“Drowning in abuse” — Full Text of Recent Sunday Perspective Feature in the Colorado Springs Gazette

This article was originally published on August 11 in the Colorado Springs Gazette, https://gazette.com/opinion/perspective-drowning-in-abuse/article_ef745b9c-54cc-11ef-ae03-a3a5044ef4c.html,

Irvin Muchnick will be appearing at the Tattered Cover bookstore in Aspen Grove-Littleton on Friday, September 13, and at Barnes & Noble in Briargate-Colorado Springs on Sunday, September 15.

Links for ordering UNDERWATER from many online outlets are here.

PERSPECTIVE: Drowning in Abuse

by Irvin Muchnick

Coloradans rightly take special pride in the accomplishments of American athletes at the Paris Olympics: Colorado Springs is the headquarters of the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee and of USA Swimming, national governing body of one of the marquee sports of the Summer Games.

Unfortunately, the Centennial State also has disproportionate ownership of the dark underside of this athletic and patriotic glory. That’s because of the widespread and persistent phenomenon of coach sexual abuse of kids in age-group programs under the aegis of USA Swimming.

The full and ugly truth is that the American youth sports system is a split screen. One side is in view and the other side is behind the scenes.

The millions watching the Olympics’ feel-good TV packages for a fortnight every leap year summer become familiar with the positive output: narratives of grit and dominance and national glory. But behind the scenes, there’s also all-too-normalized abuse; some of it is subtle and some blatant. The predators are the toxic minority of adult authority figures who have unchecked control over vulnerable children for dozens of hours a week.

This year, a little-noticed congressional commission report called for the first root-and-branch reform of our youth sports system in the nearly half-century since the enactment of the Ted Stevens Olympic and Amateur Sports Act of 1978. The Commission on the State of USOPC recommended taking away from Olympic bodies supervision of programs at the grassroots levels.

Co-chaired by Dionne Koller, director of the Center for Sport and the Law at the University of Baltimore, and fortified by such figures as Edwin Moses, the legendary hurdler, and Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a gold medalist swimmer and leading women’s sports advocate, the commissioners concluded that USOPC should focus only on developing the class of elite athletes who are explicitly chasing Olympic-level achievement.

These youngsters comprise a superminority of the vast numbers populating local age-group teams. Swimming is the biggest such sport of them all, with nearly half a million kids in the after-school practices and year-round weekend meets that are a staple of Americana.

Additionally, the commission proposed that the failing U.S. Center for SafeSport be spun off as a truly independent agency, with federal government funding. Based in Denver and started in 2017, SafeSport investigates and adjudicates claims of coach abuse. Turning SafeSport into a government entity would constitute the closest thing to the kind of national sports ministry found in almost every other peer country.

In the commission’s analysis, the existing SafeSport agency “does not adequately employ trauma-informed practices. Victims are hesitant to file claims because they believe that SafeSport’s process will retraumatize them. There is also a widespread perception that the system is stacked against victims.”

Yet while “SafeSport is not, at present, fully meeting its mission” and is thus broadly mistrusted, it must not be permitted to remain entrenched in failure. After a three-year investigation, the commission surmised that the problems there could be remedied by removing from SafeSport its USOPC and national sport governing body funding and other ties.

The public most identifies sexual abuse of athletes with the tawdry story of Larry Nassar, the now imprisoned USA Gymnastics national team doctor who molested scores of gymnasts, including Simone Biles and other celebrity Olympians. The Nassar cases have led to half a billion dollars of civil lawsuit settlements, as well as mountains of evidence of bureaucratic cover-ups, plus litigation by survivors against the FBI for botching its investigation across years.

However, swimming’s sheer volume of participants with the same dynamic — parents outsourcing their kids to Svengali coaches and other authorities, who are presumed to be tickets to college athletic scholarships and Olympic glory — inevitably means that the quiet day-to-day problem there might be even worse.

The genesis of the Center for SafeSport was a program established inside USA Swimming in 2010, after ABC’s 20/20 broadcast a scathing report on the sport’s abuse issues. The late Chuck Wielgus, USA Swimming’s chief executive from 1997 until his death in 2017, came off on the telecast as defiant, defensive and callous.

Addressing the backlash to his disastrous interview, Wielgus announced a new dedicated officer with responsibility for steering complaints through the complaint review process. And USA Swimming began publishing a list of coaches banned for sexual misconduct. Originally containing around 40 names, the banned list now numbers close to 250. In litigation, the organization has conceded that there’s also a separate, secret “flagged” list of ex-coaches — some of them believed to be well-known — who are not officially banned but also are no longer welcome.

Susan Woessner was USA Swimming’s founding director of SafeSport. In 2018, she resigned in disgrace after several news outlets closed in on facts about her past relationship with a prominent coach, Sean Hutchison, who had been the subject of her department’s very first high-profile investigation nearly eight years earlier. Woessner admitted to having kissed Hutchison some years before that. Eventually, Hutchison — the initial investigation of whom led to no sanctions — was found to have groomed and abused Olympian Ariana Kukors, and he was added to the banned list. (Kukors came to an undisclosed financial settlement of a lawsuit against USA Swimming.)

Sadly, Colorado regional swimming also has more direct ties to the sorry abuse saga — scenarios of indifference occurring right in USA Swimming’s backyard.

In 2012, the Woodmoor Waves, a club in Monument, hired coach Charles Baechler, previously a judge in Washington state who had been removed from the bench and disbarred after pleading no contest to sexually assaulting a woman who had appeared before his court. In 2006, USA Swimming had announced the implementation of background checks for coaches — but somehow these checks missed Baechler.

At the same team in Monument, parents Jeff and Cary Renwick complained about the flawed hire of an assistant coach who had posted vile sexualized material at his account on the legacy social media site MySpace. Jeff Renwick was a decorated naval aviator; Cary swam at the U.S. Military Academy and represented the country at the 1995 World Military Games. Jeff shared details of his Woodmoor Waves dispute as part of my reporting on this general subject over the last dozen years, and they were also publicized in places like “Swimming Exposed” — ad hoc newsletters published by activists unhappy over USA Swimming’s failure to maintain a safe environment.

After the Renwicks raised a fuss, the Woodmoor team kicked their kids out. For his part, Wielgus advised the family simply to shut up and carry on with their new team.

In 2014, Wielgus was scheduled for induction into the International Swimming Hall of Fame, but he had to stand down in the face of a massive petition campaign organized by survivors of sexual abuse on his watch. Wielgus issued cascading apologies of sorts for not having been vigilant enough. But he never gave up his job, which paid him more than a million dollars a year.

Three years ago, I reported for the Gazette on the mysterious case of former Irish Olympic swimming team head coach George Gibney — arguably the most notorious at-large alleged sex criminal in sports history. In 1995, after fleeing Ireland with the help of a controversial Irish Supreme Court decision, based on a technicality, that quashed his prosecution on dozens of charges of molesting and raping athletes in his charge, Gibney had a brief second act as a coach for the North Jeffco Hurricanes in Arvada.

Government documents uncovered in my 2016-17 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security, for material from Gibney’s immigration records, suggested that the American Swimming Coaches Association “greased the wheels for Gibney’s relocation,” in the words of federal judge Charles Breyer.

In 2020, the British Broadcasting Company produced a popular podcast series about Gibney that emboldened many more of his victims to come forward. Today, in his 70s, Gibney lives in Florida, where he’s sweating out a decision by Ireland’s director of public prosecutions over whether to seek his extradition for a second prosecution.

Then there’s Sarah Ehekircher — a swimmer from Aurora, then a long-time coach, whose biographical parade of horrors all but covered the waterfront. After Sarah’s father and stepmother kicked her out of home at age 17 (for her excessive devotion to swimming!), coach Scott MacFarland moved her into his apartment. In a first-person account for Britain’s Guardian newspaper in 2020, Sarah told of being groomed and raped by MacFarland, a disciple of legendary coach Mark Schubert.

Bringing her story full circle, Ehekircher said she later was sexually harassed, before and during her tenure as director of the Florida-based American Swimming Coaches Association’s SwimAmerica program, by ASCA’s long-time executive director, John Leonard.

Now retired, Leonard over the years was one of the biggest roadblocks to efforts to police coaches: he once said ASCA does not “deal directly with children, nor is that part of our purpose in any way, shape or form.”

Though Scott MacFarland abruptly retired from coaching after Ehekircher’s allegations finally got mainstream media attention decades after the fact, her formal complaints about him got dismissed by USA Swimming and the U.S. Center for SafeSport. She has a pending lawsuit against USA Swimming.

In swimming’s corporate culture, its many abuse lawsuits are treated as nothing more urgent than an insurance headache and a cost of business — not a moral clarion call to clean up its act. In 2019, the Wall Street Journal was the first to report that USA Swimming was under investigation by a federal grand jury for allegations of insurance fraud and abuse cover-ups. This flag-waving group’s edgy tactics to cover its legal exposure included, until 2014, a captive self-insurance subsidiary, “the United States Sports Insurance Company,” which was in the Caribbean island nation of Barbados — the better to avoid American taxes and regulation.

While we all might wish that none of this were so, the record overwhelmingly documents that swimming simply never has gotten a handle on its abuse problem. Ritualistically, and often politically, particular bad actors wind up getting thrown under the bus. But it’s the enablers within the system — and the silent enabling of the rest of us — that are at the bottom of it all.

The physical and emotional safety of youth athletes is far too important to be left to the monetizing standards of the litigation system. That’s why the new report of the Commission on the State of the USOPC is a hopeful development. It should not continue to be ignored.

Post-Paris Olympics glow, the constituency of sports parents needs to pressure Congress to enact the commission’s recommendations. While they’re at it, parents also should dial back their vicarious fantasies of elite sports prowess for their kids. These are what create, in the first place, the landscape in which too many coaches can sexually abuse without accountability.