A. Li Li Leung
The big news of the week was the appointment (finally) of Li Li Leung as the new president and CEO of USA Gymnastics, a shocking upset of the supposed front-runner for the position, a cheesecloth full of spiders. Leung was herself an elite gymnast, competed at Michigan, and most recently worked for the NBA in a vice president position.
My baseline approach here is that we don’t really know anything yet. She seems…fine? She doesn’t have any immediate social media red flags, so that beats Bono, and she doesn’t seem like if someone tried to make a robot inspired by your mom’s book group and then spilled grape soda all over it right before the unveiling, so that beats Perry. Our standards are not that high, so she’s already the leader.
That means, at least, that we’ve reached the “let’s wait and see how she does” phase, which we never got to with Bono because she was too horrible to begin with. That said, “clean slate, fresh start, let’s support her” is farther than I’m willing to go. Surprise, surprise. The initial concerns raised by Manly and co. about her marketing background, while taken to the rhetorical extreme, are valid. We’ve been burned too many times, and anyone who takes control of this garbage barge must be subject to more criticism and vigilance than simply “new person with a clean slate” might otherwise allow.
That’s because, if we’re being honest, “continued bad” is the most likely outcome here. The entire USOC and NGB system is probably too fundamentally toxic for any simple USAG CEO hire to do anything to change, even if that person seems perfectly fine and professional as Leung does. That’s cynical, yes, but a year from now, I’m probably writing this post with the A. heading “Everything’s still terrible.”
So to me, trying to put on a slightly more charitable hat, I’ll go with measured skepticism. Wariness until proven otherwise. Leung might forge a positive direction, but as the representative of USAG, she has so much work to do to reverse our base assumption that everything USAG touches turns to garbage. She gets a chance to do that, but she has to do it. Then actual support can come. Continue reading Things Are Happening – February 22, 2019
