Parenting & Family Quote by Mary Lou Retton

Retton’s line lands like a clean dismount: simple, upbeat, and quietly pointed. Coming from an athlete synonymous with made-for-TV Olympic mythology, it’s less a policy brief than a defense of a particular civic ritual. “Deprive” is doing the heavy lifting. It recasts pay-per-view not as a business model but as a form of exclusion, a gate swung shut on the very audience the Olympics claims to inspire.

The specific intent is protective and populist: keep the Games on broadly accessible television so kids can stumble into them the way earlier generations did, flipping channels and discovering a sport they didn’t know existed. Retton isn’t arguing about rights fees or broadcasting economics; she’s arguing about the pipeline of wonder. The Olympics, in her framing, aren’t premium content. They’re a shared, accidental classroom where aspiration gets seeded.

The subtext is a critique of sports’ slow drift from communal spectacle to luxury product. Pay-per-view turns national-team drama into a transaction, and once the audience is sorted by ability to pay, the story of “we’re all watching together” collapses. Kids become collateral damage in a fight between networks and governing bodies, and the Games become another subscription tier.

Context matters: Retton’s own fame was built in an era when a handful of networks could turn a teenager into a household name overnight. Her warning is also self-aware: remove mass access, and you don’t just shrink viewership; you shrink the next Mary Lou Retton before she even knows she wants to stick the landing.