Remembering Paul Bergen, the Rapist Master of Tualatin Hills (For Whom the Thunderbolt Junior International Swim Meet Is Most Definitely NOT Named)

by Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce

As reported back in July, the former editor of U.S. Masters Swimming’s magazines Swim and Swimmer, Bill Volckening, told us of his encounters with Oregon coach Paul Bergen, unrefuted accused child rapist of Olympic gold medalist Deena Deardurff Schmidt and others.

Bergen’s son’s club, out of the Tualatin Hills Park and Recreation District’s aquatic center in Beaverton, tomorrow is staging its 15th annual junior international meet. For 14 years, it was named the Paul Bergen Junior International Championships. This time it’s the Thunderbolt Junior International Championships — in a season when Congressman George Miller, the Government Accountability Office, and the FBI are investigating youth coach sex abuse and its cover-up by USA Swimming. What a coincidence!

(The grandfather of a Canadian swimmer who has traveled to Oregon to compete this weekend emailed us yesterday that the Paul Bergen name persists on their club’s website. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is the “rebranding” of the Bergen classic.)

Here’s what ex-Masters Swimming magazine editor Volckening said five months ago:

In 1998, I moved to Oregon and started coaching masters at Tualatin Hills. I arrived at the same time as Paul Bergen and Sean Hutchison, and knew both of them very well. I saw them every day. During this period, [now-imprisoned monster] Don King came to Tualatin Hills and was coaching for a brief period. He disappeared as mysteriously as he appeared — mid-season.

If you’re interested in knowing what happens to the rapists and molesters when they “retire” into the merely seedy but not quite illegal, they join U.S. Masters Swimming — the “Shady Pines” for sexually deviant, alcoholic, morally corrupt people who like to swim.

See “United States Masters Swimming: Where Old Perverts Make Soft Landings,” July 16, https://concussioninc.net/?p=7873.