Housecleaning Notes on Olympic Swim Coach Mark Schubert, the Spy Who Hated Me

Yesterday we told “the rest of the story” of the Washington Post‘s half-assed outing of the relationship between coach Sean Hutchison and his swimmer Ariana Kukors — which led to Hutchison’s resignation at FAST, the USA Swimming professional academy in Fullerton, California.

Cliff Notes version: It was all a leak by Mark Schubert, the Olympic honcho who had just been dumped as national team director and had an agenda. Schubert gave his associate Bill Jewell the name of a private investigator, who proceeded to tail Hutchison and Kukors, and took a photo of their cars parked together at the former’s residence at 5 a.m. America’s finest sporting minds at work!

Overall, Hutchison is said by swimming insiders to have been in over his head at FAST. And Kukors, the only world-class swimmer he could be said to have truly developed, was aided in her record 200 IM swim by a new suit design, which was quickly outlawed after athletes using it for a brief period shredded the record book.

Schubert had groomed the underqualified Hutchison — a successful high-level age-group coach in Seattle — for the FAST job because Schubert wanted someone he could control. A swimming insider told me, “By plucking Hutchison from obscurity, then promoting him and giving him recognition and honors in ways that Mark could manipulate so as to justify having chosen him, he owned the guy.”

 
Irv Muchnick