WATCHING Simone Biles dominate the US Gymnastics Championships last weekend was as close to watching sporting perfection as I’ve ever seen. The 21-year-old won gold on all four individual apparatus titles, as well as the all-around title. Her margin of victory in the all-around was an incredible 6.55 points meaning there was a larger gap between first and second place than there was between second and eleventh.

There are only a few athletes in the world who can make such performances look so easy; Roger Federer, Usain Bolt and Lionel Messi also have this knack but Biles is arguably even better than this trio at making her craft look quite so effortless.

Yet Biles was not the only story to come out of the US Championships. This was the first national championships since former USA national team doctor, Larry Nassar, was sentenced to prison for sexually assaulting minors, with it being claimed that he had assaulted over 250 girls, including a number of members of the USA national team.

Biles was one of the gymnasts who stated that Nassar assaulted her, so too have all five members of the 2012 Olympic team and four of the five of the 2016 Olympic team, which included Biles.

The outing - and subsequent conviction - of Nassar was hailed as a pivotal moment in sport. Sexual abuse within sport, and particularly by coaches on their athletes, is not a new thing. But the case of these American gymnasts, and the willingness of so many of the girls and young women to waive their anonymity in order to expose Nassar was both courageous and heroic.

These disclosures, it was claimed, would change the current system in America and beyond, both in gymnastics and across the sporting spectrum, and ensure that it was made far easier for athletes who were being sexually assaulted to come forward and expose the perpetrator. It was not an unreasonable assumption. The scale of the abuse within USA Gymnastics may have been unprecedented but the existence of it certainly wasn’t. And the least most observers expected was that the athletes’ courage in telling their stories would be rewarded by sweeping reforms of the system to ensure as much as possible was done to prevent any kind of repeat scenario.

Yet this is not how things have worked out. While the gymnasts themselves, spearheaded by two-time Olympic gold medallist, Aly Raisman, have continued to fight their case and refused to quieten down about what happened, these young women have not received the support one might have expected.

Raisman and her compatriots have been less than complimentary of the sport’s governing body, USA Gymnastics, and the way they have reacted to the Nassar scandal. And at the US Championships, the lack of explicit support of the victims continued. During the event, the president of USA Gymnastics, Kerry Perry, commented publicly on the fallout from the Nassar case, yet her comments were vague and offered little in terms of concrete statements as to what the body intended to do going forward. These were her first extended comments since she took over the role last December, yet she effectively said nothing.

And herein lies the problem. Even with a case on the scale of Nassar, there seems to be a reluctance to take the lead from those at the very top. If sexual abuse is to be eradicated from sport, or at least reduced, the responsibility cannot be left to the athletes themselves. It is not the job of Biles et al to resurrect the reputation of the sport in which they excel, however good they may be on the beam or bars or floor.

And gymnastics is not the only sport guilty of having officials who seem reluctant to uncover unacceptable behaviour for the greater good of the athletes and the sport as a whole. Too often, it is left to the athletes to expose any wrongdoing and then heal the exposed wounds. This also applies to cases on a far lesser scale than the USA Gymnastics case, but that makes them no less relevant.

But despite it not being the athletes’ responsibility in any way, these young American gymnasts’ refusal to be bowed may result in the changes that should have been implemented by those at the top. And for that, they should be eternally applauded.