The defending NFL Champion New England Patriots will face the Philadelphia Eagles at the Super Bowl on Feb. 4 in Minnesota — setting the teams up for a rematch of their 2005 league championship contest and giving Philadelphia a chance to avenge the sting of that loss.

New England quarterback Tom Brady rallied his team in the final minutes for a comeback victory against the Jacksonville Jaguars in the American Football Conference championship. Brady threw a 4-yard touchdown pass to Danny Amendola with just 2:48 left on the clock, putting the Patriots at 24-20.

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New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady throws a pass during the first half of the AFC championship NFL football game against the Jacksonville Jaguars yesterday in Foxborough, Mass.

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The Associated Press notes: “Brady, who was questionable for the game with a right hand injury, showed no ill effects and completed 26 of 38 passes for 290 yards and two touchdowns, including the big one on the Pats’ five-play, 30-yard drive in the final minutes.”

Later, the Eagles overcame the Minnesota Vikings as Philadelphia’s quarterback Nick Foles tossed three touchdown passes, chalking up an unassailable 38-7 lead against the Vikings for the National Football Conference title.

According to Reuters:

“The Vikings looked to tie the game — or at least kick a field goal — late in the first half, but [quarterback Case] Keenum was sacked by Derek Barnett on third-and-5 from the Philadelphia 16. [Chris] Long recovered the fumble.

Foles proved his mettle on the ensuing possession as he tossed a spectacular 53-yard touchdown pass to [Alshon] Jeffery on third-and-10, giving the Eagles a 21-7 lead with 1:09 remaining in the half. Foles was able to move around long enough to be able to deliver the deep pass.”

As ESPN writes:

“The Patriots kicked off the season as the consensus Super Bowl favorites with odds around 5-2 and, after a few early hiccups, remained the team to beat at Las Vegas sportsbooks for the majority of the season.

The Eagles were 40-1 to win the Super Bowl at the Westgate SuperBook in September. They got off to a 10-2 start but lost quarterback Carson Wentz to a knee injury in early December. Backup quarterback Nick Foles stepped in and led the Eagles to back-to-back wins in the playoffs. Philadelphia was an underdog in each of its playoff games, against the Atlanta Falcons and Sunday against the Vikings.”

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In just a few weeks, speedskater Kimani Griffin, 27, will join a cast of Olympic first-timers in Pyeongchang. But he’s no stranger to the bright lights and big stage — or to public broadcasting.

At age 17, the Winston-Salem, N.C., native was featured on the PBS program, From the Top, when he performed classical guitar at Carnegie Hall. He stepped away from playing music professionally after accepting a full scholarship to college in Georgia. But setting aside his other passion — in-line skating — wasn’t as easy.

“I really enjoyed my time (at Columbus State University), but I really missed skating,” Griffin says. “I really missed the world of working out and that competitive nature.” He thought, “Maybe I’ll move to Salt Lake and see if I can go down this path.”

Eight years after taking that leap, he’s back in his element. Earlier this month, Griffin’s third-place finish in the 500-meter race landed him a spot on the eight-man U.S. speedskating team.

From his Brookfield, Wisc., training ground, Kimani Griffin spoke with NPR’s Michelle Martin about his journey back to the joy of competitive performance — and how Gucci Mane fits into his routine.

Interview Highlights

On whether qualifying for the Olympics or his Carnegie Hall debut was more nerve-wracking

I think they’re about the same. I actually wasn’t too nervous or felt under pressure for either one of those experiences. I think in both experiences I was just having fun kind of in my element doing what I do.

On when he shifted his priorities from music to speedskating

Spring and summer of 2008 was kind of a big turning point in my life. I was, at that time, at the top of my game in in-line skating. And with guitar, I had just done an NPR show in Connecticut on the radio; I had just done the Carnegie Hall concert. So I was kind of in a tough spot as far as what I wanted to do in my life, what direction and path I wanted to take. I ended up getting a full-ride (scholarship) to go to school in Georgia, Columbus State University. I really enjoyed my time there, but I really missed skating, I really missed the world of working out and that competitive nature.

I was just kind of like a 19-year-old spur-of-the-moment — maybe I’ll move to Salt Lake and see if I can go down this path. Music and sports have been my two outlets in life so luckily when I left school I had another passion to fall back on. I kind of took a risk and — eight years later here I am.

On the joy of speedskating

I guess for the 500 (meters), you have that 34, 35-seconds of — just time essentially stops. You’re just in the moment, you can’t hear anything, I mean even your coach is screaming at you on the backstretch but you can’t even hear him most of the time — at least for me. And I’m just so focused in every little push, every little body angle, every movement that I’m doing to propel myself forward. And then when I cross the line, all of the sudden I hear people screaming and I look at the clock and, hopefully it’s a time that I want to see.

NPR’s Cara Reedy and Dustin Desoto produced the audio for this story. Emma Bowman adapted it for the Web.

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Rachael Denhollander was 15 the first time she went to see Larry Nassar, then the doctor for USA Gymnastics. Denhollander didn’t tell anyone of authority about how he sexually assaulted her until years later, in 2004, when she was working as a gymnastics coach.

Nassar has admitted to sexually assaulting minors. He has been sentenced to 60 years in prison for charges related to child pornography, but has not yet been sentenced in a state case for sexually assaulting the athletes.

The sentencing hearing for the Ingham County, Mich., case started on Tuesday. As NPR previously reported, before issuing Nassar’s sentence, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina is giving all of those assaulted by Nassar a chance to speak. Olympic gold medalists Aly Raisman and Jordyn Wieber spoke on Friday and condemned the abuse and actions of Nassar, as well as what they see as the inaction and inability to protect athletes from USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Olympians Simone Biles, McKayla Maroney and Gabby Douglas also have said they are survivors of sexual abuse by Nassar.

Denhollander was the first person to file a criminal complaint against Nassar in 2016. That led to more than 100 women coming forward saying they also had been victims of his abuse. Denhollander contacted The Indianapolis Star after the paper published an investigation about sexual abuse within USA Gymnastics.

Denhollander testified for nearly three hours during the preliminary examination for the child pornography case against Nassar, and she will be the last of at least 120 women to speak during the sentencing hearing, which continues next week.

She says while she’s not sure of exactly what she will say, she will address Nassar and those watching.

“This is the greatest sexual assault scandal in sports history,” Denhollander says. “Larry is arguably the most prolific pedophile in history. And it is imperative that we learn some very serious lessons from what has happened here.”

Denhollander spoke with All Things Considered host Mary Louise Kelly about the abuse she experienced, the trial and her feelings toward gymnastics today.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Interview Highlights

On women speaking at the sentencing hearing

It really is an empowering thing. It is an incredibly difficult thing to face your abuser, but to see all of these survivors able to stand up and to look Larry in the eye, and to speak the truth about what he did, and to put the shame and the blame and the guilt exactly where it belongs — on Larry and on Larry alone — is an incredible thing to witness.

On when she first told someone about the abuse

I first spoke up to an authority figure in 2004. I was coaching gymnastics at that point and one of the young gymnasts that I coached was going to be sent to him for treatment for hip pain. She was only 7 or 8, and I thought I couldn’t let that happen. So I did disclose parts of the abuse — not all of it, but parts of the abuse — and told the coach at the gym that he had sexually assaulted me under the guise of treatment, and that no gymnast should be seeing him.

On what happened when she spoke out

The response to that was not malicious in any way shape or form — I consider that coach a good friend still to this day — but she didn’t know what to do with it. And so she did continue to send gymnasts to Larry up until the point that she stopped coaching at that gym.

On if Nassar’s behavior was an open secret

Absolutely … many of the dancers, the gymnasts, the people who saw him would talk about the treatments. And the conclusion was, “Well this must be medical treatment, because he’d never be allowed near us if it wasn’t.” And as a 15-year-old that was my thought process.

As I lay on that exam table, it was very clear to me that this was something Larry did regularly. I knew if it was something Larry did regularly — that he was seeing girls every day, including our elite gymnasts — that there was no way someone had not described before what Larry was doing.

And so the only conclusion that I could come to was that it had to be a legitimate medical treatment, because surely the adults that heard the description of what he was doing would have done something if it wasn’t, and he would have never been near me. And that thought process caused me to lay still.

On how she views gymnastics now

The sexual assault itself does not color my view of gymnastics — I think it is an incredible, beautiful sport, that there is so much good that can come from it. But the way USA [Gymnastics] has created a culture in gymnastics absolutely has colored my view. Because the reality is that Larry is not the problem, Larry is the symptom of the problem. The reason Larry was able to have access to so many children for so long is because you had two major institutions who looked the other way.

NPR’s Kat Lonsdorf produced the audio for this story. NPR’s Wynne Davis adapted it for Web.

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Editor’s note: This report includes disturbing descriptions of abuse.

Amid a national sexual abuse scandal, USA Gymnastics severed its relationship on Thursday with Karolyi Ranch, the world-renowned training facility where some gymnasts say they were assaulted by the team’s doctor.

“It will no longer serve as the USA Gymnastics National Team Training Center,” USA Gymnastics president and CEO Kerry Perry said in a statement. She added that next week’s training camp for the U.S. National Women’s Team had been canceled.

“Our most important priority is our athletes, and their training environment must reflect this,” Perry said.

Perry’s announcement follows a confession by multi-gold medalist Simone Biles over social media in which she said she is one of several Olympic gymnasts abused by Larry Nassar, who was the team’s doctor for nearly two decades. Former Olympic champions Aly Raisman, McKayla Maroney and Gabby Douglas have also accused Nassar of molestation.

In the post, Biles said was dreading returning to the training facility in Huntsville, Tex.

“It breaks my heart even more to think that as I work toward my dream of competing in Tokyo 2020, I will have to continually return to the same training facility where I was abused,” Biles wrote on Monday.

More than a 100 women are telling horrific stories of abuse by Nassar, as part of a criminal sentencing hearing that started Tuesday and The Associated Press reports will likely end next week.

Nassar has only pleaded guilty to seven first-degree sexual assault charges in Ingham County, Mich., but Judge Rosemarie Aquilina is allowing all of his accusers to speak if they want to before issuing Nassar’s sentence. He has already been sentenced to 60 years in prison for child pornography in a federal case.

On Thursday Michigan Assistant Attorney General Angela Povilaitis read a statement prepared by Maroney, who could not attend the hearing.

She described the doctor as “a monster of a human being.”

“I had a dream to go to the Olympics and the things I had to endure to get there were unnecessary and disgusting,” Maroney wrote, adding that the abuse started when she was 13 or 14 and ended only when she left the sport.

“He abused my trust. He abused my body and he left scars on my psyche that will never go away,” she said.

Maroney also blamed USA Gymnastics, the U.S. Olympic Committee and Michigan State University for failing to stop Nassar’s behavior. “A simple fact is this: If MSU, USA Gymnastics and the U.S. Olympic committee had paid attention to any of the red flags in Larry Nassar’s behavior, I would have never met him. I wouldn’t have been abused by him,” she wrote.

Jaime Dantzscher, a bronze medalist in the 2000 Olympics, delivered her impact statement in person on Thursday. MLivereports she was one of the first women to publicly accuse the doctor of sexually assaulting athletes, passing off the abuse as specialized medical treatment.

The video below contains audio of Dantzscher’s full statement. Warning: The video contains explicit content.

She said Nassar massaged her genitals, laid on top of her, rubbing his penis against her and penetrated her with his fingers. The first assault happened when she was 12, she said. She described years of physical and psychological problems, stemming from the abuse, including bulimia and depression. Both led to hospitalization and one suicide attempt.

On Thursday Nassar, who has been sitting in the witness stand since Tuesday, submitted a six-page letter to the judge complaining that it was too hard for him to listen to his accusers while they described how he abused them. He claimed Aquilina had turned proceedings into a “media circus.”

She berated him for criticizing the process. In an MLive video, Aquilina can be heard saying:

“You may find it harsh that you are here, listening, but nothing is as harsh as what your victims endured for thousands of hours at your hands collectively. You spent thousands of hours perpetrating criminal sexual conduct on minors. Spending four or five days listening to them is significantly minor considering the hours of pleasure you’ve had at their expense and ruining their lives. None of this should come as a surprise to you.”

More women are expected to speak on Friday.

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We live in an age of heightened awareness about concussions. From battlefields around the world to football fields in the U.S., we’ve heard about the dangers caused when the brain rattles around inside the skull and the possible link between concussions and the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

A number of high-profile NFL stars have developed CTE, and parents are increasingly worried about how concussions may affect their children who play sports. The injury even has become part of popular culture, thanks to the 2015 film “Concussion.”

But now a high-powered team of researchers says all that focus on concussions may be missing the mark.

It’s really about hits

A study published online Thursday in Brain, a journal of neurology, presents the strongest case yet that repetitive hits to the head that don’t lead to concussions —meaning no loss of consciousness or other symptoms that can include headaches, dizziness, vision problems or confusion — cause CTE.

“We’ve had an inkling that subconcussive hits — the ones that don’t [show] neurological signs and symptoms — may be associatedwith CTE,” says Dr. Lee Goldstein, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Boston University School of Medicine and the lead investigator on the study. “We now have solid scientific evidence to say that is so.”

And this evidence, he says, leaves researchers “terrifically concerned.”

“The concussions we see on the ballfield or the battlefield or wherever — those people are going to get attention,” Goldstein says, “because it’s obvious they’ve had some sort of injury. We’re really worried about the many more people who are getting hit and getting hurt — their brain is getting hurt — but are not getting help because we can’t see the evidence on the outside that their brain is actually hurt. It’s a silent injury.”

Translating Goldstein’s concern to the football field, Chris Nowinski, who heads the Concussion Legacy Foundation, says, “We see the hard hits all the time, where a guy pops up and smiles and [signals] a first down, and [we think], ‘OK, that hit was fine.’ But what this study says is: No, that hit probably wasn’t fine, and that poor guy can’t feel the damage that’s happening in his brain right now.”

Tracking hits to the head instead

Goldstein says about 20 percent of known cases of CTE had no record or report of concussion.

“It suggested that maybe concussion isn’t the index or metric that we should be following,” he says. “Rather, maybe it’s something about the hits and number of hits that might be important. That’s what we wanted to nail here.”

The study was seven years in the making and involved researchers from Boston University, Cleveland Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and Oxford University in the U.K.

The researchers analyzed human brains — from teenagers and young adults who had been exposed to mild head impact but died from another cause soon after. They found early evidence of brain pathology consistent with what is seen in CTE, including abnormal accumulation of tau protein. CTE is a neurodegenerative disease characterized by that kind of abnormal accumulation around small blood vessels in the brain. The disease can cause brain cell death, cognitive deficits and dementia.

The researchers also conducted experiments that re-created sports-related head impact and military-related blast exposure on laboratory mice.

“It took us many years to do this,” Goldstein says. “We see in our animals — even after a small number of hits, even one — very early evidence of pathologies associated with CTE.”

And, they noted, the brain pathology was unrelated to signs of concussion in the mice, such as altered arousal and impaired balance. Goldstein says the scientists nailed what they wanted to — strong evidence linking head impact to CTE, independent of concussion.

Still, concussion is part of the picture

While the study downplays the role of concussions in the ultimate development of CTE, the familiar symptoms — headaches, fogginess or problems with concentration, memory, balance and coordination, even without a loss of consciousness, are still important signs the brain has been hurt.

“I want to be very clear on this,” Goldstein says. “This is in no way to minimize concussions.”

Nowinski, from the Concussion Legacy Foundation, is a former high school and college football player who says that even now, at 39, he deals with symptoms of acute post-concussion syndrome, including lingering headaches, sleepwalking and nausea during intense exercise.

“We’re not taking concussions out of the equation,” Nowinski says. “Concussions are still very bad.” They can still cause acute brain injury that leads to long-term symptoms, he says, independent of whether they spark a neurodegenerative disease.

“We still have to respect and address [concussions], even more than we have in the past.”

Pushing the science ahead

Dr. Julian Bailes isn’t a household name. Not like, say, actor Alec Baldwin. But the two are linked on this issue — Baldwin played Bailes in the movie Concussion. Bailes chairs the department of neurosurgery at NorthShore University Health System in the Chicago area; he wasn’t involved with Goldstein’s study, but followed the work and calls it “good science.”

“It’s a comprehensive study,” he says, “and I believe it adds a lot to our knowledge and the medical literature concerning this topic.” Bailes says the work dovetails with findings he and others published in 2013.

“We’ve known for a few years that it’s not just the known or diagnosed concussions that may increase risk for [CTE],” Bailes says. “It’s probably the exposure. It’s how many hits to the head that have occurred and at what velocity and what extent.”

He notes the first case of CTE for an NFL player, discovered by his colleague Dr. Bennet Omalu, was the late center Mike Webster who “played football 27 years and never had a known or diagnosed concussion.”

Bailes thinks the study published Thursday adds to the evolving narrative about head impact and the long-term consequences. “It certainly adds to our science and our understanding,” Bailes says. “And hopefully it adds to greater protection, greater safety and the ability for all ages to enjoy contact sports.”

The NFL Players Association agrees, saying in a statement:

“We stood firm against an [expanded] 18-game schedule and insisted on changes to the work rules in 2011 to limit contact of all types to protect players, and this study reinforces we made the right decision. We have been in close touch with the researchers at Boston University, who are also members of our Mackey-White Health and Safety committee, and we will review this study carefully to consider future changes to improve the health and safety of our players.”

Delay start of tackle football for kids?

Still, Goldstein and Nowinski aren’t so sure young kids should be playing contact sports at all.

“The longer you play, and the earlier you start playing, you’ll suffer more head hits [and put yourself at] greater the risk for CTE,” Goldstein says. “That’s what all the evidence [in the study] was suggesting.”

He and Nowinski believe student-athletes shouldn’t play tackle football until high school.

But Bailes disagrees.

For the past seven years, he has served as the volunteer chairman of the medical advisory committee for Pop Warner, one of the oldest and largest youth football organizations in the U.S.

Bailes doesn’t believe the study offers evidence that early exposure to head hits makes a football player more likely to develop CTE. Six years ago, he notes, Pop Warner became the first football organization at any level to legislate against having head contact drills in practice. Since that time, from the NFL on down, Bailes says, there has been a marked reduction in styles of practice or techniques that lead to gratuitous head contact. And new rules at all levels have helped eliminate egregious open-field head hits or head targeting, he says.

Urging kids to play flag football until high school wouldn’t actually provide the solution people seek, Bailes says. High school is when the real risk to student-athletes begins.

“That’s where the players become man-sized and run fast and have high velocity collisions and hundreds of them a year,” Bailes says. As to the question of where to draw the line in terms of what age kids should start playing tackle football — “this study doesn’t answer that,” Bailes says. “There’s been no answer to that question.”

It’s an individual choice, he believes; parents and kids need to consider the risks and benefits.

Bailes thinks playing football before the age of 14 or 15 can have many benefits.

And, he notes, everything is relative.

“There are about 10 people who drown every day in the U.S.,” he says, citing statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “and we’re not calling to outlaw swimming.”

Brain injuries that transcend football – and sports

The debate over when or even if kids should play tackle football will continue as the science of head injury evolves.

Both Bailes and Goldstein are a big part of that evolution. Right now, CTE can only be diagnosed after death, but both scientists are working, independently of each other, on a test intended to detect CTE in living brains. Such a test would help determine how widespread the disease is and, beyond that, how to develop treatment.

In the meantime, Goldstein hopes his study finds applications not just in football, but in other sports, like soccer and lacrosse, where contact and collisions include hits to the head.

And beyond sports, Goldstein says, hits to the head affect the most vulnerable segments of society. He has a long list.

“Intimate partners who are having repetitive head injuries,” he notes,” domestic violence victims, homeless, children at risk, people in our prison systems. [With] all of these people, we need to take the focus off concussion and find out if they have injured brains.”

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More than 30 Russian athletes participating in Siberian Indoor Championships last weekend abruptly withdrew from competition when drug testers arrived at the event.

According to the Russian sports website Championat, as many as 36 athletes cited various illnesses for withdrawing from the competition at the city of Irkutsk.

Last month, Russian athletes were banned from competing under their nation’s flag in the Winter Olympics that begin next month following allegations of a state-sponsored doping scheme involving athletes at the 2014 Games in Sochi.

In 2016, one Russian athlete tried to bribe a drug tester and another ran out of the stadium during her own race to avoid being tested, the World Anti-Doping Agency says.

As The Moscow Times notes, “Russia has a checkered history with the use of banned performance-enhancing drugs by its athletes, a legacy of the Soviet Union backed by historical evidence and testing records.”

The Russian track and field federation “has started an internal investigation” into the incident, according to Championat.

Sergey Shubenkov, the 2015 world 110-meter hurdle champion, tweeted Wednesday that “Doping control drove in” and “a couple of dozen withdrew,” according to a translation used by the BBC.

In a translation from Russia’s state-run Tass news agency, Russian Athletics Federation President Dmitry Shlyakhtin said he wasn’t surprised at the sudden exodus of would-be competitors.

“[We] have a lot of problems at the bottom [of athletics in Russia],” he said.

“Our suspicion that the doping situation hasn’t improved in all regions has increased,” he said, adding that without documentation, he could not be sure that the athletes who withdrew were using illegal drugs.

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Former NASCAR superstar Dale Earnhardt Jr. found out even the best drivers may have to stay off the roads in a snowstorm.

Wednesday morning after he helped pull another car out of a ditch, his pickup skidded off the road and rammed into a tree.

On Twitter Earnhardt said he lost control of his truck on a snow-covered road and warned other North Carolina drivers to avoid his fate. “[North Carolina] stay off the roads today/tonight. 5 minutes after helping these folks I center punched a pine tree,” he wrote.

But fans need not worry about the Hall of Famer. “All good,” he said. “Probably just needs new alignment.”

A storm left a blanket of snow over North and South Carolina and Georgia. North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper declared a state of emergency in advance of the storm. AccuWeather reported the snowstorm caused over 500 collisions in the state.

Earnhardt’s accident came a day after the former NASCAR star announced he will be covering the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang on NBC.

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