August 3, 2026 
September 2026 will mark the 10th anniversary of the Indianapolis Star investigation that first exposed Larry Nassar’s extensive crimes against gymnasts, and USA Gymnastics’ repeated failure to address internal allegations despite years of warning signs. A decade on, the sporting world has learned painful lessons about the systemic mistreatment of female athletes—and, crucially, how to more effectively prevent it.
A new peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Child Sexual Abuse offers a survivor-centered roadmap for that prevention, grounded in the voices of those who experienced abuse firsthand.
Conducted by #WeRideTogether—a nonprofit founded in 2021 to fight sexual misconduct across all sports—the qualitative study, “From Listening to Lasting Change: Athlete-Informed Solutions for Safer Sports Environments,” analyzes 16 publicly available survivor stories from adult female athletes.
Researchers manually coded transcripts for multiple frames: perpetrator characteristics, power and control tactics, grooming behaviors, abuse locations, and institutional responses. Code frames included everything from perpetrator traits and power tactics to the type and location of abuse, specific grooming stages, victim intuition, and sport-specific dynamics. They also examined broader themes: the meaning of sport, boundary violations, prevention education, hindsight reflections, repercussions of abuse, and reactions from peers and the broader sporting community.
The analysis identified three key themes for understanding why female athletes remain uniquely vulnerable and how institutions can intervene more effectively.
Power imbalances are structural to sport.
Power imbalances are the coins of the realm in sporting environments, both among the athletes themselves and between athletes and coaches or other authority figures.
Young athletes depend utterly on coaches, trainers, and older teammates, making them particularly susceptible to the influence of potentially predatory behavior. A gymnast’s return to competition hinges on a physical therapist’s guidance; a rider’s safety in a jump-off round requires full confidence in that trainer’s judgment and abilities.
And that’s not all.
Sports also foster unusually close, familial-like bonds. Athletes often spend more waking hours with coaches than with parents, and may socialize together outside practice, which can blur professional boundaries. This deference can easily tip into authoritarianism. As a 2021 study cited by #WeRideTogether notes, some coaches are treated as “god-like’ and use a ‘psychology of fear’” that some mistakenly equate with athletic success.
For a predator, these dynamics provide a pre-existing framework for grooming—targeting a specific athlete, gaining her trust, fulfilling her emotional and physical needs, isolating her from family and peers, and eventually sexualizing the relationship while maintaining coercive control. Power imbalance underpins every one of these stages.
The study argues that this structural asymmetry can severely compromise an athlete’s capacity to recognize or refuse abuse, regardless of her age, because the very foundation of the coach-athlete relationship is built on unequal authority.
High-level sports are insular worlds.
High-level sports are, by their very nature, all-encompassing. Athletes, coaches, and their entourages often spend long hours together, traveling and competing. Sports communities develop their own inside jokes, memes, and traditions—and even their own core values.
Some of these internalized values, like “toxic resilience”—normalizing punishing practices, playing through pain, etc.—can desensitize athletes to what is truly abnormal.
While genuine resilience is essential for athletic success, normalizing chronic adversity can convince young athletes that grooming and abusive behaviors are just additional uncomfortable norms they must tolerate.
Young athletes, whose identities are often tightly bound to their sport, may struggle to imagine a world where they can be successful outside of their chosen pursuit. This intense emotional attachment makes abuse easier to rationalize and infinitely harder to report. They may tolerate things they ordinarily wouldn’t, and then to conceal abuse, even when they recognize it’s wrong.
What’s more, speaking out carries steep, tangible costs: not being believed by authorities, damaging team standing, losing playing time or scholarships, facing overt retaliation, or witnessing organizational inaction that protects the abuser over the victim. Understanding these nuances is not academic—it is essential.
When sport is an athlete’s primary identity, the tradeoff for accepting abuse becomes dangerously logical. Reducing disclosure barriers requires institutional responses that actually listen, investigate, and act decisively, rather than circling wagons to protect reputations.
Prevention education must be transformed from the ground up.
Across all 16 stories, survivors reported a shared lack of awareness—both in themselves and in the adults around them—about what was happening.
This stemmed directly from absent or woefully inadequate prevention education. Many reflected simply, “I wish I knew then what I know now,” a sentiment that appeared repeatedly across the narratives. That refrain underscores a clear mandate: prevention must start early, with child athletes, using simple, memorable standards that become second nature.
#WeRideTogether promotes practical safeguards like the “Rule of Three,” which requires that adult-athlete interactions be transparent, observable, and interruptible—comparable in simplicity to fire-safety mantras like “stop, drop, and roll,” but adapted specifically to sporting contexts.
However, education cannot be one-size-fits-all; it must also be engaging, culturally specific, trauma-informed, and grounded in real-life incidents to resonate across different sports, age groups, and communities.
Moreover, prevention cannot stop with athletes alone; it must target the whole system—coaches, staff, officials, medical personnel, and parents.
This “whole system” approach directly counters the persistent denial that abuse happens in “my” sport or “my” organization—a denial that survivors frequently cited as a major barrier to both disclosure and institutional follow-through.
Bystanders, who are most likely to witness early red flags, must be equipped to recognize grooming patterns and empowered to “see something, say something” without fear of reprisal from coaches or administrators.
Equally critical is empowering athletes themselves with agency and bodily autonomy. They must hear explicitly that anyone—even charismatic, successful, “god-like” figures—can be an abuser, and they must learn to “trust their gut” and intuition when something feels wrong.
Building relationships with safe adults outside sport and developing rich identities beyond athletics provide vital protective safety nets, and athletes should be encouraged to cultivate meaningful lives both on and off the field, so that their self-worth is never solely dependent on sporting success.
Preventing abuse is a shared responsibility. For too long, sport’s entrenched power imbalances and insular culture have placed the burden on survivors to cope, to conceal, and ultimately to bear the weight of a systemic problem that institutions refused to confront. As we mark a decade since Nassar’s crimes came to light, we owe the next generation of athletes more than belated awareness—we owe them tangible, systemic change. Institutions must adopt survivor-informed policies, invest in continuous education, and prioritize athlete safety over medals, funding, and institutional reputations.
We all have a role in building safer sporting environments, from parents asking tough questions to governing bodies enforcing genuine accountability. The lessons of the last ten years are unmistakable; the question now is whether we will finally act on them.
To learn more about this study, visit #WeRideTogether. To learn more about #WeRideTogether’s Survivor Story program, email info@weridetogether.today.
