Mary Lou Retton thinks her household deserves a gold medal.
The Olympian defended her daughters’ resolution to begin a crowdsourcing fund to pay for the medical payments she accrued whereas combating a uncommon type of pneumonia, which she was hospitalized with in October.
“They did not deserve that,” Mary Lou advised Leisure Tonight in an interview printed Might 22. “They had been simply making an attempt to deal with me. I do not care in regards to the naysayers. There are trolls all over the place. It is what makes us America. Everyone’s obtained an opinion, however it’s what it’s.”
The previous athlete—who shares daughters Shayla, 28, McKenna, 26, Skyla, 23, and Emma, 21, with ex-husband Shannon Kelley—went on to clarify that she struggled to afford her mounting medical payments as a result of impression of COVID-19 on her job as a public speaker and the price of her 2018 divorce.
“I used to be within the ICU for a month, like, the payments had been and are nonetheless coming in,” she continued. “You possibly can’t think about from ambulance payments to all the pieces.”
Insisting that all the cash went on to her remedy, Mary Lou—who retired from gymnastics in 1986 after selecting up Workforce USA’s first gold medal within the All-Round on the 1984 Olympics—added that she could not have gotten by means of her situation with out her daughters’ considerate actions.
