The US Olympic & Paralympic Committee has initiated proceedings to remove USA Skateboarding as the sport’s national governing body (NGB), a USOPC spokesman confirmed to ESPN on Wednesday.
“We initiated the decertification process citing violations of Section 8,” said Kate Hartman, USOPC chief external affairs officer, referring to the USOPC charter that governs the process for revoking an NGB’s certification. Hartman added that the organization is “very early in the process.”
USA Skateboarding Chairman Don Bostick did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The decertification news follows USA Skateboarding’s USOPC audit, released in mid-July, which evaluated the governing body against 48 compliance standards. The audit found that USA Skateboarding met only 12 standards and failed on 28.
Shortcomings included not requiring background checks for employees, judges, athletes, board members and contractors, having their tax status revoked by the IRS in June 2021, and having no anti-doping policy. The audit also found the NGB to have a lack of child protection, noting that “a number of significant concerns were raised during the review, including athlete representation, conflicts of interest, USOPC funding, athlete safety and management skills.”
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Within weeks of the audit’s release, USA Skateboarding CEO Gary Ream resigned from his role with the organization. USAS named Bostick, a former president of the National Skateboard Association, to succeed Ream.
Ream will remain Chair of the Skateboarding Technical Committee of World Skate, the IOC’s governing body for skateboarding and roller skating.
High performance director Mimi Knoop, men’s head coach Andrew Nicolaus, women’s head coach and 2020 Olympian Alexis Sablone and two board members also resigned in protest of USA Skateboarding. “By standing up and exiting as a body from an organization we no longer believe in, our only hope is to create positive change for our athletes,” they said in a statement. “We fully support the current process being led by the USOPC.”
Skateboarding is one of the newest Olympic sports. In February 2017, the USOPC USA certified skateboarding as the sport’s official NGB, and the group oversaw the sport’s Olympic debut at the Tokyo 2020 games.
Athletes were notified of the USOPC plans to decertify USA Skateboarding Tuesday via email from Holly Shick, the USOPC’s Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer. Shick wrote that the decision to begin decertification was based on the July exam as well as “communications with current USA Skateboarding leadership.”
Although there is no timeline for the decertification process, which will be administered by the USOPC Dispute Resolution Unit, the next steps will include the selection of a three-person hearing panel that will include a member of the USOPC Board of Directors, a member of the Athlete Advisory Council, and a representative from the NGB -Rates. USOPC and USA Skateboarding will then present evidence supporting their respective positions and a hearing will be called if USOPC and USA Skateboarding do not reach an agreement.
Until then, USA Skateboarding will remain the NGB of the sport.
The USOPC previously initiated a decertification process against USA Gymnastics in 2018 and USA Badminton in 2019. In both cases, the NGBs reached agreements with the USOPC, which dropped its offers of decertification.
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