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 professional gamer and Twitch streamer told Cheddar CEO Jon Steinberg that it's hard to get fans to follow you from game to game, no matter how big your following. The 31-year-old also championed the "shenanigans" of Fortnite maker Epic Games, which allowed him to ride a rocket launched by fellow esports hero Ninja ー a combination of words that aren't typically uttered in a traditional workplace.
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The Twitter Esports Business Summit ran from Oct. 1-3, and it held its focus on the growing market of esports and how Twitter fits into the business. Rishi Chadha, head of gaming content partnerships at Twitter, said the company is focusing on the communities that foster players and fans, as well as publishers and developers of different platforms.
The team became the first in the NBA to introduce GIFs for the Facebook platform. Sandro Gasparro, director of social media for the Los Angeles Clippers, told Cheddar it's not just another way to promote engagement, but can also connect fans to players on a more personal level.
Ralf Reichert, CEO of ESL, sat down with Cheddar at this weekend's tournament at the Barclays Center and talked about the esports world and what he believes is needed for the enterprise to grow.
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Ron Darling, a former MLB starting pitcher and current TBS baseball analyst, said the easiest way to attract younger people to baseball is to get more kids playing it when they're kids. Darling said there are more children opting out of football due to concerns about head injuries, and those athletes should be primed to take up a different sport.
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18Birdies has seen success as a one-stop shop for golfers, both amateur and pro, gaining 1.3 million members since its launch. The app lets players book tee times, navigate a new course, and choose the right club. But CEO Eddy Lui says the main goal is to create a community ー a social network ー of golfers.
The blockchain has made its way into a slew of industries. Next at bat ー the sports world. The Los Angeles Dodgers are moving away from traditional promotions and have begun using crypto tokens to give away digital bobbleheads to fans. Ralph Esquibel, VP of information technology for the team, said this is the first giveaway of its kind and could lead to more experiments with cryptocurrencies.
