Justine McCarthy’s ‘Deep Deception: Ireland’s Swimming Scandals’

Last week I finally got around to ordering Deep Deception: Ireland’s Swimming Scandals, by Justine McCarthy, a writer for London’s Sunday Times. The book was originally published in 2009 and updated the next year.

Appropriately, McCarthy’s searingly reported and brilliantly written book arrived in the mail yesterday — the day after the filing of philanthropist Dia Rianda’s lawsuit against long-time Olympic coach Mark Schubert for his (at least) $625,000 participation in the cover-up of USA Swimming sex abuse, and the day before the organization banned for life rapist national team coach Rick Curl. The latter action gave new meaning to the phrase “a day late and a dollar short” — Curl molested Kelley Davies in the 1980s, starting when she was 13, and began hush-money installment payments to her family, totaling $150,000, in 1989.

Needless to say, I can’t put McCarthy’s book down, but I have to do so a couple of times an hour in order to keep up with the latest spin-doctoring by USA Swimming during a whirlwind news day.

McCarthy’s cast of heinous characters includes a sicko by the name of George Gibney, who somehow escaped Irish justice and landed on our shores. More about how that happened, and what Gibney was up to here, as this blog’s work continues.

As Tolstoy would say, every dysfunctional, criminal national swimming organization is dysfunctional and criminal in its own way. Deep Deception is not a blueprint of the USA Swimming scenario, any more than Jerry Sandusky and Penn State are. But both are road maps, for sure.

Deep Deception by Justine McCarthy is available from Amazon at http://amzn.to/RxDBCM.

Irv Muchnick