FILE - Mary Lou Retton, of the United States, performs on the balance beam during the women's gymnastics individual all-around finals at the Summer Olympics on Aug. 3, 1984, in Los Angeles. Retton. 55, is in intensive care in a Texas hospital fighting a rare form of pneumonia, according to her daughter McKenna Kelley. (AP Photo/Suzanne Vlamis, File)
Olympic gymnastics champion Mary Lou Retton has pneumonia and is in intensive care in a Texas hospital.
Retton's daughter, McKenna Kelley, shared Retton's condition in an Instagram post on Tuesday. Kelley said the 55-year-old Retton, who became the first American woman to win the Olympic all-around title, is “fighting for her life” and not able to breathe on her own.
Kelley started a fundraising campaign on Retton's behalf for medical expenses. Kelley wrote that Retton does not currently have medical insurance.
Retton was 16 years old when she became an icon of the U.S. Olympic movement during her gold medal-winning performance at the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles. Retton, who grew up in Fairmont, West Virginia, also won two silver and two bronze medals at those Olympics to help bring gymnastics — a sport long dominated by eastern European powers like Romania and the Soviet Union — into the mainstream in the U.S.
Retton, a mother of four, currently lives in Texas. She retired from competitive gymnastics in 1986 and did numerous commercial endorsements. She also made several film and television appearances, including a stint on “Dancing with the Stars.”
She and her husband, Shannon Kelley, divorced in 2018.
The police department in the remote north woods Minnesota town of Ely faces the same challenges of recruiting and keeping new officers as countless other law enforcement agencies across the country. So it's offering a unique incentive: canoes.
President Joe Biden told a gathering of Native American nations that he would support the bid by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, which invented lacrosse, to compete in the sport under its own flag in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
NCAA President Charlie Baker announced Tuesday that he wants the organization to create a new tier of Division I athletics where schools with the most resources can offer unlimited educational benefits, enter into name, image and likeness partnerships with athletes and directly pay them through a trust fund.
A men’s World Cup super-G was called off Sunday due to strong wind as weather led to the cancellation of all three ski races over the weekend in Beaver Creek, Colorado.
