Editor’s note: This piece was adapted from Irvin Muchnick’s forthcoming book “Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe,” which will be published by ECW Press on Sept. 10.
Hundreds of millions of viewers around the world are enjoying the Paris Olympics. Swimming is one of the marquee sports of the Summer Games, and American viewers are lapping up the feats of Katie Ledecky, Caeleb Dressel and others. The leap-year fortnight spectacle of the Olympics is really the only window of focused public attention on this niche sport.
Behind the scenes of these feel-good TV packages of athletic and patriotic glory, another story plays out. What America’s sports families don’t know about their country’s competitive youth swimming programs can hurt them and scar their kids for life.
In 2010, in the face of news media accounts of widespread sexual abuse by its coaches of athletes in their charge, many of them underage, USA Swimming — the national sport governing body under the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) — began publishing a list of coaches banned for abuse. Initially, about 46 coaches were listed. As of June, there were 210 names on the list. These don’t include a separate “flagged” list, which is believed to name multiple famous coaches who are either retired or otherwise not in the jurisdiction of USA Swimming.
The organization 14 years ago also established what it calls its SafeSport program, which has accomplished little except public relations cover. While resigning in disgrace in 2018, USA Swimming’s first director of SafeSport, Susan Woessner, admitted having kissed then-coach Sean Hutchison, ESPN and other outlets reported. The kiss happened before he was the subject of a high-profile investigation by her department for allegedly grooming and abusing swimmer Ariana Kukors for years. (Kukors settled a lawsuit against USA Swimming, and Hutchison was banned.)
Nonetheless, Scott Blackmun, at the time CEO of the U.S. Olympic Committee, considered swimming’s SafeSport program a model, which was expanded into the U.S. Center for SafeSport in 2017, an agency investigating and adjudicating claims of coach abuse in Olympic and Paralympic sports. Blackmun, along with members of USA Gymnastics’ board of directors, stepped down following exposure of the heinous molestation of scores of gymnasts — including many Olympic stars — by Dr. Larry Nassar, who is now in prison following federal and state criminal convictions.
There’s no tasteful or useful ranking of abuse scenarios. But what the public doesn’t appreciate is that the sheer volume of abuse in swimming has been greater than in gymnastics. With nearly half a million youth swimmers participating in USOPC/USA Swimming-certified after-school practices and year-round weekend meets, swimming is a staple of American life, but it has a dark side as deep as a long-course pool.
In 2020, Congress appointed a Commission on the State of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee to study problems in multiple areas of the national Olympic movement, including coach abuse. The commission published its report earlier this year, which got almost no major coverage.
The commission’s two recommendations in the area of abuse are potential game-changers; they are proposals for the first real root-and-branch reform of our tragically flawed youth sports system in nearly half a century. Our nation’s parents, who are mesmerized by the chase for college athletic scholarships and Olympic medals and all too willing to outsource their parenting to coaches who too often turn into subtle or blatant abusers, need to support as a bloc the effort to get Congress to turn the commission’s guidance into legislation.
Irvin Muchnick: Parents have the power to compel Congress to act to protect young athletes
For the fundamental societal problem here is that the Olympic Committee and its money-first priorities have no business running the whole show of American youth sports.
The smooth functioning of USA Swimming is made possible only with the subsidies of below-cost local public pool rentals and the economies of scale provided by hundreds of thousands of parent volunteers. And for the vast majority of those parents, their kids are in it only for an extracurricular activity and development of life skills.
Recognizing this dynamic — and wisely critiquing the current system as a relic of Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union — the commission has called for bifurcating the governance of youth sports such as swimming. While the Olympic Committee and its sport governing bodies should continue to run programs for elite athletes and hard-core Olympic aspirants, they shouldn’t control and call the shots for those at the grassroots.
The commission additionally advocates spinning off the U.S. Center for SafeSport — which has been exposed as incompetent, corrupt and under the thumb of Olympic powerbrokers — as a truly independent, federally funded agency.
Internal efforts to stem abuse have simply never gotten traction. USA Swimming implemented background checks for coaches in 2006; they’ve ranged from ineffective to fraudulent. The checks didn’t catch Andrew King, who operated up and down the West Coast for decades and in 2010 finally landed in prison for likely the rest of his life after pleading no contest to 20 child molestation charges. They didn’t catch former Washington state Judge Chuck Baechler, who coached swimming in South Dakota despite being removed from the bench and disbarred after pleading no contest to sexually assaulting a woman who’d been before his court. They didn’t catch James Pantera, who became involved with a San Diego swim club despite having federal convictions and multiple identities and who was sentenced to a year in federal prison for making false statements and fraudulently obtaining student loans, The Associated Press reported.
The most truculent voice opposing policing of sexual abuse has been the coaches’ trade group, the American Swimming Coaches Association. In 2012, ASCA’s longtime (and now retired) executive director, John Leonard, told me, “We do not have an organization that deals directly with children, nor is that part of our purpose in any way, shape or form.” Can anyone imagine the American Academy of Pediatrics making a similar statement?
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Debra Denithorne was a swimmer groomed for several years in San Ramon, California, by Andrew King, who “proposed marriage” to her the day she turned 16, as reported by the San Jose Mercury News. Today, she’s Debra Grodensky, a longtime anti-abuse activist who was part of a significant monetary settlement of a lawsuit for USA Swimming’s culpability in harboring abusers. She told me, “Civil litigation is a limited vehicle when it comes to forcing fundamental change. That’s a job for Congress.”
Indeed, it is. In order to get the commission’s proposals for Congress off the starting blocks, we need to understand that the youth coach sexual-abuse narrative isn’t a compendium of testimonials by celebrity survivors. Rather, it’s a story exposing systemic fault lines.
We must stop drowning youth sports programs in the corrupt and damaging values of professionalized ones.
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