The Why
How I Started Digging Into SafeSport
This series is about the U.S. Center for SafeSport—the organization athletes are required to report to when there are allegations of abuse in Olympic and Paralympic sport—and how that system actually works in practice.
My last few pieces have focused on structure, which I’ll continue to cover, but I wanted to interject today to talk a little about why I’m doing this.
When SafeSport closed the complaint I had brought to them, I was left with an outcome (administrative closure with letter of admonishment) but no real understanding of how it had been reached. No clear explanation of what, if anything, had been investigated or why decisions were made the way they were. But a real awareness that any question asked from that point forward would go unanswered.
It’s a strange place to land. I went into the process expecting something I could follow, expecting protection. I stepped out of it vulnerable. The person I reported continued on in sport, coaching young females along the way, and I stepped away.
I was left to try to make sense of it on my own.
My eyes were opened when I found other people who had been through the SafeSport system and realized my case was not a one-off.
These people did not have identical stories to mine nor exact experiences with SafeSport—but many were left with the same confusion and frustration I had been left with. And once you start hearing that from enough people, the patterns begin to reveal themselves.
I started looking at the system itself—how cases move, how outcomes are reached, and what actually happens between the moment a report is filed and the moment it’s closed.
Some of what I’ve written has focused on that structure—how cases are categorized and how outcomes are presented. That matters, because it shows how a system can look functional from the outside while leaving people with very little resolution on the inside.
But structure isn’t the whole story.
What’s coming next moves between that framework and what it actually looks like when people go through it.
I’ll be writing about what it means to be told there will be an investigation—and what it looks like when that never really takes shape. About administrative closure as something people experience, not just a category on a report. About the public database, and why it doesn’t always reflect what people assume it does.
There’s also a legal layer that shapes all of this—arbitration, jurisdiction, and the reality that very few cases ever reach a point where anyone is required to fully account for what happened.
And I’ll be bringing in other cases where these patterns show up in ways that are hard to ignore once you see them side by side.
There are also parts of this system that sit just outside the process itself—the attorneys people are directed to, the overlap between institutions, and the structure that’s supposed to be independent.
SafeSport’s public messaging is clear and consistent. It focuses on reporting, awareness, and athlete safety.
That’s the part people see.
What happens inside the process is much harder to see—and much harder to understand once you’ve been through it.
That gap is why I’m doing this.
Because athletes are required to rely on this system.
They don’t get to opt out of it. They don’t get to choose a different process.
And they shouldn’t have to go through it without knowing what it actually is.
Start Here:
• The SafeSport Illusion
• The Liability Black Hole at the U.S. Center for SafeSport
• SafeSport’s Jurisdictional Hold Problem
• SafeSport’s Version of Success