Dominique Moceanu, Shannon Miller, and Dominique Dawes Take a Victory Lap

On July 23, 1996, seven teenage gymnasts in red, white, and blue leotards and matching white scrunchies marched into the Georgia Dome. It was the Olympic women’s gymnastics team final, and as soon as the USA placard appeared, the crowd of more than 30,000 spectators roared. The thundering cheers were deafening as captain Amanda Borden led her team to their position by the uneven bars. The royal blue duffle bags on their shoulders were almost as big as the athletes themselves.

Borden, Dominique Dawes, Shannon Miller, Dominique Moceanu, Kerri Strug, Amy Chow, and Jaycie Phelps were touted as the best American women’s gymnastics team ever assembled. Dawes, Miller, and Strug had all competed at the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, where Miller won five medals—the most of any American at those Games. Borden offered steadfast leadership. Chow was as solid and consistent as they come. And the younger athletes, who Miller affectionately refers to as “the whippersnappers”? They had so much energy.

They were the country’s best hope for its first Olympic team gold in women’s gymnastics. They were the Magnificent Seven.

Whether you were old enough to watch the meet in real time or have just seen the grainy clips on YouTube, you’ve likely heard the lore of the Magnificent Seven. Entering the second day of team competition, the Americans trailed the Russians by a slim margin, but after the first rotation on the uneven bars, they pulled ahead by almost a half point. Clean routines on the balance beam and floor exercise widened their lead to roughly 0.9 points.

Then came the vault. The team needed a solid score from one of its last two athletes—Moceanu or Strug—in the last rotation and the gold was theirs. But Moceanu landed on her backside on both of her attempts. Strug fell during her first vault too, clearly hurting her ankle in the process. But she had one more chance to come through for her team and country. From the sidelines, her coach Béla Károlyi shouted, “You can do it!”

I remember watching the competition from my mom’s living room in California. I had just finished my sophomore year of college and decided to take a semester off. I needed a break and, frankly, I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. The gymnasts on TV, who were all my age or younger, had dedicated their whole lives to the pursuit of excellence and I admired their steely determination, passion, and purpose.

I watched as Strug shook out her foot and bounded down the runway again. Miraculously, she stuck the landing, briefly saluting the judges before crumbling to the ground. You could see the pain etched across her face and in her movements as she tried to scoot off the mat on her hands and knees.

But she did it and the Americans won gold. You couldn’t script it any better.

Shortly thereafter, Károlyi carried Strug, still in her leotard, out to the podium for the medal ceremony, her leg in a giant splint—an indelible image. The team was then whisked off to a late-night victory party at Planet Hollywood, attended by Bruce Willis and Demi Moore. Everyone wanted to celebrate the win with them.

The Magnificent Seven weren’t the only women who stole the show that summer. The Atlanta Games marked a turning point for women’s sports and the visibility of women athletes in the US. On the basketball court, the soccer pitch, and the softball field, American women shined and won Olympic gold. These athletes were among the first to grow up under Title IX, the landmark federal civil rights legislation passed in 1972 that prohibited educational institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex and opened the gates to athletic opportunities for girls. Their performances shaped the next generation’s view of what was possible in sports, inspiring thousands of young girls to confidently enter the athletic arena.

It’s been almost 30 years since the Atlanta Games, and in that time Strug’s vault has been held up as the bastion of sporting glory and the epitome of the Olympic spirit. Károlyi has been portrayed as the lovable coach hyping up his athlete before a big moment to remind her of what she’s capable of. Who wouldn’t want that?

But what seemed like innocuous encouragement belied a sports culture that some athletes say broke them, literally and figuratively.

For decades, the win-at-all-costs approach to gymnastics—evident at various gyms across the country—which prized compliance and an ethos of suffering, ignored athlete well-being and left gymnasts feeling like disposable commodities. With a prevalent culture of silence in place, it created an environment ripe for abuse, ultimately enabling the sexual predator Larry Nassar, who abused hundreds of athletes for decades.

And it turned out that Strug didn’t need to perform that second vault and put her body on the line. In the previous rotation, the Russian team flubbed their performance on the beam, making it nearly impossible for them to come back in the floor exercise, their last apparatus. It meant Moceanu’s vault scores were good enough to win. But Strug never competed again. Learning what these young girls and teenagers had to endure in their quest for sporting excellence and the toll it has taken makes revisiting the gymnastics competition as an adult bittersweet.

(In late 2016, USA Gymnastics commissioned former federal prosecutor Deborah J. Daniels to conduct an independent review of USA Gymnastics’s policies and practices related to sexual misconduct. The report, released in 2017, described the need for “significant cultural change within the sport” and featured 70 recommendations, including those related to general athlete safety and well-being, which the Board of Directors of USA Gymnastics accepted.

In December 2021, USA Gymnastics and the US Olympic & Paralympic Committee reached a settlement with the gymnasts who had been abused by Nassar. As reported by The Washington Post, USA Gymnastics President and CEO Li Li Leung said in a statement, “USA Gymnastics is deeply sorry for the trauma and pain that survivors have endured as a result of this organization’s actions and inactions…. We are committed to working with them, and with the entire gymnastics community, to ensure that we continue to prioritize the safety, health, and wellness of our athletes and community above all else.”)

Recently, SELF brought Moceanu, Miller, and Dawes together to reflect on their gold-medal moment and the years since. They are legends and avatars: the youngest US gymnast to win Olympic gold, the most decorated US gymnast in Olympic history alongside Simone Biles, and the first Black woman to win an individual gymnastics Olympic medal, respectively.

In many ways, they were each a product of their environment and sport. But who they are and who they’ve become is fashioned by more than just the situations they faced. It’s shaped by their response to those experiences, even when they felt like they didn’t have much choice. And now, they’re parents watching their children grow up at a time when women’s sports are experiencing a renaissance led by strong women athletes who’ve grown up with the legacy of the Magnificent Seven. It’s a full-circle moment.

So this isn’t a story about the teenagers who stole our hearts. This is a story about the women they’ve become—entrepreneurs, coaches, and advocates—the choices they’ve made, and their reflections on that iconic moment in the Georgia Dome. Most importantly, this is a story about finding their voice and their hopes for the next generation of girls.

The Phenom

When Dominique Moceanu thinks about her Olympic moment, she thinks of the vault. Not that vault. During the individual all-around final, where gymnasts compete for the highest combined score on each of the four apparatuses, she nailed the best vault of her life.

It was the vault she had been aiming for in the team competition two days earlier, the vault she knew she was capable of. “That was redemption right there,” she tells SELF. “It felt like a weight had been lifted off of my shoulders.”

No one was in the spotlight in Atlanta more than Moceanu. The 14-year-old phenom and 1995 US National Champion had been anointed the next Nadia Comăneci. Leading up to the Games, she was photographed by Annie Leibovitz for the cover of Vanity Fair and did Kodak commercials. Cameras followed her every time she stepped onto the podium, where everyone—gymnastics commentators, coaches, fans, the media—expected her to rack up the medals.

“I felt the enormity of it all. I had my own pressure on myself. I had pressure from my father. I had pressure from my coaches. Honestly, it was a lot,” she says.

But Moceanu could handle the intensity and demands of competition. That wasn’t the problem. “It was the abusive psychological torment behaviors between coach and athlete and then between my father and me” that created a culture of fear and control, Moceanu, now 42, says. “I was terrified every time I went to the gym—my coaches would threaten me that if I didn’t perform well enough, to their liking, they would call my father,” she told The World in 2018.

What made the Olympics even more challenging was Moceanu’s tibia (a.k.a. her shin bone)—she was competing with a four-inch stress fracture, diagnosed just five weeks earlier.

During the event final for the balance beam, her foot slipped at the end of a tumbling pass and she crashed headfirst into the apparatus. Her arms immediately wrapped around the four-inch piece of wood as she clutched on desperately so that her feet wouldn’t touch the ground, costing her more precious points. In a video of the incident, you can see her walk to a chair upon finishing her routine, subtly shaking her head and sitting—stunned and all alone—with no one around to immediately comfort the 14-year-old gymnast.

Moceanu could have been severely injured, but she says she was more worried about then USA Gymnastics coach Márta Károlyi’s disappointment than her own well-being. She also knew she was expected to compete in the event final for floor exercise a few minutes later, which she did, without anyone first assessing her for a head or spinal injury, she says. “When you’re a kid, you can’t speak up for yourself,” she says.

The thing is, Moceanu loved her sport, but she didn’t love the toxic culture she said was perpetuated by the adults in charge. “In gymnastics, we were always told who to be, what to eat, how to look, what we’re supposed to say—and that doesn’t really allow a person to evolve. It stunts you socially,” Moceanu told ESPN in 2016.

Since stepping away from elite competition, she has been fighting to make gymnastics safer for athletes. To empower athletes to use their voice. To protect athletes.

“I guess the Libra in me wants to seek justice for all the wrongdoings that had happened,” she says. “It was something I needed to shed off of me, and I needed truth.”

Moceanu was one of the first athletes to speak publicly about the inhumane tactics employed in gymnastics. During a 2008 interview on Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel, she accused her former coaches Béla and Márta Károlyi of verbal and emotional abuse and Márta of an incident involving physical abuse. (SELF was unable to reach the Károlyis for comment. They have previously denied these allegations.)

While she says she knew there’d likely be backlash in response to her allegations, she thought that people would back her up, but only a few voiced their support publicly. Instead, she says she was ostracized by many in the gymnastics community, no one wanted to hire her for gymnastics-related jobs, and she “never got an endorsement deal again.”

Despite the public fallout, Moceanu set off a spark behind the scenes. By saying the unspeakable out loud, gymnasts trusted her and sought her advice and guidance on how to handle their own questionable experiences in the sport. She says that those conversations helped lay the groundwork for what would eventually lead to the case against former USA gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar. More than 500 women accused Nassar of sexual abuse, and in 2018 he was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in prison. In 2017, Moceanu was one of three retired athletes who testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on protecting athletes from sexual abuse. It felt like redemption, again.

In the time since, gymnastics culture has started to change. When Simone Biles pulled out of competition at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, it directly challenged the long-held belief that an athlete should always put their body on the line, no matter the cost.

“These athletes having a voice is so tremendously important because it’s their safety. It’s their health and well-being. That they can now decide for themselves…. Who doesn’t want that?” Moceanu says.

But more needs to change. While elite gymnasts are finding their voice and speaking up for themselves, not all athletes are able to, owing to inherent power dynamics, and some continue to train under a broken system.

Moceanu wants to prove that you can train elite gymnasts while prioritizing health, safety, and joy, and she’s developing a new model at The Dominique Moceanu Gymnastics Center in Medina, Ohio, which she opened in 2018. That means taking care of her athletes’ emotional and physical well-being. Building solid fundamental skills rather than rushing young athletes. Watching for overuse injuries and burnout. Not viewing puberty as an inevitable setback in athletic progression for girls and instead giving kids time to develop. And showing gymnasts that she cares. “I think that that probably is the biggest thing because it was so absent in my life,” she says.

It’s personal too. Her son Vincent, 15, has his eyes on competing in gymnastics at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. While she’s not the one coaching him—her husband Michael Canales, a foot and ankle surgeon and former collegiate gymnast, is in charge—Moceanu says their priority is Vincent’s longevity in the sport. Case in point: For the past six years, he’s focused on training and upgrading his skills rather than competing in high-pressure meets, but he still made it to Eastern Nationals this year. “It’s an unorthodox pathway,” she says.

Moceanu tells me that, ultimately, she’s happy with who she is today. “No matter what, I can sleep and put my head down at night knowing that I did the right thing when it was extremely hard,” she says. “That makes me feel good that I stood for something in my life.”

The Most Decorated

The night of the balance beam event finals, Shannon Miller spoke with her mother. Miller’s time at the 1996 Olympic Games had its share of ups and downs, especially compared to the success she experienced four years prior. In Atlanta, she performed well in both rounds of the team competition but faltered in the individual all-around and the vault event final, leaving her out of medal contention in both events. It shook her confidence.

So she did what lots of 19-year-olds do when they feel anxious and homesick: She vented to her mom. With training camp before the Olympics and the competition itself, she hadn’t really seen her mom in weeks, so when Miller saw her in person, her worries about that evening’s competition came tumbling out. All she wanted was to do her best—and stay on the beam—but she was afraid she was going to let everyone down.

In response, her mom asked her one question: Did she do the work? “I said, ‘Well, yeah. I always do the work. I don’t always get it right, but I always try really hard to do the work,’” Miller tells SELF. Her mom responded with, “I know.”

Miller, now 47, thought about her mom’s words throughout the night: As she entered the arena. As she walked up to salute the judges. As she hovered her hands over the beam before beginning her routine. “I just took an extra deep breath and decided to enjoy the moment,” she says.

Watching Miller perform, you can tell that she’s on from the moment she placed her hands on the apparatus and pressed up into a handstand. She stuck each combination of jumps, twirls, back handsprings, and layouts. When she landed her dismount, a smile stretched across her face. She won the one medal missing from her collection—an individual Olympic gold.

The Olympic frenzy didn’t end once the competition was over. The gold-medal winning team, minus Strug, embarked on a national tour alongside members of the US men’s and the rhythmic gymnastics teams. They piled onto buses and made their way across the country, performing for sold-out crowds, night after night.

When I ask Miller about the tour, she can’t stop beaming and tells me, “It was so much fun.” It was a welcome buffer after the Olympics, a long off-ramp from the gold medal high. But it was also a chance for the athletes to let loose and act like kids. They played pranks on each other—milk in the chalk bowl, swapping in different music choices during floor routines, and crank calls. One time, someone hid Miller’s costume for the finale. She had roughly 30 seconds to change outfits after her beam routine and when she went behind the bleachers to get dressed, her outfit wasn’t there.

However, the transition away from sports can be disorienting, regardless of if someone is forced to step away because of injury or they leave of their own accord. “That’s what people don’t see, what they don’t always understand about retiring from sport; whether that’s collegiate, Olympic, or professional sports,” Miller says. “You do go through this moment of, ‘What do I do with the rest of my life?’ I mean, I retired when I was 19. I didn’t know anything else.”

Miller went from living with her parents, training 40-plus hours a week, and maintaining a regimented schedule to being a normal college student at the University of Houston, where she earned a degree in marketing and entrepreneurship. Even though she practically grew up in the gym, she remembers walking into a local fitness center at one point and feeling lost. “I didn’t know how to get on a treadmill. I didn’t know how to do an actual workout. I never lifted weights,” she says. “I left.”

Overnight, it felt like all her support systems disappeared along with her identity. Miller could feel herself reverting back to her shy, introverted younger self. “I was losing all that confidence that I had built through sport. I went back to not talking to anyone. I went to school, went home, did my homework, and that was kind of it,” she says.

It wasn’t a sustainable way to live and Miller knew that something had to give, something had to change. “I had to challenge myself just like I would learn a new skill on the beam…. I needed to practice it and then I needed to go for it,” she says. “You may completely fail but you might also learn something.”

She started saying yes to speaking engagements even though the idea of talking about herself felt weird. But she realized she wasn’t really talking about herself. Rather, by sharing nuggets of wisdom she learned through sport, her stories might help someone in the audience. While her talks focus on what’s made her successful—goal setting, teamwork, a positive attitude, and a commitment to excellence, what she calls the “gold-medal mindset”—she’s really giving people the tools they can use to confront challenges in their own lives.

“To help people realize that they already have this strength within them, I love that,” she says. “Now people say, ‘You’re making up for not talking then because you won’t stop talking now.’”

In addition to speaking engagements, Miller knew she wanted to promote women’s health. Over and over, she’d watched family and friends put their health on the back burner because they were too busy with work, family, or other obligations. Plus she knew firsthand how easy it is to neglect your own health, like she felt she did in college. After graduating from Boston College Law School, she launched a company to help women prioritize their wellness.

Ironically, in the fall of 2010, she found herself so busy that she was about to reschedule her annual exam. But when she realized that she wasn’t putting her health first, like she’d been encouraging other women to do, she felt guilty. Instead, she took the first available appointment—and that’s when her ob-gyn found a cyst on her ovary. After a series of tests, Miller was diagnosed with a malignant ovarian germ cell tumor in January 2011, a rare and aggressive form of ovarian cancer. Doctors removed a baseball-size tumor and Miller underwent chemotherapy; she’s now cancer-free.

Looking back, Miller says she realizes that the whole concept of being on a team—like showing up, offering and accepting support, working together toward a greater goal—applies outside of sport too. “It took several years to figure out that I didn’t have to do all of this alone, that I didn’t just have to take everything on,” she says. It’s helped her through her cancer diagnosis, treatment, and now life after cancer.

“So many survivors reached out to me during that time,” she says. “I never even knew I wanted to talk to anyone about my experience, but when they would reach out and share their [stories]—and I know now how difficult that is to do—they inspired me. I hope I continue to inspire others to do and be their very best each day.”

The Trailblazer

Right before entering the Georgia Dome for the team final, Dominique Dawes had what she describes as “an emotional breakdown.” She was overcome by the enormity of it all. The centennial Olympics. The hometown crowd. The expectations—especially high for someone with the nickname Awesome Dawesome, a nod to her explosive, entertaining gymnastics. (Seriously, a search for clips of Dawes’s floor exercise routines from the early 1990s turns up dozens of stellar performances, like the 1994 and 1995 US Gymnastics Championships.)

At just 19 years old, she was a veteran on the team. “I just felt the weight of the world on my shoulders,” Dawes, now 47, tells SELF.

That evening in Atlanta, she says team captain Borden knelt down beside her and together they prayed. Then, Dawes got up, put aside her anxiety, and reminded herself that this wasn’t solely about her: This was about the team, and she didn’t have to do it alone.

The funny thing is that they weren’t really a unified squad until they arrived in Atlanta. Back in the 1990s, there wasn’t a centralized training system for the USA Gymnastics National Team like there is now. Each athlete trained with their coach at their home gym. Sure, they ran into each other on the competition circuit, but they didn’t know each other very well.

But they knew they were given a unique opportunity. “In that moment, it wasn’t just about me hitting my sets for the team,” Dawes says. Once she was done, she was “cheering on Shannon on the bars or Moceanu when she was on the floor.”

Talking to Dawes on Zoom now, she occasionally seems conflicted when reflecting on the sport that made her a household name. She lights up when describing how gymnastics felt like flying, but appears more pensive when discussing her return for a third Olympics in 2000.

Stepping onto the gym floor always felt like coming home, even when Dawes was ambivalent about competing, and by the time of the 2000 Olympics, she wasn’t sure she wanted to come back. At the same time, it was hard to leave the sport that had defined her since she was a child. “The level of commitment we make to the sport, that’s all you know. You don’t see life not wearing a leotard. All my friends were my teammates and were in that bubble,” she says. Without gymnastics, who would she be?

Dawes tells me that her fans were also a big part of why she continued to compete. They sent her thousands of letters asking her to keep going. “I remember sitting down, reading them, and writing people back,” she says. She decided to do it one more time. One last Olympics. A farewell tour for the fans.

It’s taken Dawes a little while to reflect on and come to terms with her experience in gymnastics. She says that, in 2016, as gymnasts started coming forward and spoke about the negative culture surrounding the sport, it forced her to process what she went through during her 18-year career.

No matter how hard Dawes worked, she says she never felt like she was good enough—even if she won. It bred a persistent sense of anxiety, made worse by the fact that she had moved in with her coach part-time at age 10, and then fully at 14, because her coach relocated her gym to a new location, which made the twice-a-day drive from Dawes’s home too far.

She says the environment in her gym wasn’t the most compassionate or empathetic. From a young age, she says she was taught to strive for perfection, to train through pain and sickness, to be a people pleaser. “If a kid’s having a tough day, you don’t punish them because they’re not emotionally tough that day or they’re falling continuously,” she says. She didn’t learn to listen to herself or trust herself, and instead “like a robot, I’d been programmed into doing what I was told, no matter what,” she wrote in an opinion piece for The Washington Post in 2021. (SELF reached out to Dawes’s former coach, who declined to comment for this story.)

“[Simone Biles] stepped away [in Tokyo] and a lot of the older generations did not like that. We didn’t have a choice,” Dawes says. For example, during the 2000 Olympic Trials, she wanted to pull out of the competition but finished because, she says, her coach encouraged her to.

Dawes mentions that she doesn’t want to entirely erase her gymnastics journey, but it doesn’t mean her feelings about what transpired aren’t complicated.

“If I came from an environment that was full of compassion and empathy and love and they looked at me beyond just a commodity, I would have been a much happier, fulfilled kid, a happier and more fulfilled adult,” she says. But she also recognizes that, had that been the case, she probably wouldn’t have made it to the Olympics multiple times.

Plus her gymnastics accomplishments provided her with a platform to empower girls and women. It’s why, after retiring, she served as President of the Women’s Sports Foundation and co-chair of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition alongside former New Orleans Saints quarterback Drew Brees. She says her most fulfilling experience was serving as the Girl Scouts of the USA’s first spokesperson for the organization’s Uniquely Me campaign, a program launched in 2002 in collaboration with Unilever/Dove to foster self-esteem and body positivity among girls.

Today, Dawes is standing up for her younger self.

Like Moceanu, Dawes opened her own training center, the Dominique Dawes Gymnastics & Ninja Academy. (She currently has two locations in Maryland, with a third set to open next year.) There’s no focus on earning a Division One scholarship or making the Olympics. Instead, her goal is to make sure that every person who walks through the door knows they’re special.

“If I can give young people that compassionate and kind environment that maybe they otherwise don’t have, that’s where I feel like I’m making the greatest difference in this world,” Dawes says. “Then young people feel that safe environment. They start listening to themselves. And if it’s an unsafe environment, it won’t be this dull ringing in their head, where they just don’t know because they don’t know what’s safe and what’s unsafe.”

Toward the end of our conversation, I ask Dawes where she keeps her gold medal. “In the junk drawer. It has an AirTag on it,” she says with a slight laugh behind her voice. She explains that it’s because it makes it easy to grab when she travels for speaking engagements.

While the junk drawer may seem like an odd home for such a revered symbol of athletic achievement, it’s actually fitting. At the end of the day, Dawes says she doesn’t need Olympic medals, accolades, or media attention. What matters to her is that her four children are happy and healthy, and that the kids who come to her gyms know they are enough.

“My younger self was in a pretty bad situation for quite a few years, and I can right that [wrong] by trying to provide something healthy and empowering for the next generation,” she says, even if that means kids don’t win competitions or participate at the highest level of the sport. So be it.

The Future

In April 2024, Dawes found herself glued to the television. Like millions of Americans, she watched as Caitlin Clark and the Iowa Hawkeyes took on Angel Reese and the LSU Tigers for a spot in the Final Four of the 2024 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship.

It was more than just a hyped-up rematch of the previous year’s final. You could sense that these athletes were on the brink of something special, that they were writing a page in the history of women’s basketball—and women’s sports. Over the past two years, Clark and Reese have showcased their impeccable ballhandling and rebound skills, clutch buckets, and, yes, trash talk all over the court. Their athleticism and personalities have brought more eyeballs, attention, and excitement to the women’s game and have catapulted Clark, Reese, and the current generation of young ballers into the spotlight.

So Dawes, alongside her husband and kids, couldn’t tear her eyes away—even though it was dinnertime. Afterward, her daughters told her they wanted to be like those players. “I thought, Wow, that’s cool because I was in those shoes at one point, planting seeds of inspiration. Now these young women are trailblazers,” she says.

In 1992, Dawes became one of the first two Black women to compete on the US women’s gymnastics Olympic team. “There were so many little boys and girls of color looking at me and striving to be like me,” she says. And now, she says it’s beautiful to see the sport embrace diversity, whether it’s race, ethnicity, or body type. “They’re not only competing, but they’re dominating, and they’ve changed the sport of gymnastics.”

Athletes are extending their careers too. Dawes jokes that, at age 23, she was the “grandma” of the 2000 gymnastics team. Now, Miller notes that more gymnasts move between collegiate and elite gymnastics, something that wasn’t really done during her career, largely because it meant athletes would have to forgo lucrative post-Olympics sponsorship opportunities. They’re competing on different equipment now too, which “lead to more safety and longevity for athletes,” Miller says.

Many athletes are also prioritizing their health and well-being. “They have a lot more control these days over their training. They listen to their bodies. They listen to their minds. They make decisions. They’re smart,” Dawes says. It’s progress but it’s still a work in progress.

As elite athletes, Miller, Dawes, and Moceanu have always given their heart and soul inside and outside of the gym and the competition arena. They fell in love with the sport and its big skills as kids and want the next generation to love it too. But they also want young gymnasts to thrive, which means building a culture that doesn’t just pay lip service to routing out abusive practices, but one that truly cares about athletes as whole people—before, during, and after their athletic careers.

“This advocacy that I had fought for over a decade will be something that will remain in history forever, as well as that gold medal,” Moceanu says, “but I’m hoping that this made an even larger impact on people’s lives and the future of our sport.”

Photography: Nadya Wasylko. Creative direction: Amber Venerable. Wardrobe styling: Dione Davis. Hair: Hiro + Mari. Makeup: Shaina Ehrlich. Prop styling: Elaine Winter. Production: Melissa Kramer. Editor in chief: Rachel Wilkerson Miller. Research director: Yulia Khabinksy.