My gymnastics coach was banned from the sport 17 years after I wrote about his abuse

My former gymnastics coach — John Holman from Parkettes in Allentown, Pennsylvania — has been permanently banned from coaching. I found him on the USA Gymnastics permanently ineligible list yesterday.

I wrote about how abusive Holman was back in 2008 in my book Chalked Up. I was “his girl” — one of his favorites — which put me in his crosshairs.

I described the fat-shaming which included announcing our weight over the loud speaker at the gym, how he snatched food out of our hands and would not allow certain foods to be delivered to our table at restaurants during travel for competitions (foods like yogurt and bread), the sexually explicit jokes around minors, the forcing to train on serious injuries, the sexualized comments about our bodies, the inappropriate touching under the guise of “spotting.” And the general culture of bullying and emotional abuse.

Rather than investigate, USAG and USOPC chose to dedicate themselves to smearing me, leaving threatening messages on my work voicemail that I needed to stop talking about this stuff — that was the 80s, it’s not happening anymore! I said it then and I’ll say it again now — John Holman did not wake up in the year 2000 and say Times have changed, I’ll change too!

Then, 10 years after my book was published, an investigation into Holman's coaching was opened by Safe Sport, which had just been established a year earlier. Holman was suspended briefly in 2019 then permitted to continue coaching.

His coaching was supposedly “restricted” but he was not actually suspended. My understanding is he continued coaching. This was published in a Lehigh Valley newspaper in 2019:

He continues to work at the center despite an investigation into an incident about 25 years ago, the organization said.

For the record it was way more than one incident 25 years ago!

Then, the gym where he coached for almost 50 years did it's own parallel investigation. Because that won’t be biased, right?

Holman retired in 2023. Many thought he retired to evade being banned. But that didn’t work.

In 2025, 2 years after he retired and 7 years after the investigation was initiated, he has been banned.

Can you imagine if what I wrote 17 years ago was taken seriously? Imagine how many young athletes might have been spared his abuse?

I used real names in my book despite my publisher’s concerns. Why? This was not a made up story. It is true. I stood by it then and I stand by it now and the world has finally caught up. The coaches I described — including the 1984 Olympic team coach Don Peters who has also been banned — are serial abusers.

Unsurprisingly, Parkettes and USA Gymnastics did not accuse me of libel. They did not pursue any legal action for false statements. They merely sought to smear me as a an unreliable narrator, a terrible gymnast who was bitter about not having qualified for the 1988 Olympics.

Which begs the question — even if I was terrible (I wasn’t, I was a 7x national team member and the 1986 National Champion), would that mean I deserved abuse?

It says something that most of the negative Amazon reviews from teammates and fellow gymnasts have been deleted, doesn’t it? The above comment is from a gymnastics community website called The Chalk Bucket. The “Hope” referred to was a teammate and 1988 Olympian. I guess because she was an Olympian she was supposed to have credibility but I should not?

Despite what I went through — being absolutely thrashed and demonized by my own teammates and community — it was worth it. He’s gone. And now that gym knows, and others like it, that abusive coaching won’t be tolerated. They may comply due to force and fear of investigation rather than some sort of heartfelt recognition of the error of their ways. But they will likely comply.

That gym and others that retain their abusive coaching practices from the 70s are being dragged out of the stone age. Slowly. But they will change. Some day. It sure would help if Safe Sport moved a little faster and made the reports public.

Why it took Safe Sport 7 years from reports being filed to getting rid of the guy is what I want to know. Why he continued to coach after multiple reports of abuse, pending the results of the 7 year investigation, is an important question that must be answered. I would call on Congress — a key funder of Safe Sport — to look into the matter.

For what its worth, the other source of Safe Sport’s funding is the individual sport governing bodies like USA Gymnastics. So if the governing bodies don’t want their sports to be investigated they can just not fund Safe Sport!

As I ponder why events of 40 years ago impacted me yesterday, I think about how hard it was for 10 years to be ousted my community. And I’ve received only one apology. A very meaningful one. (You know who you are and I value our friendship immensely.)

These gymnasts who accused me of grift and lying and being a bitter and shitty all around person knew what happened. But they chose to defend a corrupt system instead of a fellow athlete, a friend.

And then I think about what I endured during covid for standing up for children. The loss of friends and career and a total upheaval of my life as I knew it. And I think I will be proven right in the end again, as well. But it may take nearly 20 years as it did in the case of my gymnastics coaches.

And then I think about the stance I’ve taken now — for women and girls and biological reality. And the threats I put up with now, every day. Which I generally brush off and keep going but it all just hit for a brief moment yesterday.

The hatred heaped upon me — upon all of us standing up for women and girls’ rights — not just from strangers but former friends as well is not easy though I endure it with nothing but steadfast determination. And I know, in my heart of hearts, I will be proven right again. But so much will have been lost in that process.

And it will still have been worth it. Because doing the right thing is always worth it. No matter the cost. If one little girl is spared, it is worth the fight.