First Nations Complainants Ask Canadian Prime Minister to Bar Olympic Boss John Furlong Pending Hearing of Abuse Allegations

by Irvin Muchnick

An offshoot of our investigation of former rapist Irish national swim team coach George Gibney — a long-time American permanent resident alien and No. 1 at-large sex criminal in global sports — is the disturbing history of someone who seems to have been an early Irish colleague and perhaps even supervisor: John Furlong, CEO of Vancouver’s 2010 Winter Olympics.

Furlong was the athletic director of the Newpark School in Blackrock, County Dublin, in the same early 1970s period when Gibney was a teacher there. By 1976, Gibney had founded the Trojan Swim Club, which operated out of the school’s new aquatic complex.

As Canadian writer Laura Robinson has documented, Furlong leaves a trail of his own abuse allegations. His patriotic autobiography, a bestseller in Canada and the springboard for his lucrative current gigs as an inspirational speaker and fabulist, conveniently omits Furlong’s time in Canada several years before he officially emigrated from Ireland to Canada. In 1969 Furlong taught at a Catholic missionary school in Burns Lake, British Columbia, where he exhibited undeniable physical and mental cruelty against the First Nations (indigenous) children he was teaching and proselytizing, and where numerous victims credibly contend that he sexually abused them as well.

Now the First Nations group has asked Canada’s new prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to force Furlong to step down from his chairmanship of the government-funded sports organization Own the Podium. See http://www.playthegame.org/news/news-articles/2015/0129_furlong-accusers-issue-call-to-be-heard/.

See also this compelling article in the National Observer by Joan McEwen — the only journalist other than Robinson who has bothered to tell the Furlong accusers’ side of the story: “Waiting to be heard: Claimants versus John Furlong,” http://www.nationalobserver.com/2015/11/26/opinion/waiting-be-heard-claimants-versus-john-furlong.

My first take last month on the Gibney-Furlong connection is at https://concussioninc.net/?p=10506. Headline links to all of Concussion Inc.’s Gibney coverage are below.

GEORGE GIBNEY SERIES TO DATE