Olympic gold medalist Mary Lou Retton has been battling severe pneumonia in a hospital intensive care unit, daughters of the famed American gymnast said.
A post Tuesday on a crowd-funding page by her daughter McKenna Kelley characterized Retton as being critically ill. Another daughter confirmed the illness to NBC News.
On the crowd-funding site, McKenna Kelley wrote: “My amazing mom, Mary Lou, has a very rare form of pneumonia and is fighting for her life. She is not able to breathe on her own. She’s been in the ICU for over a week now.”
More details were not shared, and it wasn’t clear where Retton, 55, was being treated. A native of West Virginia, she lives in Houston.
In the crowd-funding statement, linked from her verified Instagram account, Kelley made an appeal for help with Retton’s hospital bills, saying she doesn’t have medical insurance.
“ANYTHING, absolutely anything, would be so helpful for my family and my mom,” she wrote.
Retton scored a perfect 10 and became the first American woman to win a gold medal in gymnastics with her victory in the all-around competition at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. She also took home more medals than any other athlete that summer: 5. She won silver medals in the team and vault competitions and bronze medals on the uneven bars and in the floor exercise.
The Soviet Union, which had dominated the sport up until that point, boycotted the 1984 Games.
Nonetheless, Retton’s feats made her a household name and catapulted her into broadcast booths as a sports commentator, onto television shows as an actor and contestant and even into movie roles. She was inducted into the Gymnastics Hall of Fame in 1997.
After she retired from elite gymnastics, she was a board member for USA Gymnastics and faced controversy for defending the organization as it was embroiled in the Larry Nassar sexual assault case. USA Gymnastics was asked to testify in front of a Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017, but it declined. Instead, Retton accompanied USA Gymnastics officials to meet privately with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., about the organization’s policies to protect athletes from sexual abuse.
Her daughters McKenna and Emma Jean are gymnasts themselves and have competed in NCAA gymnastics. McKenna competed for Louisiana State University, and Emma Jean is a gymnast at the University of Arkansas.
In 2019, Retton and McKenna appeared on NBC’s “TODAY” show after she competed for LSU at the NCAA women’s gymnastics championships. LSU finished second, and McKenna anchored the floor rotation for the team, earning a score of 9.95.
“I don’t think I understood the enormity of what she did and the groundbreaking gymnastics that she did at the time,” McKenna said. “To me, she’s just Mom.”
In the “TODAY” interview, Retton addressed the sexual abuse scandal and the culture of USA Gymnastics.
“They absolutely need to start at the ground level and build back up. A culture of acceptance, a culture of safety. These girls have to feel safe. … It’s a beautiful sport filled with beautiful people, and the spotlight’s going to a monster. And it’s a problem. I don’t have the solution,” she said.
Since Retton’s daughters shared news of her hospitalization, her Olympic teammate and NCAA gymnastics commentator Kathy Johnson posted a photo of the two of them embracing at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on X.
