How gymnastics made Mary Lou Retton a star — and damaged her

 Mary Lou Retton became a true American hero while still a teenager, scooping up a spectacular gold in the individual all-around competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, at age 16.

The price of such glories had to be paid later in life.

“She couldn’t even take a full breath when I talked to her, she takes these little panting breaths,” ex-brother-in-law Shaun Kelley, who remains close to her, told The Post.  

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Mary Lou Retton frequently uses an oxygen cannula to help her breathe following battles with COVID and pneumonia.TODAY/NBC

It’s a far cry from when she proudly became the first female athlete to grace a Wheaties box in her Olympic year.

Retton, now 57, frequently wears an oxygen cannula, remains on medication, and has undergone many debilitating hip surgeries that have left her struggling physically.

It’s a heavy toll that her career as an Olympian has taken on her body, according to Kelley, who said he last spoke with Retton a few weeks ago.

The once-mighty, 4-foot-9-inch gymnast crashed back into the news on May 17 when she was hit with a DUI after cops in her hometown of Fairmont, West Virginia, allegedly found her in her 2019 Porsche Macan in an AutoZone parking lot.

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Retton with her Olympic medals in 2000 in Houston, Texas.Getty Images

An arrest report claimed she reeked of booze, was slurring her words, and had a bottle of wine by her side.

Somewhat ironically, she was just two miles from her namesake, Mary Lou Retton Drive, when it happened.

Kelley said Retton, who also has a home in Boerne, Texas, continues to undergo treatment for long COVID and lung problems, and he was alarmed by the alleged presence of the wine.

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Retton was the first female athlete to grace the iconic cover of the Wheaties box in her Olympic gold winning year, 1984.

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Retton and Shannon Kelley in Houston on their wedding day in December 1990. They were together for 27 years and had four daughters before divorcing in 2018.AP

“She is on all these meds and one drink could throw off her brain chemistry,” he claimed, adding that since the incident, from which she quickly bailed out of jail — “she is healing” and lying low in West Virginia.

“She’s a great mother and a giving person, she raised four amazing daughters,” he added, saying he hopes she gets better. He also clarified that Retton has no history of alcohol abuse that he knew of.

Retton — whose daughters are all with ex Shannon Kelley, whom she divorced after 27 years of marriage in 2018 — suffered another health scare in 2023 when she contracted “a very rare form of pneumonia,” according to a post made by her second-oldest daughter, McKenna Kelley.

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Retton on the podium in Los Angeles after receiving the gold medal in the women’s individual all-around gymnastics final.AP

“Girl, I should be dead,” she told People magazine a year later, describing how she spent a month in the hospital.  

At one time, doctors told her daughters — Shayla Rae, 30, McKenna, 28, Skyla, 25, and Emma Jean, 22 — “to come to say their goodbyes.”

She pulled through, but was left depleted.

“My lungs are so scarred. It will be a lifetime of recovery. My physicality was the only thing I had, and it was taken away from me. It’s embarrassing,” she added to People.

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Retton with all four of her daughters: Shayla Rae, 30, McKenna, 28, Skyla, 25, and Emma Jean, 22.Shayla Kelley Schrepfer / Instagram

Even worse, she had no insurance, saying in another interview with NBC, in which she appeared with an oxygen cannula in her nose, “I just couldn’t afford it,” citing her divorce and the underlying health conditions she had been left with, after 30 orthopedic surgeries.

McKenna created an online fundraiser that brought in almost $500,000 from fans, sportspeople, and public figures shocked by how Retton had seemingly fallen on such hard times.

McKenna told USA Sports last year her mother started running into money troubles during the COVID pandemic, which limited her ability to earn money “because she was not able to work and give speeches for two years due to the pandemic.”

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Retton in a still from an interview she gave to Entertainment Tonight, where she discussed her near-death experience with pneumonia, which left her hospitalized for a month in 2023.ET Online

However, it appears Retton traded an older Porsche for her current one during this same period, getting the newer car in December 2021, according to a Carfax report seen by The Post.

Retton had retired from professional gymnastics in 1986, not long after her gold medal triumph. She capitalized on her fame and signed endorsement deals with many products, then became a commentator for NBC at the 1988 Olympics. She wrote a daily column through the 1992 and 1996 Olympics for USA Today and co-hosted a TV show, “Road To Olympic Gold,” per her USA Gymnastics biography.

Retton also tried her hand at movies, appearing in “Scrooged” in 1988 and 1994’s “Naked Gun 33 1/3” as well as making guest appearances in shows including “Baywatch” and “Knots Landing,” plus continuing to take bookings as a motivational speaker and “fitness ambassador.” Her last high-profile bookings were a 2014 Super Bowl XLVIII commercial and a 2018 stint on “Dancing With The Stars,” where she finished in ninth place.

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When Retton was pulled over for DUI, she was just two miles from the street named after her in Fairmont, Virginia.Courtesy of David Kirk

However, after the goodwill brought in with Retton’s pneumonia fundraiser, people began to ask questions.

It was pointed out that it’s illegal to deny coverage to those with underlying conditions. Others asked where any excess money from the fundraiser, which had originally set its goal at $50,000, went.

The family claimed they donated money not used for treatment to the American Lung Association, although the charity said it wouldn’t comment on individual donations when contacted by The Post.

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Mary Lou Retton and McKenna Kelley have a number of businesses together, including a gymnastics competition and consultancy business.NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

It also emerged that during her divorce from quarterback-turned-real estate developer Shannon Kelley, she was awarded almost $2 million in cash, according to the Daily Mail, as well as the profits from selling two houses. She was also given a vehicle valued at $43,000, which she later traded in.

Retton, who did not respond to requests for comment, also reached an out-of-court settlement with the maker of her metal hip replacements, Biomet, in 2019 for an unknown amount, per the Mail’s report.

Retton’s corporate LLC, which she used for her speaking engagements, is now inactive but she has started new businesses. 

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Retton appeared on “Dancing With The Stars” in 2018, where she and dance partner Sasha Farber placed ninth.Disney General Entertainment Content via Getty Images

She formed a company called Forever Our Legacy, described as “For Mothers & Daughters,” which has run a women’s gymnastics competition tour annually since 2022.

The Forever Our Legacy competition is planned to take place in South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in February 2026. The event also includes meet-and-greet opportunities with Retton and her daughter, who was also a competitive gymnast.  

The mother-daughter duo also has a signature line of gymnastics equipment with the company Speith and runs a nonprofit called the McKenna Kelley Foundation.

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Retton was a torchbearer for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, Utah.Getty Images

Retton also partnered with a Michigan leotard company in 2023 to sell her own themed leotards, and McKenna sells video messages on Cameo for $100 each.

Shaun Kelley also confirmed that Retton is excited to attend her youngest daughter Emma Jean’s wedding to former University of Arkansas football star Hudson Clark next month.

https://nypost.com/2025/06/05/us-news/gymnastics-made-mary-lou-retton-a-star-and-damaged-her-forever/

Federal Judiciary's War On Trump Is Not About Protecting Us From Gov't Overreach

 by Connor O'Keefe via The Mises Institute,

So far, in his second term, Donald Trump’s biggest headaches haven’t come from the Democrats or his fellow Republicans. Nor have they come from the groups that were his biggest enemies in his first term—the media, federal bureaucrats, or the intelligence agencies.

This time around, Trump’s biggest difficulties are coming from the courts.

“The Resistance” has been celebrating the judicial branch as the tip of the spear in the effort to thwart the president’s agenda—and for good reason. In May alone, federal courts ruled against the Trump administration in 96 percent of the cases brought before them. And while that was a particularly dramatic month, the administration’s loss rate for the entire term so far still stands at a staggering 77 percent.

Nearly every one of Trump’s central campaign promises has either been tied up in the courts or blocked entirely by lone federal judges. Everything from the deportation of illegal immigrants, the enactment of tariffs, and the defunding and cutting of federal agencies have come under attack by the federal judiciary.

The battle between the Trump administration and the courts is quickly becoming the defining dynamic of this second Trump term.

It may be tempting for opponents of big government to find much of what the federal judiciary is doing commendable. After all, we’re taught in elementary school that the purpose of the judicial branch is to “check” the power of the other branches and halt government overreach.

But, like a lot of what we were taught about the federal government in school, that simple characterization of the federal judiciary is not accurate.

If the purpose of the judicial branch were really to limit the scope of the federal government to the handful of tasks laid out in the Constitution, one would only have to glance at the behemoth in Washington DC—intervening in every aspect of our lives while running a global empire—to conclude that the judicial branch has failed more spectacularly than any other group of watchdogs in history. And yet, the branch continues on as if it’s all working great, which suggests that the federal judiciary is actually serving a different purpose.

What might that be? Well, as scholars like Murray Rothbard have pointed out extensively, there is a much better case to be made that the true purpose of the judicial branch has been the precise opposite of what it claims. That its role has actually been to help the federal government transcend the limits placed on it in the original Constitution.

That may sound counterintuitive, but it’s not the first time limits on state power have been turned around and used to help states expand past those limits. As Rothbard explains in Chapter 3 of For a New Liberty, the concept of the “divine right of kings” actually began as a doctrine promoted by the church to limit state power.

The idea was that a king could not do anything he wanted because he was constrained by divine law. But as absolutism began to take hold in Europe, kings flipped the concept around to mean that the very fact that they were kings meant their rule represented the will of God. So therefore, anything they did necessarily had God’s approval because otherwise, he wouldn’t have made them kings.

Rothbard goes on to explain how parliamentary democracy, utilitarian liberalism, and every other device devised to check state power has eventually come to lose its original purpose and instead, as Bertrand de Jouvenel put it, “to act merely as a springboard to Power.”

The same has happened with the federal judiciary and its task to interpret the constitutionality of federal government programs. Because as Rothbard notes, “If a judicial decree of ‘unconstitutional’ is a mighty check on governmental power, so too a verdict of ‘constitutional’ is an equally mighty weapon for fostering public acceptance of ever greater governmental power.”

In other words, while federal courts are defined in the public mind by the few times they have blocked government actions, their more enduring contribution to American history has actually been helping the continuous growth of the federal government by giving it their stamp of legitimacy.

One of the major turning points in the judiciary’s transition from a check on power to an enabler of power was the Supreme Court’s ruling on FDR’s New Deal. The Court was hesitant and refused to approve the president’s actions for two whole years—likely because the New Deal programs were so obviously well outside the role of the government as laid out in the Constitution.

But then, after some threats from FDR that he would pack the Court, the justices gave their full approval and defined the entire New Deal as presented by Roosevelt as “constitutional.” The federal government’s enormous and blatantly illegal power grab was, from then on, to be considered entirely legitimate.

That dynamic has only accelerated in the decades since, especially as the progressive movement gained prominence. As Roger Pilon put it, while the authors of the Constitution were fairly explicit that any federal government action not directly authorized by the Constitution was forbidden, progressives “turned that on its head” and reasoned that any federal government action not explicitly forbidden in the Constitution is authorized.

Today’s federal courts are not basing their rulings on the same text of the Constitution that you can read on the National Archives website. They use what’s called the Constitution Annotated, which is a much longer document containing both the Constitution and annotations with all the previous federal court decisions. Federal court decisions which, like the New Deal ruling, have been increasingly driven by political considerations and the progressive interpretation of the founder’s intent.

That is how we get government programs that are obviously well beyond the limits of the original Bill of Rights, like the Federal Reserve, restrictions on firearm ownership, the mass imprisonment of Japanese-Americans, the FBI, the Patriot Act, Obamacare, major undeclared wars, and much, much more. Not in spite of the efforts of the judicial branch, but because of them.

That said, there’s some important nuance to consider when analyzing how the established political class, or establishment, has actually gone about expanding its power. They have not tried to expand the federal government as rapidly as possible, nor are they aiming for the federal government to take over every single aspect of American life. If that happened, they wouldn’t get to fully enjoy all the benefits of their ill-gotten profits.

It is better to think of the establishment as a coalition of groups that are committed to a specific rate of government growth. It’s a rate that is steady and unyielding during relatively normal times but also fast and ferocious during periods of crisis. There is some dissension—establishment Democrats want the rate of growth to be a bit faster, while establishment Republicans want the rate of growth to slow slightly (never reverse). But overall, that trajectory of government growth, which continues steadily and then ratchets up during crises, is the status quo that the establishment is committed to protecting against anti-establishment forces from all sides of the political spectrum.

And that is the status quo that the federal judiciary, which is an integral part of the American political class, is trying to protect against the Trump administration. Because Trump’s attempts to change the status quo in ways that actually benefit the American public for a change have ranged from excellent, like the attempts to cut federal agencies, to terrible, like the raising of import taxes, the rulings from federal courts cannot simply be considered as uniformly good or bad.

But it is vitally important to recognize that the establishment judges and justices who make up the federal judiciary are not, in fact, trying to prevent government overreach, as they claim. They are trying to stop Trump from threatening the establishment’s ability to continue pursuing the government overreach they want in a way and at the pace that benefits them.

Even if they occasionally rule in ways that opponents of big government may like, it is a mistake to view the judicial branch as an ally. They are anything but.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/federal-judiciarys-war-trump-not-about-protecting-us-govt-overreach