SwimSwam: USA Swimming Is Running a Deficit

Irvin Muchnick’s book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe will be published next year by ECW Press.

by Irvin Muchnick

SwimSwam, a site with news on the sport of swimming, has good coverage of financial problems at USA Swimming, the Olympic Committee’s national sport governing body. See “USA Swimming Board, Staff Continue Culture of Silence on Organizational Issues,” https://swimswam.com/usa-swimming-board-staff-continue-culture-of-silence-on-organizational-issues/.

The SwimSwam writer, Riley Overend, cites Ira Klein as the only member of the USA Swimming board to respond to Overend’s query about the organization’s $10 million operating deficit, as revealed in its Internal Revenue Service nonprofit filing. And even Klein, a member of the Executive Compensation Committee – which approved CEO Tim Hinchey’s compensation package (fluctating in any given year between just above and just below $1 million) – simply referred the SwimSwam reporter to others, who didn’t acknowledge requests for comment.

In 2012, Ira Klein, then head coach of a USA Swimming age-group club in Sarasota, Florida, and a member of the board of the American Swimming Coaches Association, emailed me at length, and with unintentional comedy, after I asked board members for comment on then ASCA executive director John Leonard’s statement to me that his group was not “an organization that deals directly with children, nor is that part of our purpose in any way, shape or form.”

Klein decried what he called “your McCartheist style,” adding: “It is easy … to call for action.” He urged me, “Put down your keyboard and come out from the shadows, stand in the light of day and make serious efforts to better the future.” See https://concussioninc.net/?p=5872.