Coach Sexual Abuse Is a Far More Serious Olympic Sports Problem than Performance-Enhancing Drugs

by Irvin Muchnick

The gold medal for outrage from the Summer Olympics easily goes to the Chinese swimmers whose national sports overseers gave them a pass on obvious doping violations.

Meanwhile, Rana Reider, the sprint coach who was in Paris despite looming lawsuits by three of his former athletes, who claim he sexually abused them, might not even earn the bronze.

Of course, at this point the only thing we can say with certainty about Reider is that he faces serious allegations. That’s not the case for 78-year-old Derry O’Rourke, coach of the Irish swimming team at the 1980 Moscow and 1992 Barcelona Games, who last month was convicted in a Dublin court of raping a teenager 35 years ago. O’Rourke already has served a dozen years in prison on two previous convictions for multiple heinous sex crimes.

O’Rourke was succeeded and preceded as Irish Olympic swim coach by George Gibney, who may be the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history. In 1993 he was indicted on 27 counts of indecent carnal knowledge of athletes under his supervision – and a 2020 British Broadcasting Company podcast series reminded us that these were probably the tip of the iceberg. In 1994 the Irish Supreme Court tossed Gibney’s indictment on a technicality and he repaired to the United States, armed with a mysterious diversity lottery visa and a letter offering him a coaching job here.

In a Freedom of Information Act case that unearthed some of Gibney’s immigration records, many in redacted form, federal judge Charles R. Breyer noted the strong circumstantial hypothesis of the litigating journalist that “the American Swimming Coaches Association greased the wheels for Gibney’s relocation.” Gibney did coach briefly in suburban Denver before his Irish past caught up with him. Today he lives in seclusion in central Florida and awaits the outcome of the umpteenth reconsideration by Ireland’s director of public prosecutions of whether to seek his extradition for a second prosecution in his native country.

O’Rourke and Gibney were just two of the prominent coaches from the Irish youth swimming program abuse scandals of the 1990s, which led to a somewhat cryptic government investigation and report and, in turn, to the rebranding of the Irish Amateur Swimming Association as Swim Ireland.

All told – by any measure other than the rah-rah standards of nationalistic propaganda and individual competitors’ bragging rights – the passion brought to bear on policing performance-enhancing drugs is out of whack with the comparative shoulder shrug that greets the persistent phenomenon of coach sexual abuse. This pertains not just to the occasional celebrity victim testimonial in the news, but also to the millions of underage athletes who constitute the Olympic feeder system. Three days after the pomp wound down in France, there aren’t enough ways to say that while both doping and abuse are deplorable, only one of them takes a profound human and societal toll.

In public consciousness, abuse suffers from being a mostly silent scourge. When it surfaces in media accounts – almost always episodic and atomized – it lacks the easily digested narratives of cheaters prevailing in televised spectacles. Performance-enhancing drug corner-cutting also offers off-the-shelf bogeymen in the form of Russian and Chinese “others.”

You don’t need to be an apologist to point out that doping miscreants are committing the equivalent, in the grand scheme of things, of a misdemeanor – they take shortcuts that compromise a level playing field. In games. And if we’re being honest about it, we should concede that PED rules can be impenetrably Byzantine, and that savvy navigation of them involves timing, loophole acuity, and politics. Canadian journalist Mary Ormsby has a fascinating new biography, World’s Fastest Man, of Ben Johnson, the Jamaican-Canadian whose gold medal in the 100-meter dash in Seoul got stripped away in the most dramatic, high-profile, real-time PED bust ever. In no way did I emerge from my read of the Ormsby book believing that “Ben Johnson” and “innocent” ever belong in the same sentence. But did he get special (ill) treatment?

The absurdity of our doping-sexual abuse dynamic is encapsulated in the figure of Travis Tygart, CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency. Tygart got onto the USADA staff following a stint as a lawyer at the Holme Roberts & Owen firm in Denver (since merged with Bryan Cave) – outside counsel for USA Swimming.

Today Tygart is celebrated for his integrity on the PED issue, as exemplified by his takedown of multiple Tour de France bicycling champion Lance Armstrong. But back in 2001, Tygart had been organized swimming’s administrative prosecutor in the review board process that banned a native Venezuelan coach, Danny Chocrón, after he jumped $250,000 bail following confessions that he had sexual encounters with, at minimum, three underage athletes he coached at the Bolles School in Jacksonville, Florida.

Oddly, Tygart was assigned this matter despite – or perhaps because of? – the fact that he was himself a Bolles alumnus and had even been an assistant coach in the athletic department there before earning his law degree. The  Chocrón case came nine years before USA Swimming, under public pressure, finally started publishing its list of banned coaches, and Tygart was a key member of the team that managed to contain the episode’s publicity and the group’s reputational hit. (Chocrón fled first to Spain and then back to Venezuela, which had no extradition treaty with the U.S., and casually resumed his coaching career there.)

Similarly under the radar in the years since have been the thousands of pages of internal USA Swimming files, bulging with dossiers on coaches accused of abuse, that the organization filed under seal in 2012 after the California Supreme Court forced it to stop defying lower court discovery orders in civil lawsuits by survivors. These records were later subpoenaed by an FBI field office.

There’s also the federal grand jury investigation of USA Swimming, first reported by the Wall Street Journal in 2019, of allegations of insurance fraud and abuse cover-ups. Until 10 years ago, this icon of flag-waving operated an offshore reinsurance subsidiary, called the United States Sports Insurance Company, in Barbados. There, the locally required annual directors’ meeting became an in-the-know beachfront baccanal. 

Earlier this year a little-noticed congressional commission report, four years in the making, recommended that the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC) and its affiliated national sport governing bodies be stripped of running youth programs at the grassroots levels. This would be the most significant reform of the youth sports system in the 46 years since the passage of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act. The result in swimming, where up to half a million kids participate in age-group clubs benefiting from subsidized local public pool rentals and massive parent volunteer hours, would be that wannabe Olympians and college athletic scholarship aspirants and their coaches would have to find a different support infrastructure.

The Commission on the State of USOPC also proposes spinning off the overwhelmed, corrupt and widely mistrusted U.S. Center for SafeSport – investigator and adjudicator of coach abuse claims – as an independent, federally funded entity. This would be the closest thing to the kind of national sports ministry found in almost every other peer country.

In testimony to the commission, Ju’Riese Colón, the center’s CEO, argued that the more than 2,100 individuals from all sports who are now listed as restricted or banned in the agency’s central database are proof that significant progress has been made in combating abuse culture. Her defenses against SafeSport’s huge backlog and earned and unshakable reputation for mistrust are not the least persuasive.

In Paris, Colón led the first SafeSport delegation at an Olympiad. “Team USA, we are in your corner,” she told the Chicago Tribune.

Colón didn’t say anything about Team Kid Athletes. It’s yet another manifestation of the hegemony of fandom, which is what makes vigilance against performance-enhancing drugs a priority. As for the safety of children in sports from the sizable minority of predatory authority figures within them? Not so much.

Irvin Muchnick’s book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe will be published shortly by ECW Press (distributed by Simon & Schuster). Pre-order information is here.