Questions Swirl Around Azura Aquatics in Davie, Florida. Is Owner Gianluca Alberani Just Alex Pussieldi 2.0?
January 28, 2026PREVIOUSLY:
“Alex Pussieldi Update: Decade After Ouster in Florida, Peeping Tom and Multinational Trafficker Coach Remains a Powerful Figure in Brazilian Swimming,” October 27, 2025, https://concussioninc.net/?p=15882
“Questions Swirl Around Azura Aquatics in Davie, Florida. Is Owner Gianluca Alberani Just Alex Pussieldi 2.0?,” January 28, https://concussioninc.net/?p=16521
Alex Pussieldi is the subject of Chapter 9, “Sex, Lies, and Alex Pussieldi,” in the book UNDERWATER: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe.
by Irvin Muchnick
Concussion Inc. has posed some questions to Gianluca Alberani, the head coach and owner of Azura Aquatics in Davie, Florida. The questions concern his ties to Alex Pussieldi’s clinics in Brazil and, even more pointedly, to the aggressive practices of Azura in importing and housing underage foreign swimmers.
These practices seem to mirror the historical ones of Pussieldi, who was disappeared a decade ago by Florida Gold Coast Swimming, the regional affiliate of USA Swimming.
Alberani and Azura didn’t respond to multiple emails, so I turned to Florida Gold Coast Swimming’s general chair, Bruno Darzi. I got nothing from Darzi or others on the organization’s board, either.
Next was parent organization USA Swimming – and I additionally asked the national group whether Pussieldi, who is not on the published list of banned coaches, is on the murkier but known secret “flagged” list. The reason this question is important is that Pussieldi still openly posts on his social media photos of his attendance at age-group club meets in South Florida. He is believed to still live part-time in Fort Lauderdale, and according to local sources, is suspected of still boarding young foreign athletes, as well.
USA Swimming, which responds to our queries around twice a decade, had a terse response to our listed questions. “Alex Pussieldi is not currently registered as a USA Swimming member,” emailed Nikki Warner, the senior director of communications.
Warner did not say whether Pussieldi and his co-owner of the Nadadores club in Davie, Tomas Victoria, ever paid the more than $20,000 in fines and the suspension imposed on them by Florida Gold Coast Swimming for illegal and manipulated meet event entries.
There was a time, a decade ago, when USA Swimming was more loquacious about Pussieldi. This was after we acquired and published a 2004 USA Swimming investigator’s report of an incident in which the coach, an assistant at Jack Nelson’s Fort Lauderdale Swim Team out of the International Swimming Hall of Fame aquatic complex, punched out a whistleblowing Mexican swimmer, whom Pussieldi had “adopted” and boarded at his house — while also maintaining in the bathroom a Peeping Tom video camera. In a 2014 email to another coach in Florida, Susan Woessner, then USA Swimming’s director of Safe Sport, wrote: “I understand your frustration and I can only offer frustration myself when I review the file and wonder why more was not done then. I can tell you that we are committed to trying to right that wrong now.”
It’s perhaps not surprising that Woessner’s administrative outrage had a short shelf life. In 2018 she would resign in disgrace after it was revealed that she’d had a relationship with coach Sean Hutchison — groomer and serial abuser of gold medalist swimmer Ariana Kukors — prior to a high-profile investigation of Hutchison (the first important one on Woessner’s watch).
Today, it’s reasonable to speculate that Operation Pussieldi — 20-plus years after the pool deck assault, 10-plus years after he “retired,” according to the swimming news site SwimSwam — essentially continues unchecked, brazen as ever.
