Washington Post’s Ethical Woes a Reminder of How That Great Newspaper — and Others — Have Pandered to Team Swimming and Fallen Short on Critical Coach Abuse Coverage

by Irvin Muchnick

The tumult at the Washington Post is in the news. On the heels of the withdrawal of incoming top editor Robert Winnett, before he even got started, following reports that he was ethically challenged, the focus is on publisher William Lewis’s questionable deals for the Post to partner pursuit of content with a company called News Movement, in which he has a financial interest.

It’s an opportunity to take a close look at one reason behind the deficient coverage of youth swimming coach abuse issues by the newspaper of record in the company town of the federal government.

In doing so, I don’t mean to suggest that the lapses I’ll proceed to outline are on the scale of the scandal of Winnett and the emerging scandal of Lewis. The mainstream American media have a larger problem with their coverage of swimming abuse than blatant conflict of financial interest. Simply put, our most important sources of hard news are deep in the tank for Team Rah-Rah at the Olympics, and have no editorial real estate or staying power for thoughtful dives into the public health issue of widespread and systematic abuse. A handful of papers reported several years ago on a federal grand jury investigation of USA Swimming for insurance fraud and abuse cover-ups – then let it drop. The New York Times hasn’t even deigned to mention that, in March, a Congressional commission report recommended an overhaul of the country’s youth sports system – taking grassroots programs away from Olympic Committee national sport governing bodies – and putting the flailing and failing U.S. Center for Safe Sport under government jurisdiction and funding.

With regard to the Post, even its good coverage has been fragmentary and equivocal. In 2010, the Post’s swimming beat writer at the time, Amy Shipley, broke the story of the sexual relationship between coach Sean Hutchison and his protégé Ariana Kukors at USA Swimming’s professional development center in Fullerton, California. Fine – but that was just a plant by defrocked national team coach Mark Schubert, who was using this dirt to leverage negotiation of his own severance package.

In 2012, Shipley reported the explosive scenario of the abuse of swimmer Kelley Davies by her coach Rick Curl, followed by decades of cover-up. This story was served up on a tee by the victim’s lawyers, who were poised to file a lawsuit. Curl got banned by USA Swimming and trundled off to Maryland state prison. The Post editorialized that Congress needed to investigate USA Swimming. Former Congressman George Miller, a California Democrat, obliged.

But Miller’s so-called investigation was a flop. And the Post contributed to that dud with no follow-up coverage. Years later – in a retrospective piece once the scandal of molesting USA Gymnastics doctor Larry Nassar was all over the headlines – the paper ran an interview with the now-retired Miller in which he rationalized that the fault lay with a weak report by the Government Accountability Office, rather than his own wimpy work.

Last decade, before the ownership of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the Post owned a site covering regional swimming called reachforthewall.com.

I’d much rather the Post reached for the full truth of how professionalized youth sports programs, epitomized by USA Swimming, put the country’s kid athletes at unacceptable risk of abuse by the adults supervising them.

Pre-orders of UNDERCOVER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe are available at these links. 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.