On April 18, 2017, in front of the (UCI) road commission in Brussels, presented the findings from a survey of the women’s peloton. Slappendel, a 34-year-old retired professional road cyclist and former Dutch national champion, was in Brussels to educate the sport’s governing body about the realities of being a female bike racer.

The findings from the survey of nearly 200 riders—roughly half the women’s peloton—were stark. One-third of respondents made $5,670 or less a year, and a majority reported working a second job in order to continue racing. Of those who made a salary, 51 percent paid some of it back to their team in order to compete—for mechanic fees, travel, race kit, event entry fees, and even gas money to get to the airport. Most respondents listed affordable medical care, a minimum salary, and standardized contracts as important issues they faced. When asked if there was a need for an independent association or union to “represent their career interests,” 85 percent responded yes.

The attendees were shocked. No one at the UCI had ever bothered to survey its female riders. As someone who was still serving on a UCI athlete commission, Slappendel doubted the ability of the sport’s leadership to fix the problems. Three months earlier, after she spoke to the men’s union, the Cyclistes Professionnels AssociĂ©s (CPA), a male official approached Slappendel and asked, “Do you really think women are professional cyclists?”

Few should be surprised that such an attitude still exists in cycling. Ever since Billie Jean King famously went rogue in 1973, defying tennis’s male-dominated governing body to launch her own Women’s Tennis Association, female professional athletes have been waging a battle for equality in nearly every major sport. The past few years have produced watershed wins. After filing a wage-discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2016, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team signed a new collective-bargaining agreement, dramatically closing the pay gap between men and women players. Last year the World Surf League announced that it would finally award equal prize money to men and women at all of its events.

In contrast, cycling has remained in the dark ages. The UCI’s 18-member management committee includes only two women, so it’s little wonder that the governing body has never made it a priority to give women cyclists a platform to help grow the sport. There are no stage races longer than a week outside of the Giro Rosa, no parity in race length, and little coverage online or on TV—a factor that all but eliminates major sponsorship deals.

Slappendel’s leadership is finally forcing some changes. Eight months after her meeting with the UCI, along with pro riders Carmen Small and Gracie Elvin, she helped launch (TCA), the first independent labor union for women’s cycling. More than 100 cyclists have signed up so far.

“In the Netherlands, women are more mouthy, disagreeable, and there is less of a hierarchy—because of that, we are more equal,” says Slappendel, who is now the executive director of the new union.

In its first year, the group negotiated supplemental health-insurance packages for cyclists and their families, offered standardized contract templates and legal help for racers, created a mentoring program linking experienced racers with rookies, and mediated 12 disputes between riders and their teams. In January, with a nudge from TCA, the UCI announced that the 2020 Women’s WorldTour would offer a minimum salary of around $17,000 to start, rising to match men’s Continental Teams salaries of $33,000 by 2023, as well as maternity contract clauses, health insurance, and eventually a pension.

The men’s peloton took notice. In the past year, two professional riders associations have pulled out of the men’s union, unhappy with the lack of reform, diversity, and athlete voices in the CPA. In March, British racer Mark Cavendish tweeted about TCA, writing, “I reckon the unity our female colleagues show is something us male riders could aspire to. Massive respect and support to everyone that’s put in to build to where it’s at.” Several high-profile male riders and national riders associations have approached TCA to see if they can join. Others are trying to find a way to model a new union for the men based on TCA’s efforts.

But Slappendel wants to go one step further and remake cycling’s infrastructure. Like King, who eventually bypassed the United States Tennis Association in her fight to fix the sport’s 12-to-1 gender pay ratio, Slappendel envisions one day going around the UCI, allowing women’s cycling to strike its own deals for TV rights, sponsorships, racecourses, and coverage in a way that benefits women cyclists, not their governing body. With the current unity of the women’s peloton, TCA could potentially negotiate with the organizer of the Tour de France, the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), about finally putting on a comparable women’s event.

“Iris is a force of nature,” says Joe Harris, coauthor of the blog the Outer Line, which covers the structure, governance, and economics of professional cycling. He and his writing partner, Steve Maxwell, advised Slappendel as she pulled together her early vision. “She’s like no one else in the sport,” Harris says. “She sees the whole picture. How do you change cycling, which has a solidified identity as a men’s sport, with a specific market and a concrete band of leaders? You scrap it all.”

“We need a cultural change,” says Slappendel, who spoke to me via Skype while recuperating from a concussion and two broken vertebrae after getting hit in the head by a falling rock during a hike. “Billie Jean needed to convince eight players. I have to convince 300 riders. Some of the women believe in our vision, but some see themselves as individuals who are there to race and get paid—well, until something goes wrong. We have 100 riders signed up. I want more.”

Slappendel insists that the success of her sport comes down to media attention and live-streaming races. The UCI can ask the ASO to organize a Tour de France for women, but that’s not her priority, she says, arguing that clinging to the old grand-tour model may be futile. She cites the growing popularity of other racing formats, like the short closed-circuit events called criteriums. “In the end, we shouldn’t be afraid of an entirely new concept,” Slappendel says. “We can’t wait around for the UCI to change.”

The post Meet the Billie Jean King of Cycling appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

In 2005, Sarah* was wrapping up her fifth year as a seasonal guide for a wilderness camp in the South. Normally awkward and shy, she had blossomed there, growing into a gifted leader and teacher. She had spent the last five years fixing trails and teaching her young charges how to make fires and hang bear bags. The camp was more of a home to her than anything from her childhood. After her first trip there, she cried when the bus pulled out of the parking lot to take her back to Louisiana.

Even deep into a night of heavy drinking at a local bar off of camp property, Sarah trusted her coworkers. It was easy. She says she considered them like-minded, laid-back outdoor guys—and completely non-threatening. By the time the bartender began wiping down tables, she was staggering from too many Long Island Iced Teas and flirting with a couple of them. At the end of the night, she walked out with Scott, a fellow guide she’d known for a couple of years.

The two clambered into her crayon-blue Toyota Corolla. Sarah remembers that they started making out, but when she began to feel sick and dizzy, she pulled away, and from what she figured happened next, she passed out. When she woke up, she was lying in the backseat and Scott was pulling off her pants.

Sarah said she was in and out of consciousness as he folded her body into different positions, raping her. She remembers him leaving the car and coming back several times, which, even in her drunken stupor, she recalls thinking was odd. The car door was open and the temperature outside was in the 40s. Scott covered her naked body with her car’s metallic sunshade and drove her back to camp. In the camp parking lot, he raped her twice more. When he began to enter her anally, she screamed so loudly that he stopped. He later told the police that he’d initiated sex with her back at the camp to “warm her up.”

After he helped her to her tent, Scott placed her in her sleeping bag and wished her a good night. She recounted her story for a state trooper two days later. But it wasn’t until years later, as often happens with trauma survivors, that Sarah thought back to the night and realized that Scott wasn’t leaving and re-entering the car. Sarah had been raped by three, maybe four, coworkers. Over time, she began to remember the physical differences between them.

*All the names in this story have been changed to protect the sources.

Sarah was one of ten women who reported being raped while on the job in the survey conducted by OBJ and #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű last fall. Of the 992 responses analyzed, one in two women and one in five men said they had been sexually harassed or assaulted during work-related events. The survey revealed several prevalent—and disturbing—patterns: an increased risk of sexual harassment in a male-dominated workplace, laissez-faire sexual harassment policies and procedures, retribution stemming from reporting harassment, and the prevalence of alcohol in nearly every instance of sexual misconduct. Several women acknowledged that they had to leave their jobs in order to end the harassment.

Over the last few years, surveys, reports, and lawsuits began a reckoning in the outdoor industry (and in the culture at large). In January 2016, the U.S. Interior’s Office of Inspector General finished an investigation of misconduct among employees of the Grand Canyon’s River District, finding evidence of a long-term pattern of “discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment.” In 2018, the șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű article “Hostile Environment” explored the rampant sexual harassment and assault among the river guiding community.

Last August, 5,000 people responded to a survey by a grassroots initiative, #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, which found more than 31 percent of men and women had experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault in a climbing environment. In January of this year, Camber Outdoors released the results of its survey of 1,364 professionals in the outdoor industry, finding that 47 percent of women and 15 percent of men had experienced sexual harassment and discrimination, but that only 31 percent say their company would handle it correctly.

The problem, in part: there’s no overarching regulatory body that oversees or institutes “best practices” for the $887 billion outdoor industry, which employs 7.6 million people. #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű stepped up last year and began offering a tool kit for companies to combat sexual abuse and harassment within their ranks. While the kits were received enthusiastically, no one knows whether or not they’ve been implemented seriously.

Taken together, the surveys from OBJ, #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű, and Camber paint a picture that resembles the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) findings that 60 percent of women experience “unwanted sexual attention or sexual coercion, or sexually crude conduct or sexist comments in the workplace.”

The predictors of sexual harassment on the job read like an outdoor industry checklist: male-dominated, boutique companies with fewer than 50 employees; a culture where locker room talk goes unchecked; and any office where you’d find a kegerator or decent happy hour.

Like many women in wilderness camps, Sarah was outnumbered by the guys. She learned to laugh off the inappropriate comments, because camp leadership laughed along with the men who made them. She learned to be diplomatic and firm when an adult male client balked at being led by a female ranger. She remembers the frequency with which male staff mentioned needing to visit the “water tower,” which was code for hiking to higher ground in order to spy on the teenage girls bathing in the uncovered backcountry showers. To the female employees of the camp, this behavior came with the territory.

Indeed, seven women in our survey used a version of the phrase “boys’ club” to describe why it was so hard to get a fair shake in their careers.

Several women in our survey reported wage disparities, being overlooked for promotions, and blatantly being ignored. The reason male-dominated workplaces come with such a high risk for gender and sexual harassment on the job is because of the atmosphere it sets up in the first place. Some women told us they were left out of mountain biking trips or dinners or other key work events that ended up being just the men from their company.

“When someone leaves women out of activities that improve client relationships or keeps them from showing leadership skills that might demonstrate their worth to a supervisor, it serves as a barrier to career advancement,” said Elizabeth Tippett, associate professor at the University of Oregon School of Law. “It’s gender harassment. Title VII was created to prevent discrimination against employees on the basis of sex, race, color, national origin, and religion, and protect advancement in the workplace.”

Immediately, gender-skewed workplaces set up an “in group” and an “out group.” According to a 2008 study in Journal of Occupational Health Psychology (which has been backed up by several more in recent years), in homogenous, single-gender-dominated workplaces, the people in the minority group are perceived as intruders, which leads to less support, more critical evaluations, and harassment. They’re deemed less competent. And even if they prove successful, their majority peers tend to dislike them and view their accomplishments negatively.

Alice spent a year putting together a big event for the outdoor sports association she worked for, and it was a hit. When she found herself in a hotel room celebrating with male executives later that night, they discussed the improvements to the conference, but when she tried to chime in, they ignored her. Only when Alice began to put on her coat did a sponsor perk up, and ask, “Why are you leaving so soon, sweetheart?” before blowing her a kiss. The irony, Alice said, is that one of the key improvements to the conference was adding events about diversity and gender equity.

When a company devalues the efforts of women and sequesters them into an out group, it sets the stage for harassment. Acceptance of unequal treatment or the inability to see it as a problem is the largest indicator for sexual harassment in a workplace, according to the EEOC.

If employers write off the behavior as part of the company’s culture, it often leads to far bigger problems down the road as their female employees are forced to continue working with the men who are chronic harassers. Gender harassment begets sexual harassment begets assault. But too often, companies only focus on the assault and not the behavior that breeds it.

“The partners at my company were good at protecting women, but they always fell short of empowering them,” said one woman.

The morning after her rape, Sarah woke up in her cot, vomit on the floor. She told one friend what had happened, as well as her female supervisor. She was in shock. Her body was sore everywhere. Sarah couldn’t eat or drink from the nausea, and every time she fell asleep, she woke from nightmares. She was so exhausted, so dizzy, that doing anything other than lying down felt impossible. Neither her supervisor nor any other senior camp official or friend checked in on her for 24 hours. She was completely alone.

By the evening of the second day, the director of the camp finally got involved and insisted that Sarah file a police report. In all, the state trooper interviewed Sarah, Scott, and six other coworkers who were with them at the bar that night. All of them remember Sarah and Scott flirting and eventually leaving together. The next morning, the director told Sarah it would probably be best if she left the camp so that people wouldn’t ask questions. He asked if she had somewhere to stay. She said yes, even though both of them knew she was estranged from her family. Three days after her gang rape, feeling alone, scared, and a burden to the rest of the camp, Sarah drove herself down the mountain and away from the place that had once been a refuge, but was now a trauma zone.

Our survey revealed a multitude of issues when reporting problematic behavior to HR or senior management. Often, the report was acknowledged and then ignored. Other times, the accused received a stern talking-to, but little else. A few women told us that they watched as the perpetrator got a promotion or a new title at another company before he was eventually let go for the same abusive behavior they’d tried and failed to stop. In the majority of cases, if there was a response, it was bungled. That’s despite the fact that the companies often had a sexual harassment policy in place.

“Policy in itself is meaningless unless you implement it,” said Tippett. “You need to behave in a way that is consistent with the policy and discipline people who disregard it. If no one practices the policy, it won’t protect the company, employees won’t feel confident reporting, and it certainly won’t stop or prevent harassment.”

According to a 2008 meta-analysis of a decade’s worth of sexual harassment studies, approximately 70 percent of employees don’t complain about their harassment to their employers. Instead, they avoid their harasser, downplay the harassment, or ignore and endure the behavior. The reasons are numerous: fear of humiliation, ostracism, blame, and indifference; worry about damaging their careers or reputations; or after all of that effort, inaction by management.

Sometimes, they don’t report because they haven’t even started their job yet.

Maria had just nabbed her dream job as an island guide and was a week away from moving her whole life to her new, tropical home when a future coworker called to let her know the start date.

“Then he asked if I had big boobs,” said Maria. “I didn’t respond. I figured if this guy’s a problem, I’ll deal with it when I get there.”

Turned out, dealing with it was a full-time job, she said. Her coworker always took two pictures of his female clients: one for the company files and one for himself. But his behavior was explained away by his superiors and her coworkers as being juvenile, and she says she followed other women’s leads and “gave him a wide berth.”

“I didn’t know I had freckles on my butt until he told me they were his favorite part of me when I bent over to wash gear in my bikini,” said Maria.

More often than not, women won’t speak out because they know the repercussions. In fact, the study in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology found that 75 percent of employees who spoke out against workplace mistreatment faced some form of retaliation. And men are not immune from it.

As Bill and his wife were leaving his company Christmas party, the vice president of his company grabbed her ass when he hugged her goodbye. She didn’t react in order to not make a scene, but in the office on Monday, the VP called Bill into his office to let him know that what happened was “an accident.”

Still, Bill reported the incident to the owners of the company. They were shocked and said they would put the incident in the offender’s file, but the owners sheepishly admitted that they were non-confrontational people. For months, nothing happened, but Bill says a “switch flipped” when it came to his boss’s satisfaction with his work. Then, out of the blue, Bill was put on probation and issued a 60-day performance improvement plan. He felt betrayed—he knew didn’t deserve it—and let upper management know that his boss had assaulted his wife.

The next Monday, he walked into work with a resignation letter in his hand. The blinds were drawn in the conference room, where he soon realized upper management was talking about him. Someone had changed the password on his computer. They were planning on firing him that morning.

An EEOC task force found that “employers often make a wrong cost-benefit analysis when faced with allegations of harassment against a highly valued employee.” That’s why they tend to ignore or downplay misconduct: fear of cost to the business. Often, companies worry about a lawsuit from the accused, but the EEOC found that the cost of allowing harassment to continue is far higher. Between 2010 and 2015, employers paid $698.7 million to employees alleging harassment during EEOC’s pre-litigation enforcement process.

“Even if it doesn’t end in a lawsuit or public scandal, your employees will know what happened,” said Tippett. “Your response will have an impact on your culture and your workplace: how employees feel about you and the integrity of your business.”

In our survey, Jillian said she watched as one of her young female coworkers was sexually harassed and then intimidated by a supervisor at the ski resort where they worked. He continually asked the young woman out and each time, she said no. Eventually, he began to send her graphic photos and text messages saying he was going to kill himself and started rumors that she was sleeping with another employee. Jillian was concerned for the young woman’s safety, so, following company protocol, she reported the harassment to HR. The next morning, HR called Jillian in for a meeting.

“They told me I wasn’t seeing the big picture and that I needed to keep this quiet,” said Jillian. “They told me, ‘Sometimes snowflakes hear ‘sexual harassment’ and immediately jump on it.’” Bullied for weeks afterwards, Jillian eventually quit. She was seven months pregnant.

“I’ve been skiing on that mountain since I was five years old,” said Jillian. “I can’t go back. They destroyed my favorite place on earth.”

Other women told us that the nature of their outdoor job meant that their call for help might go unanswered in the wild. Cassie worked for the U.S. Forest Service Hotshots crew, fighting fires in the ’90s. She says she dealt with the typical misogyny that comes with being the only woman on a fire crew and once had to threaten a coworker who gave her “purple nurples,” telling him that at the next fire, her Pulaski might slip.

But it wasn’t until Cassie signed up for a mountaineering course that she felt threatened and demoralized. She was 20 years old and had to share a tent with two Chicago firemen who she says were “sexist and racist.” The pair spent their time talking about their experiences with Filipino prostitutes. When Cassie mentioned that her mother was a person of color, the men asked how much for her services. Sharing the tent felt especially unsafe when the men went out to the bar and returned drunk. The days weren’t much better, though. She says they sexually harassed her as they belayed her.

“I wasn’t a high-income person,” said Cassie. “I took this course to build my skills as an investment in myself, but I wasn’t getting the same experience because it was hindered by these guys. The Hotshot crew might have done things that were inappropriate, but they had my back. My course instructor at the mountaineering school did nothing. When I wrote a letter to the school about my experience, they never replied. If you don’t have a way to respond to women’s incidents in the field, you put them at emotional and physical risk.”

She went on, “As a woman, when you walk into a dark parking lot, you’re conditioned to be on high alert. When we’re in a place that should feel safe and welcoming, but it’s not, it’s overwhelming.”

Cassie said it was the climate of “accepted hostility” that turned her away from pursuing a career in the outdoors. Instead, she became a scientist and eventually found a way to become an outdoor educator. Currently, much of her research focuses on the idea of belonging.

“People spend a lot of cognitive energy looking for social signals that they belong,” said Cassie. “The outdoor industry should send signals that everyone belongs. You’ll finally get a diverse set of people who want to be outdoors and they’ll spend their time enjoying it, not puzzling out if it’s a place for them.”

In the U.S., 43 percent of employees work in organizations with 50 or fewer people, which means the majority of them don’t have an HR department. Most people have no idea what to do in the face of sexual misconduct, especially when the accused is their boss or mentor or friend. It turns out that simply writing a code of ethics won’t eliminate the problem. There needs to be training, procedures, swift enforcement, and repercussions. And it only works if leadership models it.

But even with an HR department, Claire Harwell, attorney and legal director for the New Mexico Coalition of Sexual Assault Programs (NMCSAP), said she’s seen good people repeat the same destructive actions executed by the U.S. Olympic Committee or the Catholic Church. They protect the institution, protect its reputation, protect its accused. As Harwell sees it, the actions have more to do with our inability to handle bad news.

“We don’t want to believe bad stuff happens,” said Harwell. “We want to believe that we live and operate in a safe space, and we will discount anything that proves that wrong—even if it means disbelieving women and children who say otherwise.”

That’s why policies are necessary to correct the knee-jerk human response. Not only to correct for biases or ignorance, said Harwell, but because a company’s mishandling of a sexual assault response can cause victims a second round of trauma symptoms.

In our survey, respondents name-checked outdoor industry trade shows like Outdoor Retailer, the now-defunct Interbike, and other sport-specific events as places where alcohol and sexual harassment go hand-in-hand. Usually, the drinking begins on the trade show floor before the day is wrapped. The drinks often continue right into dinner with clients or coworkers, and they keep flowing late into the night at music shows or after-parties. Best case, it’s a good night filled with new friends and contacts and maybe some business deals. Worst case, it leads to harassment or assault.

“In nearly all sexual violence cases, alcohol is involved,” said Callie Rennison, PhD, professor in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Colorado Denver. Rennison’s research has examined violence against women and minority groups and how survivors interact with the criminal justice system. She, along with director of program operations at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Charlie Lieu, created and conducted the #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű climbing survey. She said that company leaders must limit alcohol at work and outside work-related events.

“Nobody is saying no alcohol,” said Rennison. “But it should never be a free-for-all, anything-goes kind of night. When people see their friends overdoing it, they should step in. If someone says he’s going to ‘hit that person’s tent up’ because he’s pretty sure she’s interested, stop him.”

Last November, Google announced an important policy change because alcohol was the most common reason for sexual harassment complaints among its staff: “Excessive consumption of alcohol is not permitted when you are at work, performing Google business, or attending a Google-related event, whether onsite or offsite…The onus will be on leaders to take appropriate steps to restrict any excessive consumption among their teams, and we will impose more onerous actions if problems persist.”

While alcohol is correlated with sexual harassment and assault, it’s not a cause of the bad behavior. That old adage that a few beers make some people more “handsy?” Several studies have found there is no relationship to the amount someone drank and their aggressiveness. In some cases, the desire to harass or assault someone may cause him to drink more in order to justify the behavior. Lindsey told us that while working as a project manager at a cycling event, she had fallen asleep in her shared hotel room. Unbeknownst to her, her roommate had given the other bed to an inebriated male journalist attending the event. Lindsey woke up to him trying to kiss her and take off her clothes. She threw elbows and managed to get him to stop. “He stopped because he wanted to,” she said. “I wouldn’t have been able to overpower him if he’d decided to continue.”

Sadly, society tends to apply a sexist double standard when alcohol is involved: we often see a drunk perpetrator as less responsible for his or her actions and a drunk victim of assault as more responsible. According to a study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, more than 50 percent of victims who “experienced an alcohol-related sexual assault” are told it was his or her fault for making the decision to drink.

That’s exactly what happened to Sarah.

When she eventually reported her rape to the camp director, he told her there was a lesson to be learned in all of this. Maybe next time, he said, “you won’t drink so much.” “I’d never even considered blaming myself until that moment,” said Sarah. “It changed everything.”

When Sarah returned home to Louisiana to recuperate after her rape, she received notification that the District Attorney’s office had enough evidence to issue an arrest warrant for Scott, if she wanted to pursue a case. Sarah’s first thought was about Scott and how he wouldn’t fare well in prison. (That’s not an uncommon sentiment: according to the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network (RAINN), one out of 14 survivors say they didn’t report the sexual crime to police because they didn’t want to get the perpetrator in trouble). Her second thought was about the camp director’s insinuation: that it was her own fault because she had been so wasted. She decided to forgo the charges for fear of being humiliated in court.

The outdoor industry’s laid-back atmosphere—stemming from the fact that so many brands were formed by friends who met on the mountain, crag, or river—is part of the problem.

“It’s a passion-first industry,” said a former outdoor PR rep.

“A lot of the big brands today were started by a few friends in the ’90s: a handful of climbers want a better carabiner, and you’ve got a climbing company. Five or ten years down the road, you’re growing and still hiring more of your friends. Then you’re employing 25 people and suddenly, that mix of relationships and boundaries gets tricky, fast.”

Finding that line—how to go from selling gear out of your garage to managing a workforce—is where the outdoor industry needs to grow up.

“Just because you’re a great climber, doesn’t mean you’re a great leader,” said Rennison. “More companies are getting their act together to train their leaders to be just that. You don’t get to say, ‘It’s 5 o’clock, let’s get drunk.’ Once you’re a leader, employees will always look to you to see what’s allowed.”

But the collegiality and camaraderie of the outdoor industry is also what may drive its best attributes. Usually when Rennison conducts sex and violence surveys, hate mail is just part of the job. When she worked on the #SafeșÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű climbing survey, more than 50 percent of the people who reached out to her were men who wanted to say thank you for bringing the issue to light.

“Every other industry has addressed this topic after a big crisis, when they were forced to deal with a situation they’d known about,” said Rennison, who’s a recreational climber. “The outdoor industry got ahead of it. We weren’t afraid to turn over the rock and see what’s under it. Maybe it’s because we see each other on the human level because we participate in activities that come with a high chance of dying. On the subconscious level, we’re each other’s keepers.”

Sarah said that she applied to work at the camp three separate times after her rape. It seemed nonsensical, she agreed, but the camp was the only home she knew. Each time, her application was rejected.

In 2011, Sarah decided to pursue a civil case against her attacker. In the six years since her rape, she’d coped with PTSD, survived an amphetamine addiction and eating disorder, and gotten therapy—making it to the other side of trauma in a way many people will not. By 2011, she felt healed, healthy, and ready to finally pursue justice. But at the time, the state had a three-year statute of limitations on civil lawsuits stemming from sexual assault and battery and had destroyed the evidence in her case. Reaching out in our survey seemed like one way to tell her story.

“It’s been eating away at me for a long time,” said Sarah.

In 2005, when the state trooper interviewed Scott, she said he acknowledged that while they were having sex, Sarah said that it hurt. He shrugged it off, telling her it was because she hadn’t had sex in a long time. “When you drink, you normally do things you wouldn’t when you were sober,” Scott stated in the police report.

During an interview for this story, the state trooper said that even 14 years later, this case has stuck with her. Her intuition that night was that Scott had done this before and that he was guilty. She thinks that if Sarah had pursued charges, she would have won. While the trooper didn’t suspect multiple perpetrators at the time, she said that some of the statements she collected from others that night were suspiciously vague and brief, and that when a woman is as drunk as Sarah was that night, there’s the potential that multiple men will take advantage of it.

Sarah said that in the years since, she’s heard of other incidents of rape at the camp.

“I started crying when I found out about them because I feel like all of this stuff is preventable with proper training,” said Sarah. “I was sexually harassed just about every day there. After my rape, it was clear that the camp’s risk management didn’t come from a place of love, but from fear of litigation. Does that culture still exist there? God, I hope not.”

The post Unsafe Space appeared first on șÚÁÏłÔčÏÍű Online.

A new lawsuit, filed on May 4 in federal court in Denver, alleges that former Olympic taekwondo coach Jean Lopez and his brother, three-time Olympic medalist Steven Lopez, sexually abused or raped four female taekwondo athletes when the victims were teenagers and young adults.

The filing adds a notable twist to litigation of this type, claiming that the Lopez brothers and two named organizations—the (USOC) and (the national governing body, or NGB, that effectively runs the sport)—have been complicit in “sexual abuse, exploitation, and trafficking” during episodes of alleged abuse that spanned more than 20 years. According to the suit, the organization’s failure to adequately protect the athletes left them in the hands of men who they knew were sexual predators, in situations that involved international travel and monetary gain.

“Starting in 1996-97 and continuing until 2018,” says the complaint, “[the] USOC and USA TKD knowingly participated in a venture to transport and traffic plaintiffs … around the globe to be used for the sexual benefit” of the Lopez brothers, along with unnamed coaches and officials who, the suit says, “will be uncovered during discovery in this case.”

The suit is the latest development in the ongoing controversy surrounding Jean and Steven Lopez, two of the most influential figures in U.S. taekwondo. On April 3, after a three-year probe, the —an independent investigative arm that handles abuse and harassment allegations involving Olympic athletes—issued a recommendation to the USOC that led to Jean Lopez being from participating in the Olympics or any USOC events. SafeSport’s investigation of Steven Lopez is .

In the current climate of #MeToo comeuppance, this legal strategy represents a seismic culpability shift if a judge allows the case to proceed with all claims intact. According to the suit, the USOC’s executives have a well-documented history of allowing children to train and travel with known serial abusers, as illustrated by the Lopez cases.

“By 2006, USA TKD had received written and verbal complaints that Jean Lopez and Steven Lopez were routinely sexually exploiting, assaulting, and raping multiple female athletes that were entrusted into the protection … of the USOC and USA TKD,” it says. “The USOC knew or was willfully blind that the Lopez brothers represented a clear and present danger to young female athletes.”

The suit also says that the USOC has routinely offloaded its oversight responsibilities onto NGBs like USA Taekwondo, despite the fact that the USOC funded these organizations, paid the coaches’ salaries, and bankrolled international travel expenses of both the alleged perpetrators and their victims.

“Ignoring repeated reports of sexual misconduct,” the suit claims, “the USOC has prioritized commercial success over safety by ignoring and then covering up complaints, deferring and diverting investigations, and continuing to financially support NGBs that tolerate or even facilitate sexual abuse by coaches and others.”

Currently, there are 47 NGBs that oversee a range of sports represented in the Summer and Winter Olympics, everything from high-profile events like swimming, gymnastics, and figure skating to less-publicized pursuits like team handball and table tennis. In recent years, other sports under the Olympic umbrella have been the target of explosive allegations involving sexual abuse—most notably and USA Swimming.

An important legislative development that affects the new lawsuit—and that is mentioned in it—is the Safe Sport Authorization Act of 2018, passed by Congress in January. This law was designed to give athletes and NGBs better pathways for addressing allegations of abuse. It extends the statute of limitations to ten years after a victim discovers a violation or injury, and it also declares that the USOC, NGBs, and clubs will not be liable for defamation claims brought by coaches and others removed for misconduct. In these ways, the Act clears the way for greater accountability. “This Congressional action signals welcome and long-awaited progress for elite athletes who are survivors of abuse in their sports,” the suit maintains.

All told, the USOC and its NGBs represent hundreds of thousands of athletes, whose performance and successes boost the USOC’s reputation, sponsorships, television deals, and revenue. Even if an athlete would prefer to bypass the USOC to make an Olympic bid, they can’t: Each NGB is responsible for selecting the athletes and coaches for the Pan American Games, world championships, world cups, and Olympic Games. In the case of USA Taekwondo, those selections are done at the discretion of the sport’s Olympic coach, and for the 2004, 2008, and 2012 Olympic Games, that person was Jean Lopez.

In the lawsuit, taekwondo athletes Heidi Gilbert, Gabriella Joslin, Amber Means, and Mandy Meloon detail their allegations of abuse and rape at the hands of Jean and Steven Lopez. For example, Gilbert alleges that, in 2002, when she was 20, Jean Lopez wrestled her to the ground and began “dry humping” her until he ejaculated in his pants. In 2003, Gilbert alleges, Jean drugged her drink and sexually assaulted her while she was unable to move. According to the complaint: “Employees [of USA Taekwondo] threatened Heidi and warned her not to tell anyone about Jean’s sexual assaults,” so she never reported what had happened.

The suit, filed by lawyers based in Indiana, Kansas, and Colorado—Jonathan Little, Rex A. Sharp, Ryan C. Hudson, Larkin E. Walsh, and Daniel A. Lipman—asks for a jury trial and seeks punitive damages. The next step is a response by plaintiffs.

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Rice’s love of snow has grown exponentially. In 2011, the Alta, Utah, native skinned 75,000 vertical feet. In 2015, he logged 703,000. But the one-year world record was two million, set by Canadian Greg Hill in 2010. So in 2016, Rice planned to notch 2.5 million self-­propelled vertical feet by skinning (and hiking, when he had to) 5,000 to 12,000 feet per day in Argentina, California, Chile, Colorado, Utah, and Ore­gon. There were plenty of powder days, but much of it was a slog. He spent the entire month of June trudging up dirt and scree to ski down Colorado’s diminishing veins of snow. Along the way, he learned a few things about setting an ambitious goal and staying motivated. By late October, he’d pulled even with Hill. And on December 29, just outside Alta, he notched vertical foot number 2.5 million.Ìę

Bye-bye down time: “Between skiing, eating, and transport to and from the hill, I only had about an hour and a half of free time each day.”

Homemade fuel: “I ate Probars while I skied, but my big issue was recovery. The key was four grams of carbs to one gram of protein in my recovery drink. Every night I had a half-gallon of a homemade mix of seltzer water, ­orange juice, and soy milk. The next morning I was a new person.”Ìę

Finding ski buds: “In Utah and Colorado, friends would join me for laps. In Argentina, I used social media to find partners. It’s hard to overstate the value of two people’s energy.”

Going forward: “Pick a little drift of snow in front of you and get there, then pick another. You need to think about anything other than how hard it is.”

Turn up the volume: “There were days when I liked to put on light gear, plugÌęin a podcast, and go as fast as I could for five hours. I even managed to listen to the entire Radio Lab series all the way through.”

Thoughts to work: “When you’re out there for ten hours every day, you have so much time to stew in your thoughts that it becomes a source of anxiety. I wrote everything down on my iPhone as I skinned, and it helped me let go. I got so good at it that I could almost touch-type with-out looking.”Ìę

Long-term magic: “When the skiing is good, it’s easy to stay motivated and go with the flow. That motivation pulls you along. But you need stubbornness to go for a goal that takes a year.”

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A strange thing happened over the weekend of Saturday, November 16: Bode Miller’s wife, Morgan Beck Miller, posted a long and sizzling piece on her blog that she labeled “The Honest Truth.” What she wrote, complete with Facebook and Twitter grabs, was a blast against Sara McKenna, one of Bode’s ex-girlfriends. A child that McKenna and Bode conceived together is currently the object of a custody battle between the Millers (who live in Southern California) and McKenna (who lives in New York City).

The apparent motivation for this happened on the 14th, when a Manhattan court ruled that the custody proceedings weren’t over and that they would be moved back to New York, three months after the Millers thought they’d won primary custody of the child in San Diego. The next day, Morgan had her say, characterizing McKenna as a woman motivated by a “desire for revenge, attention, and money” and reproducing what she believed were ominous statements made online. “She began posting bizarre messages on her Twitter account,” Morgan wrote of McKenna, “such as, ‘A silent woman means she is about to destroy you.’” Morgan said that, in one tweet, McKenna “posted a picture of a gun referring to it as her girlfriend.”

News of theÌę post was tweeted and retweeted, and then it suddenly vanished from Miller’s blog on Sunday the 17th, without any explanation. At this point neither Miller will discuss it, but the issues raised by the dustup aren’t likely to go away as the two sides square off. What follows is the post as it originally appeared.

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Bode Miller is at a beach volleyball game, and he's pissed. As in: he has thrown his Sölden cap to the floor, his head is in his hands, and he's visibly shaking. It's August 2013, and Bode is in Salt Lake City's Liberty Park watching his wife, 26-year-old Morgan Beck Miller, lose in a tournament put on by the (AVP). A couple of friends sitting near him in the VIP section look worried. It doesn't help that the families of the winning players—who just beat Morgan and her partner, Kaitlin Nielsen, two games to none—are only a few feet away, whooping and clinking beer cans. Bode probably wants to hit something. Instead, he has to sit there, itchy in this moment of athletic impotence.

At 36, Bode is on the old side for an athlete, but when he's around any kind of competition the adrenaline still flows. It's a blood rush that has allowed him to ski on pure guts, ignoring personal safety and technical grace for balls-to-the-wall plummets down the toughest racecourses in Europe, Japan, and North America. He's the same unleashed wild man who, over a 17-year span, became the most decorated male skier in U.S. history and one of the most electrifying athletes to watch anytime, anywhere. Bode has won five Olympic medals, 33 individual World Cup races, six event titles, and two overall World Cup crowns. (He has so many trophies and cups that he sometimes uses one to marinate chicken wings.) Going into the 2013–14 ski season, he was recovering from microfracture surgery to his left knee that kept him off the slopes last year, but he was thinking big: his goal was to win the overall World Cup title and, in February, collect more gold at the 2014 Sochi Olympics. Even now, Bode brings it to the mountain like a Red Bull–chugging 16-year-old. It's as if nothing's changed.

Except everything has.

In Salt Lake City, Bode quietly picks up his hat. He knows that if Morgan sees his bare head, she'll figure out that he lost his temper and he'll hear about it later. He doesn't mind throttling things down on her behalf, though, since he's quite clearly a man in love, for better and for worse.

Bode said goodbye to his playboy lifestyle when he married Morgan in October 2012, and his first year with the 26-year-old athlete and model has been a mix of pure joy and terrible pain for both of them. An incident in mid-December was typical: Bode, who has taken up golf, hooked a tee shot directly into Morgan's left eye—an injury that required more than 50 stitches and resulted in what may be permanent vision impairment. That day, Morgan established herself as one of the all-time gamers by and the message “I'm not feeling so hot. Line drive to the face today with a golf ball from my darling husband. I still love.” Bode kept his message short and contrite: “Hit wife w golfball. #worstfeelingever.”

Bode's lament came in the wake of a pretty bad November. That month, Bode and Morgan began a bitter custody battle for a baby boy Bode had conceived with an ex-girlfriend before he met Morgan—a now resolved dispute that brought him plenty of negative media attention (“Bode Miller's Baby Mama Sara McKenna Claims: 'He Never Offered to Use a Condom' ”). By that time, Bode already had custody of a five-year-old girl he'd conceived with a different ex-girlfriend. Later, in January 2013, Morgan miscarried what would have been their first child. A few months after that, Bode's brother, Chelone “Chilly” Miller, died of a seizure at the age of 29.

It was the kind of year that might incline even Romeo and Juliet to call the whole thing off, but the couple remain undaunted. Ebullient, even. Publicly, you can figure that out from the kissy-face emoticons they post on Twitter. Get a glimpse of their personal life and you see it in their glass-half-full handling of marriage's many challenges. “Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of people would have walked away by now,” Morgan says, “but if you look at the bigger picture, our lives are amazing.”

BODE WAS KNOCKED sideways the first time he saw a picture of Morgan in the offices of the New York sports agent they share. A snap-shot of a blond, six-foot-two California beauty will do that to a man.

He wrangled her number in May 2012 and swung by a volleyball tournament in Florida where she was playing a couple of weeks later. At the end of her match—which she won, a breakthrough moment for her fledgling AVP career—Bode watched her cry. In that outpouring of raw emotion, he says, he saw every-thing he wanted in a woman.

“She was trying to be macho and hide it, but I saw it,” he tells me, his stubble now speckled with gray. “When everything is stripped away—it happens in sports or when someone is stressed—you see who a person really is, even someone like Morgan, who has as thick a wall as anyone I've ever met.”

“He said that's when he knew I was his soul mate,” Morgan says, feigning gushiness and leaning into him in a booth at Bambara, a Salt Lake City bistro where we're having dinner.

“No, I didn't know that until June,” says Bode.

“We met on May 26,” Morgan points out.

The lovebirds flew in from very different habitats. Bode, famously, had a Huck Finn upbringing in the New Hampshire woods, with hippie parents who let their four children self-police, get dirty, get lost. At 11, he was five-two and a scrappy 115 pounds; he fought to keep up with older, bigger skiers as they sped down the mountain.

Morgan grew up in Coto de Caza, a 5,000-acre gated community in Southern California, in a family that Bode calls “the white Cosbys.” Her father, Ed Beck, was a pioneer in software financing, which made him very, very rich. They were definitely on the grid: Morgan was given a Mercedes as her first car and got grounded if she didn't blow-dry her hair. By age 11, she was already more than six feet tall. She ended up playing volleyball at UC Berkeley and turned pro in beach volleyball in 2011.

Since Bode has achieved so much in sports, he can shrug off a bad race, a bad Olympics, and even a bad breakup with the U.S. Ski Team. (Which he quit between 2007 and 2009, in part for not supporting him during controversies like his flop at the 2006 Olympics.) Morgan is a midlevel pro whose dream is simply to compete in the Olympics someday, and she has trouble shaking off a bad practice. During one early match at the Salt Lake City Open, where she and Nielsen ulti-mately placed ninth, Morgan slammed her fists into the sand after hitting a perfectly set-up ball into the net. It took some tough love from Bode to keep the negative moment from bleeding into the next game.

“Morgan's emotions are her biggest strength,” says Bode. “But she's also a dominant and very powerful woman—most guys aren't ready for the brunt of that.” Bode revels in it. She expresses the highs and lows for him, the constant, analytical half; he reels her back to rational when she needs it.

People think that Bode lacks perspective, but that's not really true, as he'll show you during the wandering analytical conversations he's known for. At one point, Bode compares the range of emotions he and Morgan experience to liquid moving through a drinking straw. He holds out his hands and mimes a straw with a huge opening, the diameter of a basketball. That's Morgan's “volume.” He shrinks it to the size of a marble: that's his. “Our personalities look black-and-white,” he says. “But we require each other to get the full spectrum out of life. Neither of us would be the same otherwise.”

Morgan shoots me a glance. “Not one conversation remains on the surface,” she says. “Every day is a therapy session.”

“She knows she can talk about stuff with me and I won't just address it,” Bode says. “If there are 30 layers there, we're going to start from the bottom.”

LAST APRIL 7 in New Hampshire, Bode's mother, Jo Miller, entered a room making the most pained sounds that Bode had ever heard from a human. He and Morgan were playing with his daughter, Dacey, and at first he almost laughed, because he thought it was a put-on. Then Jo told Bode that Chilly was gone. He'd died in Mammoth Lakes, California, inside his van, of a seizure stemming from a motorcycle crash he'd suffered years earlier. Chilly was a professional snowboarder and was hoping to join Bode at Sochi in February. For the next 90 minutes, Bode couldn't stop sobbing and sweating.

Neither Bode nor Morgan will expand much on that day, but they both say the full impact of the loss didn't hit until Chilly's absence at August's annual, family-heavy BodeBash in his hometown of Franconia, New Hampshire—a fundraiser for Bode's adaptive- and youth-sports nonprofit, the . Bode has since said that he feels he has his brother's energy with him and that Chilly's spirit will be there in Sochi.

Leading up to that possible final Olympic Games, Bode's goal was to win all four alpine races—downhill, slalom, giant slalom, and super-G—at every World Cup event, which meant regularly defeating the reigning giant-slalom world champion, Ted Ligety, and the super-G and downhill world champion, Norwegian Aksel Lund Svindal. Bode is working with Chris Krause, a technician for retired Swiss World Cup star Didier Cuche, and his hope is to win the overall World Cup, set a points-total record, and come home with a few heavy necklaces from Russia.

“It's a lot,” Bode admits. “I have way more understanding of what it takes to train and win in four events than anyone else in the world. Whether my body puts up with it
”

“It's ambitious,” says Forest Carey, head multicoach for the U.S. Ski Team and the man overseeing both Bode's and Ligety's bids for the overall World Cup. “Is it possible? Yes. Is Bode capable of doing it? Yes, he's done it before. Is it likely this year? Ummm.”

At the opening World Cup race in Sölden, Austria, in October, Ligety took the GS title. Bode finished 19th. “Wasn't my best skiing,” he tweeted later. “But happy to be back.” It's a respectable start, though, and Carey anticipated that Bode would take a few races to really get under way. He thinks there's no reason that Bode can't be competitive all season.

Bode has dropped 20 pounds and says he feels lighter and springier than ever. Technically, this is also the first time he's had a fully functional body since 2001, thanks to the surgery in spring 2012. Last August, at his first training camp in New Zealand, Bode came back skiing fast, but he left early because of swelling in his left knee. If it turns out that his body can't handle the four events, Bode says the first to go will be giant slalom and, after that, slalom. “I'm old enough and mature enough to know that you get old, and if your knee fucking hurts, it's time to let go.”

Bode could be hard to beat in the downhill and super-G. Older skiers excel at those two races. The fast-twitch muscles required for the slalom and giant slalom, however, favor youth. “Taking on the slalom and giant slalom is like being a running back,” Carey says. “You have to be explosive on your feet. Past 33 years old, not a lot of guys get better. And with Bode coming back from a microfracture surgery—there's a lot of chattering, jarring, and slamming in those courses. I want to say that Ligety can beat him handily in slalom, but
”

He pauses. “I've learned to never bet against what Bode's capable of doing.”

FROM THE STANDS in Salt Lake City, in the stifling, godless heat of a Utah August, Bode watches Morgan's matches like a stage mother: worrying aloud, pointing out mistakes, texting her tactical ideas mid-match, and talking volleyball semantics with other AVP players and their coaches between events.

“Bode comes to every single practice,” says Morgan. “I'm not kidding. One day, four of us were working on pulling drills when Bode brought practice to a halt. He wanted to show us—and this includes a fifteen-year volleyball veteran—how to do it better.”

Bode has a knack for picking up the invisible pulses of a game, gaining an intuitive playbook of moves and responses through observation. (He's a first-rate amateur tennis player and has become a good golfer.) He also has a knack for being a no-filter know-it-all, which doesn't always fly with others. “Being married to Bode requires a lot of patience,” Morgan says. “I swear to God, he has said to me, 'If people listened whenever I told them what to do, they'd be so much happier.'

“There are days I'd like him to play in traffic,” she admits. “But the worst part? Ninety percent of the time he's correct. Do you know how that feels? It's obnoxious.”

The way she smiles when she talks about Bode isn't the passive acceptance of a newlywed, but genuine amusement about the man she married. So she gives him a pass on the small things. She lets him pick her entrée at dinners and her dress for the ESPYs, and after some argument, she gave him her blessing to build a regulation-size sand volleyball court in their yard in Coto de Caza, where the pair ended up after they got married and Bode sold his yacht for (literally) a more stable home.

Because of the volleyball court, Morgan barely has time to finish her morning coffee with her parents—who are living with the couple for now and watching their pets and plants when Bode and Morgan travel—before Bode turns to her and says, “Let's go, babe.” Her daily practices have become decidedly more intense, but as Morgan points out, when Bode is training hard, he often keeps going until he pukes.

“I'm super stubborn and patient,” Bode says during dinner in Salt Lake City. “I know sports. I know nothing happens overnight. If I make a suggestion, I trust that if it doesn't happen immediately, it might sink in later. That's how I got Morgan to marry me. I always have two or three strategies going at once.
I have the immediate attack that I focus on, and that has three or four ancillary carryovers that help the other three or four attacks—”

“You're getting some insight here,” says Morgan. “Relentless.“

Bode bought Morgan an engagement ring in Chicago during the in July 2012, part of a “two-prong attack.” First, he found a diamond guy and had the ring sized. When he and Morgan walked into the jewelry store, Bode had the seller bring out the cushion-cut diamond ring. She turned white.

“She said, 'If you ask me, I'll say no,' ” says Bode. “And I said, 'I know. I haven't asked you yet.' ”

“It was a month and a half into our relationship,” Morgan says.

“I took the ring home, and we didn't talk about it,” says Bode. “We had it for so long that I was carrying it around in my backpack when we were in London for the Olympics. She got so flustered, because she was convinced I was going to lose it, and was like, 'No! You give it to goddamn me.' So here she was, carrying around her own ring.

“I knew”—Bode switches to a more scheming voice here—”that the strategy was working to perfection.”

At this point, all of Morgan's friends knew about the ring, and the thought of it drove her crazy. Finally, one night, she lost it.

“I told him, 'If you're not going to ask me to marry you, return the ring and buy it when you have the balls to propose,' ” says Morgan, throwing her hands up.

“And I said, 'Will you marry me?' ” Bode says, beaming. “She said, 'No
 Yes
 Ugh.' Check aaaaand mate!”

Morgan interrupts to say it didn't happen in quite this order. But that doesn't matter: Bode has his story, and he'll probably stick to it.

MORGAN WENT IN with her eyes open when she married Bode. There was the good: his daughter, Dacey, would become a part of her life. Bode's been friendly with her mother, Chanel Johnson (who has since married), ever since she was born, and he helped name the little girl. Then there was the bad: the risk of more ex-girlfriends and the negative publicity that seems to follow Bode around like a zombie entourage.

Three weeks into his relationship with Morgan, Bode found out he was going to be a dad for the second time. Morgan says she placed an awkward phone call to the mother, Sara McKenna, a former Marine and firefighter now living in New York City, who Bode had met through a high-end dating service, went out with a couple of times, and last saw a few days before he met his future wife. Morgan told McKenna she knew about the baby and reassured her that Bode would help take care of her. This was three weeks into Bode and Morgan's relationship.

“I could write a book about this year,” says Morgan, swiping through her phone's pictures to find a few of Bode and McKenna's cherubic son, Samuel Bode Miller-McKenna, a tiny doppelgĂ€nger of the skier, right down to the piercing blue eyes.

When Bode and Morgan got engaged, the tone of McKenna's tweets shifted from “Congrats to @MillerBode and I, 8 more months and we will have a baby him or baby me! 99% sure it's a boy already! :)” (in June 2012) to “Cheers to all the guys that man up and care about their babies. You guys deserve a gold medal, unlike some” (in September).

Later that fall, Bode filed a paternity suit for joint custody. (He did the same with Chanel Johnson for Dacey.) In response, McKenna, who could not be reached for comment, hired a publicist and released everything to the media on January 19, 2013. Three hours later, Morgan had her miscarriage. She was eleven weeks and two days in. She blogged about going through the devastation; among the heartfelt replies were a few comments saying she deserved it.

McKenna provided reporters with text messages allegedly showing that Bode had been willing to walk away from the baby and give her a lump sum of child support. She claims he wanted her to get an abortion, that she almost miscarried from stress, and that Morgan harassed her online, using the Twitter handle @anaappert. McKenna, who filed for a restraining order against Morgan last spring, says she was responsible for threatening tweets like: “There will be a warrant for your arrest for kidnapping the moment you go into labor so throw boulders bitch.”

Morgan flatly denies these charges. “What's really hard is that it was all false,” she says. “She sold pictures of the baby to the media and was posting all these things on Facebook. We've had to deal with it and not fight back.”

That changed on November 15. In May, a judge had ordered McKenna to return to California for the custody proceedings—where she was living when Bode first filed the suit—from New York City, where she was enrolled at Columbia University on the GI Bill. Once the battle was back in California, Bode and Morgan won primary custody of the six-month-old boy and renamed him Nathaniel. He lived with the couple for three months, until November 14, when a New York County judge reversed the ruling to bring the battle back east.

The next day, Morgan posted a diatribe on her blog about McKenna and McKenna's alleged desire for “revenge, attention and money.” Two days later, Morgan deleted it. As one commenter pointed out, “Why would you post this in the middle of a custody battle?” Bode's lawyers probably agreed, since there may be a nasty fight ahead. Morgan declined to talk to me about her on-again, off-again post.

FOR NOW, MORGAN and Bode are settling in with their new family, content to wait on a child of their own. At dinner, Bode points out that his mother was a midwife and that he was in attendance for a few births, including his sister's and brother's. He notes that he studied his mother's midwifery books during his years of homeschooling. This leads to the obvious question: Will Bode deliver Morgan's first child?

“No,” says Morgan.

“I think so,” says Bode.

Morgan looks at him, horrified. “I will be in a hospital. He doesn't want me to be in a hospital.”

“I was there when my daughter was born,” Bode says. “I'm very comfortable around that stuff. It's so raw. There's no ego. You're right in the moment. Things get so calm. It's awesome.” Morgan is clearly appalled. The subject changes to Bode's retirement.

“I would have been happy retiring in 2009, but I realized I had to leave this sport in a better condition than when I came in,” Bode says.

He goes on to say that, these days, he wishes he'd been more diplomatic during his career, but he still believes in the importance of a freewheeling style in the sport. When Didier Cuche and Aksel Svindal—with their technical, meticulous form—started winning, Bode took it personally.

“It felt like I had allowed the World Cup to prove my style was a fluke,” says Bode, who came back for the 2010 Olympics to give people what he calls a “whoa” feeling again. And he did, winning gold in the super-combined, silver in the super-G, and bronze in the downhill. When he got to the starting gates, people told him they could feel the energy shift.

“My attitude was, 'I'm going to go like you've never fucking seen before, and there will be nothing left,' ” he says. “But I'm not alone in that anymore—other skiers have picked up the torch. Ted Ligety, for one.” He also praises Austrian slalom specialist Marcel Hirscher, who skis “like a little jackrabbit.”

“Unfortunately, your legacy tends to be your whole legacy,” Bode concludes. “You don't get to pick the time later in life when you under-stood things better. It includes the times when you were a dick, too.”

Should Bode retire, his future will include horse racing—he co-owns two thoroughbreds with trainer Bob Baffert—his foundation, and golf, but all that will take a backseat to parenting. “I'm ready to retire,” says Bode. “I'm so much happier watching Morgan play sports than doing them myself. I really want her to do well.” He believes Morgan can be one of the top four players in the world, whether that means her first Olympics is in Rio in 2016 or Tokyo in 2020. Either way, she knows her coach will be at her side.

“I can't wait for the day when I win a gold medal at the Olympics and you're like, 'Thank you, thank you,' ” Morgan says, imitating his future bow.

“Yep! They'll be putting the medal around your neck, and my head will pop up—” Bode leans closer to Morgan and raises his head up between her collarbones to scoop the medal. They laugh. But don't be too surprised if it happens.

writes for Esquire, Runner's World, and other publications. She lives in Denver.

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