale offering a troubling reminder that, when it comes to Retton, many believe all that glitters is no longer quite gold.

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Six years ago, she refused to endorse the Safe Sport Authorization Act, a bipartisan Bill before the United States Congress designed to try to clean up her own sport in the wake of a slew of horrifying cases involving predatory coaches, one of whom worked with the American team at the 1984 Olympics. To add insult, she was then part of a delegation from USA Gymnastics that went to Washington to tell senators to drop the legislation because their sport was already well policed and had its own safeguards in place. Mind-boggling.

This was the very governing body which presided over decades during which hundreds of young gymnasts across the country were molested by, among others, Larry Nassar, the national team doctor. On national TV, Retton made subsequent comments about Nassar being “one monster” destroying the sport when there were actually dozens more of his ilk. She sounded like a woman who, despite serving eight years on the board of the association, didn’t grasp the issue. Even more bizarre because she had suffered physical and psychological mistreatment during her own career.

If the image of her running into the arms of her delighted coach, Béla Károlyi, in Los Angeles is part of her Olympic legend, there are many accounts of the Romanian martinet making her suffer along the way. Such as when she broke a bone in her wrist, was forced to train through the pain, and then had the ice pack kicked off her hand as she rested. At 15. Or the time, recounted in Joan Ryan’s disturbing yet essential Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, a US gymnastics official warned her he’d deduct a half point from the high-schooler because of “that fat hanging off your butt”.

Retton was a huge supporter of Ronald Reagan, and, alongside fellow Olympic champion Kerri Strug, delivered the Pledge of Allegiance at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Those two political strikes were enough to have many on social media feeling less than sympathetic to her current plight. Since her chosen party has always railed against any form of state-sponsored or affordable healthcare, even after Barack Obama managed to introduce it, there is no shortage of keyboard warriors savouring the irony of a millionaire Republican now relying on handouts from others to foot mounting bills.

In Retton’s defence, she, presumably, has no control over what’s happening as she lies in hospital struggling to breathe. She’s not to know that, online, snarky speculation abounds about whether her family should be raising the money when she has her own fortune. On Instagram last Saturday, McKenna Kelly, one of Retton’s daughters, said her mother’s condition was improving and she was responding well to treatment. Many Americans were thrilled at the news; others immediately floated conspiracy theories linking the rapidity of her recovery to the sums raised in her name.

In every way, a story of our time.