Here’s an Olympic Comeback Story You Probably Haven’t Heard About

by Irvin Muchnick

Salon ran my recent commentary on how the Milan Cortina Olympics came and went with nary a word about the scrupulously ignored 2024 report of the congressional Commission on the Future of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. “Passing the Torch: Modernizing Olympic, Paralympic, & Grassroots Sports in America” recommended restructuring the U.S. Center for Safe Sport and, more generally, the American youth sports system, in order to make widespread sexual abuse of young athletes a less blandly accepted environmental cost of quadrennial nationalist glory excavation.

At the Winter Games, figure skating gold medalist Alysa Liu was sweetheart of the fortnight and deservedly so – she seemed to win both despite and because of defying the template for success in her sport. A more thoughtful world would have processed the deeper implications of her decision to compete on her own terms. Liu’s triumph holds the potential to trigger radical rethinking of not just the drudgery of joyless training at the elite levels of all sports, but also of the Olympic system’s formula of shipping off legally non-consenting kids to remote outposts of all-powerful in loco parentis authority figures.

Those are the conditions in which abuse festers – as American biathlete Joanne Reid knows all too well.

Funny how, in NBC’s relentless feelgood coverage, its shill anchor, Mike Tirico, regurgitated the company line about Liu’s inspiring comeback but didn’t fit in an observation edgewise about Reid, so far as I know. Her comeback wasn’t from burnout but from trauma.

Two years ago the Safe Sport center – which specializes in making itself look slightly less buffoonish by way of occasionally throwing under the bus a villain you’ve never heard of – suspended Czech ski-wax technician Petr “Gara” Garabik for his years-long pattern of harassment and unwanted sexual contact with Reid. A biathlon teammate, Deedra Irwin, was instrumental in blowing the whistle on Garabik. (I’ve been unable to find out whether Garabik simply got back up and running after his suspension expired. Readers with more information are invited to contact me at tips@muchnick.net.)

Reid is the daughter of an Olympic speedskating legend, Beth Heiden, and niece of another, Beth’s brother Eric Heiden. Her story is told in a documentary, Line of Fire, which can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWg4SjIBEi8&t=35s.

It appears that the only press on Joanne Reid’s comeback came from this reflection at the University of Colorado athletic department website: https://cubuffs.com/news/2026/1/6/skiing-on-her-terms-joanne-reid-qualifies-for-third-olympic-games.

And the reason is that Reid didn’t go on to win any hardware in Italy. Her 4 x 6 kilometer relay team, including Deedra Irwin and two others, Luci Anderson and Margie Freed, finished 18th. Reid was 68th in the 15 K individual and 72nd in the 7.5 K sprint.

Much more impressively – even if never acknowledged by Mike Tirico or others – Joanne Reid won the restoration of her dignity and personhood.

This corner is here to remind everyone that the Reid story is not an outlier in youth sports annals. More in upcoming posts.