LOS ANGELES – A former U.S. Olympic team coach who guided American gymnastics to some of its most iconic and triumphant moments could face a lifetime ban from the sport after three women have come forward to accuse him of having sex with young gymnasts in the 1980s.

Don Peters coached the groundbreaking U.S. women’s team to a record eight medals at the 1984 Olympic Games and built SCATS, a Huntington Beach gymnastics club, into an international powerhouse with a string of Olympians and national champions.

It was during that same decade that Peters had sex with three teenage gymnasts, three women have told The Orange County Register.

Doe Yamashiro, a former U.S. national team member who trained with Peters at SCATS in the 1980s, told the Register that Peters repeatedly fondled her, beginning when she was 16, and had sexual intercourse with her when she was 17.

A second former SCATS gymnast told the Register that Peters had sexual intercourse with her when she was 18. The woman said she had earlier been sexually abused by her father, abuse that Peters was aware of, she said. The woman has asked not to be identified in this story but has signed a sworn declaration attesting to the truth of her story, as has Yamashiro.

Linda McNamara, a former assistant director at SCATS who shared an office with Peters, has also told the Register that Peters confessed to her in the early 1990s to having sex with Yamashiro, the second former SCATS gymnast and a third teenage gymnast.

The women’s allegations are echoed by family members and other gymnasts close to them. The women said they are coming forward now to expose the sport’s exploitive culture and USA Gymnastics’ failure to pursue sexual abuse more aggressively.

Yamashiro and McNamara told the Register that they have reported these allegations to USA Gymnastics, the sport’s national governing body, and that the federation is conducting an investigation of Peters.

Yamashiro said she has been interviewed by a USA Gymnastics investigator. The second gymnast said she still has not been contacted by USA Gymnastics nearly 11 months after McNamara provided her name to USAG officials.

USA Gymnastics President Steve Penny said he could neither confirm nor deny that Peters is under investigation by USA Gymnastics, citing the organization’s policy. But in a Nov. 19 email to McNamara, a copy of which was obtained by the Register, Penny confirmed that Peters’ case was “under review.”

“I don’t have anything to say about any of that,” Peters said when contacted by the Register.

An attorney for Peters, Kevin O’Connell, acknowledged that the coach is under investigation but said the matter is private.

“Doe Yamashiro is not a victim of repressed memory and never wanted this matter to become public,” O’Connell said in an email. “The other incidents you have alleged are wrong. (The Register’s) knowledge of the allegations and conduct of USA Gymnastics is an invasion of Mr. Peters’ privacy.”

Since receiving that email in June, The Register has repeatedly contacted O’Connell and asked for a more specific response to the allegations against Peters. O’Connell has not responded to those requests.

SPECIAL RELATIONSHIPS

Team USA’s success at the 1984 Olympic Games firmly established the American women as a global superpower in the Olympics’ marquee women’s sport. American women have won 23 Olympic medals since the 1984 Games, including the last two individual all-around titles. Those triumphs have helped USA Gymnastics grow into a worldwide brand, attracting corporate sponsors like Visa, AT&T, Hilton, adidas and NBC.

But the sport’s success has come at a steep price, some former Olympic and World Championship team members said. Female gymnasts peak in their teens. The average age of the U.S. squad that won the team silver medal at the 2008 Olympics was 17.5. The U.S. team that won the 2003 World Championships team gold medal had an average age of 16.

To achieve such a high level of performance at such a young age, many girls are already training as much as 30 to 40 hours a week while still in grade school, leaving them socially isolated and emotionally dependent on their coaches.

“There is a special relationship between a coach and an athlete, particularly in an individual event sport like gymnastics, swimming, tennis,” said Charol Shakeshaft, a professor at Virginia Commonwealth. “The coach is very important to the success of the athlete, and there are no other places to find that support, or at least that’s what the athlete believes, usually because the coach has taught the athlete that message: ‘Without me, you wouldn’t be able to do this.’

“In these relationships, the girls both love and hate their coaches,” Shakeshaft said. “They are grateful for the good things the coach has done, and they don’t like the bad things. Yet, they are afraid that if they speak up, they will lose all the good things and additional bad things will happen to them. The coach will hurt them, they will not be believed, they will lose their chances at the Olympics, etc.”

Because of the sport’s gravity-defying nature, young gymnasts are also dependent on their coaches for their own personal safety.

“So you have this thing you’re doing daily that is risking your life, and you have this coach who’s spotting you and supposedly keeping you alive,” Yamashiro said. “So it just gets really twisted, the whole thing, twisted up.”

All of which creates an environment ripe for exploitation that USA Gymnastics has not done enough to defuse, said former U.S. Olympic and World team members.

“It’s my belief that (sexual abuse) over-indexes in gymnastics compared to the general public, just like the Catholic Church,” said Jennifer Sey, the 1986 U.S. all-around champion and author of the book “Chalked Up.” “I’d like USA Gymnastics to overtly say they put the athlete first, but they don’t put the athlete first.”

Sey and other former U.S. national team members said USA Gymnastics ignored a series of red flags with Peters, especially in regard to his relationship with Yamashiro. They believe USA Gymnastics officials should have questioned why Yamashiro traveled with Peters to competitions and events, some in foreign countries, that she was not participating in.

“I feel like they protected Don and they protected the sport,” Sey said of Peters, now 62, and still the director of SCATS.

Under California law, sexual contact with a person under the age of 18 is illegal, even if the minor consents. But the statute of limitations for prosecuting statutory rape cases in California is three years if the perpetrator is 21 or older or more than three years older than the victim. Experts say it is now impossible to prosecute Peters under that law, even if the women’s allegations could be proven.

But if USA Gymnastics substantiates the allegations of sexual misconduct, Peters could be placed on USAG’s permanently ineligible list, a lifetime ban from an American sport he helped build.

Such a fall from grace would have been hard to imagine in 1986.

OLYMPIC GLORY

Born in 1949, Don Peters grew up in a small Western Pennsylvania town, 35 miles down the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh. Peters’ competitive fire was evident early when he earned a starting role on the Belle Vernon Area High School football team at center and inside linebacker despite weighing only 155 pounds. He took up gymnastics in the off-season to build himself up for football and led the gymnastics team to the state title, according to newspaper accounts of his career.

Not long after graduation, Peters married his high school sweetheart, Jean, and the couple moved across the state so he could attend West Chester State College in the rolling farmland 30 miles west of Philadelphia. He captained the West Chester gymnastics team as a senior and then took a series of coaching positions at gyms in the Philadelphia area before moving on to a spot at Grossfeld Gymnastics in Milford, Conn., at the time one of the nation’s top gyms and operated by Muriel Grossfeld, a three-time Olympian, according to a USA Gymnastics Hall of Fame biography.

By 1979, he and Jean were on their way to Orange County after he was recruited to take over the Southern California Acro Team, a Huntington Beach gym now known just as SCATS.

With coal black hair and a thick mustache, Peters still looked fit. Although never a national star as an athlete, Peters made it clear that he had Olympic aspirations for himself and his new gym.

“He commanded respect and also reveled in it,” Sabrina Mar, a U.S. and Pan American Games all-around champion who trained at SCATS in the 1980s, said in an email. “Workouts were exactly that … WORKouts. There wasn’t any messing around. It was all business. Going to workouts was like going to a job. You went because you had to, everyday, even if you weren’t feeling your best. In our eyes, Don was the most knowledgeable and experienced coach in the gym and he could make you into an Olympian if you worked hard enough.

“Don’s coaching style mimicked his personality. He was stern, methodical and he had a quiet confidence. He was the polar opposite to Bela Karolyi (Olympic champion Nadia Comaneci’s coach), who was a loud, flamboyant, self-promoting, media-loving showman. Don didn’t raise his voice, often, but when he did, you knew you were in trouble. He was an intelligent man who was respected and well-liked.”

While other top coaches might have had greater technical knowledge than Peters, he had a knack for knowing how to push the right buttons with each athlete.

“He always knew exactly how to motivate you, by knowing what your insecurities were, and then exposing them,” Mar said. “He once accused me of being lazy. Keep in mind, at 15, I was waking up at 5 a.m. and going to bed at midnight, working out 6-8 hours a day, and going to school between workouts. And even then, when he claimed I was lazy, I believed it. Don always knew how to manipulate your emotions with very few words.”

Mar said she never witnessed any sexual abuse by Peters.

A year after taking over SCATS, Peters coached two gymnasts onto the 1980 U.S. Olympic team. In 1981, Peters was named U.S. national team head coach, a job he would hold until 1987, while still running SCATS.

It was at the 1984 Olympic Games that Peters played a leading role in a defining moment for American gymnastics, helping launch the sport on an unprecedented run of success and popularity. With Peters as the U.S. team’s head coach, the American women won the silver medal in the team all-around, the first U.S. women’s Olympic medal in gymnastics since 1948. Texan Mary Lou Retton became the first woman from a non-Eastern Bloc country to win the Olympic all-around title.

Four of the six members on the silver medal team trained under Peters at SCATS. SCATS-trained gymnasts won a gold medal, a silver and a bronze. The eight total medals has not been surpassed by a U.S. women’s team at the Olympic Games.

In just five years, Peters had gone from being an assistant in a Connecticut gym to the Olympic spotlight and global fame.

Telephones at SCATS didn’t stop ringing the morning after the U.S. women won the team silver medal. SCATS had 300 athletes when Peters arrived, but 1,500 after the 1984 Games, with another 800 on a waiting list.

“We were scrambling to find enough coaches,” Linda McNamara recalled.

One of the girls joining SCATS that summer was Yamashiro, then 14. She had been spotted by a former SCATS Olympian in a Los Angeles gym that summer and within days of Peters’ Olympic triumph, Yamashiro for the first time walked through the front doors of the gym on Research Drive.

Unlike most of the girls that walked past the wall full of photographs of SCATS Olympians in the gym’s lobby, Yamashiro did not come to the sport with Olympic aspirations. Even as she emerged as a world-class gymnast, she fantasized about leaving the sport and pursuing her interests in music and art. In fact, six months after starting the sport at age 8, Yamashiro tried to quit after witnessing a series of horrifying gymnastic accidents.

Yamashiro would be haunted by a fear of catastrophic injury for the rest of her career.

“By the time I was 17 I knew five people who had broken their necks,” Yamashiro said. “And every day I was terrified the same thing was going to happen to me.”

Already shy and soft-spoken, Yamashiro said she began to shut down emotionally as life at home began to unravel.

After some early success at SCATS, Yamashiro missed much of the 1985 season with an ankle injury. “And from that point on, it was just injury after injury, really, and then when I was recovering from injuring that ankle I got a stress fracture in my leg and then my back went out and then my shoulders,” she said.

But Peters was convinced that in the shy 16-year-old he had found the next Mary Lou Retton. Peters thought Yamashiro would emerge as his and American gymnastics’ next star in 1986 at the U.S.-Soviet Union meet and the Goodwill Games in Moscow later that year.

“He took me aside and he grabbed my shoulders and he was shaking me and trying to shake it into me the words he was saying which were ‘You can beat Mary Lou.'” Yamashiro recalled. “I think he was a little out of his mind with this idea. He had this vision of my career that was sort of distorted; and I think his vision was distorted.”

Yamashiro seemed to get lost for a moment in thought as if she was in a dark place.

“The sexual misconduct distorted how he was able to see my whole career.”

This much, Yamashiro said, is clear: At some point, Peters began to see her as more than just his next rising star.

SEXUAL ADVANCES

It was during a U.S. national team tour related to the 1986 U.S-Soviet meet that Peters first had sexual contact with Yamashiro, she said.

“He asked to speak with me in his hotel room and he locked the door behind us. And then he began groping me.

“And that was the worst; that was really the worst of it because I had never been kissed by a boy, and I wasn’t even interested in boys at that point. I didn’t have breasts. I was totally pre-pubescent at 16. And, you know, if you spend your life in the gym, you’re totally emotionally naive.”

Yamashiro was in an elevator with other gymnasts later that night when she was cornered by Peters.

“He said, ‘Doe, I need to talk to you,’ and I was like, ‘Oh, (expletive).'” Yamashiro recalled. “But we ended up having this really frank conversation, and I said, ‘I think you’re a dirty old man, I don’t want you to do anything but kiss me on the forehead. I see you like a father.’ And really, I don’t know how I was able to do that. At the time, I just couldn’t say ‘no’ to him, but I could say that.”

Despite the conversation, Peters’ advances continued, she said.

“So for about two years off and on until I left SCATS, he would mostly try to grope me and try to get me alone on trips with him,” Yamashiro said.

By the summer of 1987, Yamashiro had moved out of her family’s home in Gardena and into what was known as the “SCATS house” in Huntington Beach, a house rented by the gym for elite gymnasts who had left their hometowns to train with Peters at SCATS. Yamashiro attended Marina High School for her junior and senior years.

That summer, Yamashiro claims, Peters succeeded in having sexual intercourse with her in the parking lot of the Huntington Beach library. She was 17. Peters was 38.

“And I still couldn’t say ‘no’ to him,” she said.

“That incident I had a very strong emotional reaction to. That was a real physical violation and I was disgusted. I was disgusted at him and myself. And that’s it. I was in pain and I had just lost my virginity. And then I had to go to workout.”

Peters continued to try and kiss and fondle Yamashiro after she turned 18, until she enrolled at Stanford in 1988, Yamashiro said.

FRIEND OF THE FAMILY

As Yamashiro was joining SCATS, another gymnast from the club was trying to move on with her life – the second former SCATS gymnast who would later tell her story to the Register.

The gymnast and her family had been close to Peters. “I had strep throat when I was 12, and I remember Don coming over and with my mom carrying me into the emergency room,” said the woman. “He was like part of the family.”

The woman says she was molested by her father throughout her pre-teens and early teens – and Peters knew that.

“I was a mess after that,” she said.

She tried committing suicide at 16, and again at 18. Not long after the second suicide attempt in 1985, Peters visited the woman’s family out of state and attended a social event with them.

“I wanted to go home and he took me home, and I went to the bathroom and I came out and he got me in this hug,” she said. “He hugged me and then tried to fondle me.”

The next night, Peters took her to a drive-in movie and then to a motel.

“We had intercourse at the motel,” she said.

“I would include him in the people who have taken advantage of me. I was vulnerable and he knew that, and he really preys upon that kind of person.”

CONFESSION

It was in the early 1990s, after Yamashiro had gone to Stanford, that Peters began acting oddly at SCATS, McNamara said.

“His behavior became very erratic,” recalled McNamara, the SCATS assistant director who shared an office with Peters. “I mean, he wasn’t getting his business work done. He wasn’t getting, you know, things he normally did every day in this office, weren’t being done. His coaching was just sketchy. He was short tempered.

“So after things got to a point where it was kind of unbearable in the office and the gym for everybody, I said to Don one day, ‘Either tell me what’s going on or get out of the gym.'”

Peters agreed to meet McNamara at a local bar after work and over drinks confessed to having sex with Yamashiro and a third SCATS gymnast, who at one point had lived with Peters’ family, McNamara said.

(The third SCATS gymnast, whom the Register is not naming, declined to comment when asked by the Register if she had been contacted by USA Gymnastics investigators or if Peters had had sex with her.)

“So I said, anybody else?” McNamara recalled. Peters, she said, then acknowledged having sex with the second SCATS gymnast, the woman who told the Register about sex with Peters in an out-of-state motel.

“But I don’t think she counts because I think she was 18,” Peters added, according to McNamara.

“And my head just, that one, to me, is the most despicable of all,” McNamara said.

McNamara asked her husband at the time, a Los Angeles police officer, to call the District Attorney’s Office. A prosecutor told her husband that the cases were beyond the statute of limitations for statutory rape, McNamara said.

“If you come forward, you’re open to civil suit,” McNamara recalled her husband telling her. “You can’t do it for them. They have to come forward.”

So McNamara kept quiet. Yamashiro and the second gymnast also guarded their secrets. Yamashiro and the second gymnast said they have never met nor spoken to each other.

Others, however, had been speculating about Peters and Yamashiro for years, former U.S. national team members said. The nature of Peters’ relationship with his star pupil was a frequent topic of conversation during the U.S. national team’s trip to the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow.

“It was rumored that something was going on between Doe and Don, something more than a coach/gymnast relationship. … That perhaps there were improprieties,” Sey, the U.S. all-around champion and a member of the Goodwill team, wrote in her 2008 book “Chalked Up.”

“It got to the point where we all joked about it. ‘Where’s Doe?’ one girl would say, and we would all fall into a pile in fits of laughter. Yet no one intervened. Nobody asked Don, ‘What’s going on here?’ Everyone just let it happen.”

Yamashiro said no one from USA Gymnastics ever questioned her about her relationship with Peters following the Goodwill Games trip or after she traveled to the 1987 World Championships in Rotterdam, Netherlands, even though she wasn’t competing. Peters was a member of the U.S. staff at the 1987 Worlds.

“At the time, I really thought that was kind of odd,” recalled Stacey Gunthorpe, a U.S. national team member. “She didn’t fly out with us to Rotterdam. She joined us there. I just remember I thought, ‘This is kind of strange.'”

At that point, Yamashiro said, she was taking 500 milligrams of naprosyn, an anti-inflammatory drug before and after training sessions. Emotionally shut down, Yamashiro said she viewed the sexual relationship with Peters in the larger context of a sport that was beating her down physically and psychologically on a daily basis.

“My life in the gym was so difficult for me that my feeling toward dealing with Don was ‘Oh, it’s just another thing to do deal with,'” Yamashiro said.

And Yamashiro dealt with it alone.

“I didn’t tell my parents,” she said. “(Peters) told me I couldn’t tell anyone, and I don’t know if I believed him or I was just ashamed.”

COMING FORWARD

Yamashiro eventually confided to Sey about Peters’ sexual advances when they were teammates at Stanford. She also began to tell family members.

Over the years, the second former gymnast said she tried to repress the memory of her encounter with Peters but finally came to terms with it when her daughter enrolled in a gymnastics class last summer.

“It really hit me last summer, being in the gym again,” she said. “It was like, ‘Wow, I can’t believe (Peters) did that, knowing my story, knowing what I have been through, knowing that I trusted him so much. The weight really hit me.”

Dealing with the encounter triggered another emotion, she said: guilt.

“Looking back now, I regret not telling someone sooner if it could have helped someone,” she said. “I’m really sorry. It’s horrible, and I wish I would have said something. At the time, you think you’re the only one.

“We always blame ourselves. Sexual abuse is so confusing to the victim, especially when it’s someone like him or your dad, a trusted person.”

She said she has never told anyone about her sexual encounter with Peters until she recently confided to a longtime boyfriend. She said she was caught off-guard when contacted by the Register.

“I wasn’t sure what to say because I thought you were going to do some story on what a great coach Don is, and I thought, ‘Should I tell him what really happened?'” she said.

Yamashiro and McNamara said by telling their stories now they hope to trigger a culture shift in a sport that they and other former U.S. Olympic and national team members claim exploits young girls.

“Once I talked about Don, I was suddenly free to talk about what really bothered me about the sport, which is everything,” Yamashiro said. “The children really have no advocates. When the parents go loopy for success and the coaches are driven by who-knows-what to create a successful gymnast, then the child is stuck there.”

Yamashiro said Penny, the USA Gymnastics president, wants to keep the sport’s sex abuse scandals private.

“At the same time, he expects the public to know to ask serious questions,” Yamashiro said. “His job is to showcase and advertise the sport and now he’s being asked how to figure out how to protect the athletes and there hasn’t been and is not yet a clear path to do that.”

Penny said that USA Gymnastics has room for improvement in handling sexual abuse cases, but he said the organization’s commitment should not be questioned.

“USA Gymnastics remains committed to addressing concerns of these type at the highest level and improving our practices whenever possible,” Penny said. “Each and every one of these instances offers unique circumstances that must be taken into consideration.”

While she said she will continue to push for more accountability within the sport and USA Gymnastics, Yamashiro said she made her peace with Peters, at least in her own mind, years earlier.

“Jen (Sey) was always trying to get me to tell somebody,” Yamashiro said. “And I’m not sure what kept me from doing that. So I didn’t really feel free of it.”

Yamashiro said she would go and check up on Peters every summer to see if he was involved with any of his gymnasts.

“He promised me, which I know now he lied, that he was staying out of the gym, that he wasn’t coaching anymore,” she said. “That is what he would tell me.

“And then one summer, I went back and his hair had gone from dark to just white like within a year, and I thought OK, something’s happened and he’s got the message. And that was all probably just projection and wishful thinking.

“I kind of felt free after that.

“I thought he had seen or felt something. And I at least thought, in my 22-year-old mind, with that white hair, there’s no way you can manipulate a young girl into trying to make out with you.”

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