FORT WORTH, Texas _ You may draw a blank on the name Katelyn Ohashi, but once you see her, and that routine, you will know her.
She is one of the few gymnasts to ever achieve fame in college.
Ohashi is scheduled to come to Fort Worth for the NCAA Gymnastics Championships April 19 and 20 at the Fort Worth Convention Center.
She is the UCLA gymnast who just about crippled Google and YouTube with floor routines that makes anyone who watches them say, "Wow." Her routines have generated tens of millions of views on social media.
She has earned multiple perfect 10s for her routines this year.
Ohashi, 21, inspired entertainers from Janet Jackson and politicians like Kamala Harris and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to applaud her. You may not be a big fan of Harris or the U.S. Rep. known as AOC, but everyone can agree Ohashi's routines make you want to get up and move.
The only problem, it would seem, is that a routine that inspired so many is set to some music by Michael Jackson.
On Sunday, she wrote in her blog that she would no longer perform to any of Jackson's music. She cited the reason because of the release of the documentary "Leaving Neverland."
The documentary features two accounts of people who allege that the late pop singer molested children. The Jackson family has refuted the claims.
Coincidentally, I recently asked to interview Ohashi in advance of the NCAA Championships, and this all came up. We spoke on Wednesday afternoon.
When I asked her about the decision to remove Jackson's music from routine she said, "Well, it's getting misconstrued right now. I got in a rabbit hole a couple of minutes prior to this call. It has nothing to do with the documentary, or Michael Jackson, or him being guilty or not. I've heard from multiple people that the documentary is so upsetting. That not everyone can find joy in (the routine) again.
"I've heard from survivors who say that, '(The routine) has done so much for me.' I've watched the beginning portion of the documentary. It's not about me siding with guilty or not. It's about me siding with survivors in general. You can't disregard what someone is saying. At the end of the day, no one was in the room besides Michael Jackson and the boys. Who is to say what really happened in there?
"That's not the point of it. I am trying to use my platform for something bigger than all of this. This is trying to empower people's voices. My teammates are survivors themselves. A few of them (are actual survivors of assault). My floor coach. It's joy what I am trying to convey. If old form music made anyone uncomfortable, that wasn't the point."
