For Congress, Doping Violations in the Chinese Olympic Program Are a Job for the FBI. As for Sexual Abuse in Our Own … We’ll Get Back to You.
May 22, 2024FOIA for Prince Harry’s 2020 U.S. Visa Application Extensively Cites – and the Newest Court Development Mirrors – Our 2016-17 Case for George Gibney’s Immigration Records
May 26, 2024Pre-orders of UNDERCOVER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe are available at the links below. Official publication date is September 10, 2024, but copies are likely to start getting shipped from these outlets shortly after the late-July start of the Paris Olympics.
“Irvin Muchnick made my carefully selected list of personal heroes long ago. Nobody rakes the muck, nobody shines a searchlight on human cockroaches with a more relentless sense of purpose than Irv does. Underwater is a shining example of his work. It’s horrifying stuff that we desperately need to know.”
– Scott Ostler, San Francisco Chronicle columnist and 13-time California Sportswriter of the Year
The hundreds of millions who watch the thrilling spectacle of the Olympics are unaware of the extent to which their entertainment is undergirded by the systematic abuse by coaches of the underage athletes they develop. Many flag-waving fans got some sense of the problem from the USA Gymnastics scandals. But the crimes of swimming, for generations, have actually caused a much wider tsunami of pain and trauma around the world.
Backed by thousands of pages of FBI files and the author’s independent investigations, Underwater is the first comprehensive account of this ongoing and unacceptable phenomenon. Irvin Muchnick, a well-known chronicler of the dark side of sports, pulls together shocking stories involving some of the most iconic coaches in swimming history and some of the sport’s most celebrated programs (including Michael Phelps’s). The book lays the blame not just at the feat of individual villains, but also at a system that casually commodifies and sexualizes the vulnerable and non-consenting, making the priorities the pursuit of athletic scholarships and Olympic medals, glory, and riches.
Undercover is published just as a congressional commission has called for the first fundamental changes in the U.S. youth sports system in half a century. In the author’s estimation, this reform is the only real way to protect kids from the predation of the money-first stewards of professionalized sports.
Irvin Muchnick is author of Wrestling Babylon, Chris & Nancy,, Concussion Inc., and Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning. He has written articles for the New York Times Magazine, Salon, Washington Monthly,, Spy, and Sports Illustrated, and other major outlets, as well as for Ireland’s Broadsheet and Village magazine and San Francisco’s Beyond Chron. He lives in California.
