Wagner spoke mind before revelation
The decorated career of Olympic figure skater Ashley Wagner has been marked by an unabashed willingness to speak her mind on a variety of topics with a confidence and boldness that stands out among her peers.
So it was that she came to the difficult and important decision of sharing her story of how John Coughlin sexually assaulted her at 17 in a first-person account and video in USA TODAY, a decision that has been met with an outpouring of support across social media.
“I’m known to speak my mind,” she said in an exclusive interview with USA TODAY Sports on Tuesday. “I’m a strong woman. I’m an opinionated woman. I think it’s important for people to see that things like this can happen to anybody. I’m tough as nails but something this horrifying still happened to me. It’s not enough for me to be a strong woman to make things like this not happen.”
Wagner is 28 now, no longer competing but still a top skating show performer while commentating on her sport on TV and speaking at skating seminars.
But nearly six years ago, at 22, she joined her fellow Olympic figure skating hopefuls on stage at a media summit months before the 2014 Sochi Games when a question was asked about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s controversial anti-gay propaganda law.
As one top U.S. skater after another declined to answer the question, the microphone finally came to Wagner. She did not remain silent. “For me, I have gay family members, and I have a lot of friends in the LGBT community,” she
said. “I have such a firm stance on this that we should all have equal rights.”
A bit later, she continued the conversation with USA TODAY Sports: “I think growing up in skating, I was surrounded by the LGBT community, so I grew up very aware because I was around it so often, and some of the kindest people I know are gay figure skaters. At the end of the day I’m an athlete, and that’s what I’m focused on. But I felt that too many people are quiet and they’re not comfortable sharing their opinion, and it’s just my opinion.”
That was hardly the end of it. While at the U.S. Olympic trials in Boston a
month before Sochi, Wagner told USA TODAY Sports she “absolutely” planned to continue talking about her opposition to the controversial law while competing for the United States in Russia. “This is the opportunity for this Olympics to be groundbreaking,” Wagner said.
Putin’s law criminalized “homosexual propaganda,” making public displays that promoted gay rights, including hand-holding, punishable by up to two weeks in prison. In reply, International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach said the Games would be “free of discrimination” for athletes and visitors to Sochi.
Wagner was undeterred when discussing the issue in Boston. Asked if she would talk about the law at her news conferences in Sochi, Wagner said she would. “It’s something that I feel strongly about and I’m never one to not say what I’m thinking. I just speak my mind. It’s something I can’t stay quiet about. If it’s my opinion, I’m going to say it.”
At those Olympics, Wagner won a bronze medal in the team competition for the USA and finished seventh in the women’s event. She did indeed continue to speak out against Putin’s law on Russian soil whenever she was asked about it. While protesters did show up and march against the law, the number of competing athletes who denounced the law in the midst of their Olympic events could be counted on one hand.
She also has never shied away from critiquing her sport’s arcane judging system, something that few skaters ever dare do publicly. Angry with her seventh-place finish in the women’s competition when others who made glaring mistakes were placed higher than she was, and perplexed as many were that Russia’s Adelina Sotnikova won the gold medal, Wagner didn’t hold back in the mixed zone afterward.
“People do not want to watch a sport where they see someone skate lights out and they can’t depend on that person to be the one who pulls through,” she said. “People need to be held accountable. … It is confusing and we need to make it clear for you. … There are many changes that need to come to this sport if we want a fan base, because you can’t depend on this sport to always be there when you need it. The sport in general needs to become more dependable.”