Scandal of Canadian Olympic Chieftain John Furlong’s Abuse of Missionary School Students Explodes As Native Groups Mobilize

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July 13, 2016

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July 17, 2016

July 15, 2016

by Irvin Muchnick

When it comes to turning a blind eye to sex crimes against children, the U.S. Olympic establishment has nothing on our neighbors to the north, where John Furlong, CEO of the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver, remains a leading lord of the rings. If anything, the Canadian blazers have doubled down on Furlong, who has been brought in to steer a new bid to host a future Olympiad in Calgary.

In seven previous posts (headline links below), Concussion Inc. has been the singular U.S. outlet for tracking the what appears to be the highest-level cover-up the world over of sexual abuse by an Olympic movement-affiliated coach or official. The allegations of Furlong’s widespread abuse of native children at a Catholic missionary school in British Columbia in the late 1960s were broken by my sister freelance journalist Laura Robinson.

The clues that Furlong’s defense is just a passel of lawyers, combined with he-said-she-said hogwash, are familiar — most notably, there are the numerosity and essentially unrefuted specificity of the charges. In this case, they are reinforced by the clear evidence that Furlong has lied about the origins of his immigration from Ireland (where he worked in the same school athletics program, and evidently for overlapping tenures, with George Gibney, a rapist who would become the Irish Olympic swimming coach and, during his two decades of mysterious visa passage in the U.S., the sports world’s No. 1 at-large sex criminal). These lies extend to the patchy chronology of Furlong’s bestselling book of Canadian superpatriotism.

Topping off the Furlong tale are the evidentiary manipulations of a Canadian judge — herself an ex-Olympic athlete — in his murky and abandoned defamation lawsuit against Laura Robinson for her 2012 article in The Georgia Straight, an alternative weekly.

Carla Qualtrough, the sports minister in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet, is missing in action.

But now the Assembly of First Nations, a consortium of Indian groups, has raised the temperature with their newest and strongest resolution, calling on Trudeau to listen to the victims and administer overdue accountability and justice. We’ve uploaded the document to http://muchnick.net/afnresolution.pdf.

See also the excellent new article, “Assembly of First Nations Votes to Press Government for New John Furlong Investigation” at http://www.canadalandshow.com/.