There are two things that are false.
First, because of our financial situation, we terminated Lisa's contract, which cost us—in terms of her salary, benefits and travel—about $120,000 per year. We've contracted a female coach to provide similar services for $20,000 a year. We're effectively saving about $100,000 in our budget, which really allowed us to balance our budget this year but still provide the services that we need to provide to our athletes.
Second, as I said before, the decision to terminate Lisa was made in February. Regarding the decision about when to inform her, we picked the date of March 17 because she was doing some coaching internationally. In the meantime, we had those two dates. We had the termination letter.
We decided that we were going to give her notice after the European championships, which were going to take place on March 17. On March 8 she announced to us that she was pregnant, but we had the termination letter. We had all the documents in place. We made the decision between the high-performance director and myself that the best time to do that with the least disruption to our team would be March 17.
As I say, in the meantime, she announced that she was pregnant. We respected that, but it had nothing to do with the termination. We have many practices.... We've had within our own staff many who have had maternity leave, five in the last five years. There's no way we discriminate between women. Half of our staff are women.
The second in command is a woman, and we've had various maternity policies. We have one person who has just come back from maternity leave. We have one currently on maternity leave. There is absolutely no way that this had anything—zero—to do with her pregnancy, and all of our records will show that.