For the first time ever at the Olympics, a delegation from the Denver-based U.S. Center for SafeSport is on the ground in Paris to help ensure the physical safety and emotional well-being of U.S. Olympic athletes.

“This is the first time we’ve been here,” Ju’Riese Colón, chief executive officer for SafeSport, told me in phone call from Paris. “The U.S. is leading the charge” in raising awareness about athlete well-being as a first priority. “Medals should never come at the cost of athlete well-being — that’s the message the U.S. Center for SafeSport is bringing directly to the Paris Games,” Colón said in a statement.

Their presence is timely in reinforcing an elevated emphasis on the mental health and well-being of athletes that Simone Biles sparked at the last Olympics. Biles surprised fans around the world when she withdrew from five event finals at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, citing the “Twisties,” a gymnast’s term for disorientation during midair tumbles.

“Whenever you get in a high-stress situation, you kind of freak out,” Biles told reporters at the time. “I have to focus on my mental health and not jeopardize my health and well-being.”

Her frank talk about her vulnerabilities inspired other notable athletes to speak out about mental health and the pressures to perform, including retired Olympic gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps, NBA star Kevin Love and Naomi Osaka, a Grand Slam tennis champion who withdrew from the French Open in 2021, citing her mental health.

SafeSport and the Colorado Springs-based U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee have since shored up the mental-health and sport-psychology resources available to athletes at the Olympics and elsewhere. Since the Tokyo Games, USOPC has trained hundreds of coaches, staff members and athletes in mental-health first aid. USOPC has nine licensed psychological-services workers and a dozen contractors on hand for U.S. athletes during the Paris Games.

While in Paris, the SafeSport team will be “observing the athlete experience in various settings with the goal of identifying risks and developing proactive measures and resources for future games.”

Colón said SafeSport will then turn what they’ve learned into educational content for future Olympics.

The center also has developed resources specifically for the Paris Games to enhance athlete safety, which include:

• An informational tool to assist those who need help while competing at the games.

• A 24-hour hotline and resource list for survivors seeking support and/or information about reporting.

• Information regarding a custom training to help staff and volunteers interacting with U.S. athletes recognize, prevent, and respond to abuse.

• The launch of an athlete-focused Instagram channel that will feature educational content from SafeSport staff on the ground in Paris.

The SafeSport center was established in 2017 to oversee sex-abuse cases in Olympic sports after the Larry Nassar abuse case shook the U.S. Olympic movement to its core. Hundreds of gymnasts, including Biles, were abused by Nassar and other authority figures in the largest sexual abuse scandal in sports history.

SafeSport was created in the wake of the scandal to provide an independent place for athletes to go who had complaints about suspected abuse and harassment. It has since evolved its mission into making athlete well-being the centerpiece of the nation’s sport culture, setting safety policies, and receiving, investigating, and resolving complaints of abuse and misconduct.

Colón and others members of the SafeSport leadership team as well as board chair and Paralympic gold medalist April Holmes are in Paris in support of that mission.

So are these efforts working? Are athletes safer and healthier now? Will they be somehow safer in Paris with a SafeSport team there?

From its inception, SafeSport has dealt with an overload of cases and has been criticized for taking too long to resolve them.

A panel charged with reviewing the Olympic structure in the U.S. released a 275-page report in April calling for Congress to consider wide-ranging changes to SafeSport because of concerns it wasn’t helping athletes enough.

The report published polling information that found 25.4% of 1,752 respondents to a commission survey found the SafeSport Center to be “not so effective” or “not effective at all.” Another 41.4% said it was only “somewhat effective.”

SafeSport announced substantial changes aimed at addressing the concerns raised in the report. They have since implemented new processes designed to streamline the investigative process, communicate better with the parties involved in cases and be more sensitive to the trauma of abuse victims.

Some of the national governing bodies of Olympic sports have raised concerns about the number of cases SafeSport closes quickly without issuing a verdict — a step known as “administrative closure.” SafeSport said it would provide more information about those cases to the governing bodies to help them implement safety plans in the absence of a penalty issued by SafeSport.

The report also called for government funding of the center, which is now funded by the USOPC in Colorado Springs.

Colón said funding is woefully insufficient right now for their caseload. “I’ve asked for $10 million more from Congress so we can invest in more staff and more teams.”

“One of the many challenges is that athletes continue to want more from us,” Colón said. She told me the center receives 150 reports a week from athletes that all merit investigating.

Without a doubt, SafeSport has made significant strides toward preventing and responding to sexual abuse.

Nearly 300 coaches affiliated with USA Gymnastics have been banned or are suspended for misconduct, according to SafeSport’s database.

But a recent investigation by The Washington Post has found that many gymnasts’ allegations of physical and emotional abuse in their clubs around the country have been met with inaction. The Post found that hundreds of young gymnasts are still in the care of coaches accused of serious misconduct.

Six coaches that SafeSport has investigated over allegations of emotional and physical abuse of recent U.S. Olympians or alternates are still coaching, according to news coverage and reporting from the Post.

None of the SafeSport probes have resulted in public findings, the Post found, and most are still open.

Desiree Palomares, a former gymnast with California’s All Olympia who is now a 29-year-old public defender in Colorado, told the Post that when she was around 11, gymnastics coach Artur Akopyan slapped her across the face after he believed she had spoken back to him.

Ten other former gymnasts told the Post that Akopyan physically abused them or their teammates when they were girls, including nine who said he had thrown young gymnasts to the ground in anger, sometimes hard enough to leave bruises. Other gymnasts said Akopyan was emotionally abusive, screaming, degrading them and mocking their injuries, the Post reported.

Yet Akopyan continues to work without restrictions, the Post found.

Why?

Why are these coaches still permitted to coach?

In a statement in response to the Post, SafeSport said it recently had begun prioritizing cases open longer than two years, which would include those languishing gymnastics investigations. The organization said it had identified more than 120 such cases, roughly one-third of which it had resolved since December.

Sometimes SafeSport simply doesn’t have enough evidence to pursue penalties and bans, and has had difficulty getting participation in their investigations, which makes it particularly hard to adjudicate these cases.

SafeSport officials say they are trying to tackle the growing caseload more efficiently, and more funding and resources would help.

“A lot of these cases do take longer” to bring to a close, Colón said. “The center is really young, and there has been continuous quality improvement.”

Part of its effort to do better clearly includes the delegation to Paris to focus on prevention of abuse and misconduct in real time, and to develop better programs for future Olympians.

And the continuing challenges shouldn’t diminish the tremendous progress made.

Colón cites Biles’ courageous return to the Olympics in Paris as a sure sign of progress. Her coach says the most decorated gymnast in history has continued to improve, is healthier and more confident than ever now and is performing better than she ever has.

She has not only completed a rousing comeback to the top of her sport, but also achieved something even more lasting: changing the way we all think about athletes and mental health.

Said Colón: “She has come back stronger than ever.”