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Mary Lou Retton thinks her family deserves a gold medal.
The Olympian defended her daughters’ decision to start a crowdsourcing fund to pay for the medical bills she accrued while fighting a rare form of pneumonia, which she was hospitalized with in October.
“They didn’t deserve that,” Mary Lou told Entertainment Tonight in an interview published May 22. “They were just trying to take care of me. I don’t care about the naysayers. There are trolls everywhere. It’s what makes us America. Everybody’s got an opinion, but it is what it is.”
The former athlete—who shares daughters Shayla, 28, McKenna, 26, Skyla, 23, and Emma, 21, with ex-husband Shannon Kelley—went on to explain that she struggled to afford her mounting medical bills due to the impact of COVID-19 on her job as a public speaker and the cost of her 2018 divorce.
“I was in the ICU for a month, like, the bills were and are still coming in,” she continued. “You can’t imagine from ambulance bills to everything.”
Insisting that all of the money went directly to her treatment, Mary Lou—who retired from gymnastics in 1986 after picking up Team USA’s first gold medal in the All-Around at the 1984 Olympics—added that she couldn’t have gotten through her condition without her daughters’ thoughtful actions.