USA Swimming’s Abusive Culture and Revictimizing Methods Near a Reckoning in the Case of Persistent Whistleblower Sarah Ehekircher
September 22, 2025Selected Historical Headline Links to Our Coverage of the Sarah Ehekircher Case — Now Settled by USA Swimming
October 14, 2025PREVIOUSLY:
“USA Swimming’s Abusive Culture and Revictimizing Methods Near a Reckoning in the Case of Persistent Whistleblower Sarah Ehekircher,” September 22, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16251
by Irvin Muchnick
Thirty-nine years after she was groomed by her youth coach, who went on to rape her, in the virtual shadow of the U.S. Olympic movement’s Colorado headquarters; 15 years after USA Swimming inaugurated what it calls its Safe Sport program; and seven years after the launch of the U.S. Center for Safe Sport, national and regional sports bodies have settled Sarah Ehekircher’s civil lawsuit, which was filed in 2022 in Colorado federal court.
On October 3, Mission Aurora Colorado Swim Team informed the court of a settlement among Ehekircher, Colorado Swimming, Inc., and USA Swimming, Inc. According to the notice, the parties are finalizing their respective settlement agreements and releases, and they anticipate stipulating for dismissal of the case by early November.
So ends a saga of administrative and legal horror as emblematic of the underworld of American youth sports sexual abuse as any covered in this space.
The Sarah Ehekircher story became Chapter 3 of my book published last year, UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe, not just because of the heinous serial abuses she endured, which unfortunately were not atypical. Sarah’s constellation of well-documented anecdotes touched almost every motif of this sordid subject – from the targeting of particular populations of vulnerable girls, to the safety-last culture of swimming, which came top-down from the sport’s most iconic coaches and programs, to the aggressive “risk mitigation” strategy of the sports corporations that commandeer the values and practices of youth activities at the grassroots.
Sarah’s story turned into a who’s who of swimming, in part because she remained in the sport for decades as a coach and came to know almost everybody who was anybody. And she endured retaliation and smearing in that role when she came forward to reclaim her life. Along the way, and with perverse appropriateness, she was even sexually harassed by the long-time former boss of the American Swimming Coaches Association, John Leonard, who is on record proclaiming that his organization has no “direct” responsibility to children “in any way, shape, or form.”
The Ehekircher settlement is the second major shoe to drop in the wake of the publication of UNDERWATER. The first was the long-sought extradition from the U.S. and re-indictment in Ireland, in July, of George Gibney, the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history. (Direct credit for the overdue bust of Gibney, head coach of the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swimming teams, goes to the 2020 BBC podcast produced by Mark Horgan and the Irish media company Second Captains.)
Sarah’s story started with her getting kicked out of her home by her father and stepmother in 1986. Coach MacFarland, who was never held accountable by either the USA Swimming National Board of Review or the Safe Sport Center, but “retired” in the face of bad press in 2018, moved Sarah in with her, and later that year, according to Sarah, raped her for the first time when they were in Irvine, California, for an out-of-town meet. MacFarland’s and swimming’s defenses were reduced to claiming that the two first had sex not in 1986, when Sarah was 17 and below the age of consent under California law, but in 1987, when she was 18. The entire palette of tactics and evasions, across decades, was nothing short of a clinic in legalistic needle-threading, which now, with the settlement, is finally mooted.
Concussion Inc. shortly will publish headline links to our years of coverage.
