USA Swimming’s Multimillion-Dollar International Sex Abuse Insurance Scam (Introduction)

by Irvin Muchnick and Tim Joyce

Those of you who remember the contretemps last year in London over U.S. Olympic team athletes’ uniforms that were made in China need to ask yourselves this:

What about the fact that USA Swimming, seat of the biggest documented scale of institutional sexual abuse outside the Catholic Church, owns a captive “reinsurance” subsidiary … in Barbados?

With this post, Concussion Inc. launches a series of articles on the Byzantine manipulations behind how organized swimming’s top executives self-insured their feathered nests against a generation of claims of widespread coach abuse and cover-up. It is an extremely complicated story, involving international law and money-laundering, tax-dodging, tropical junkets, and incestuous business relationships.

And all in the name of “safe sport.” Not.

Congressman George Miller and his staff at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce are investigating USA Swimming. In that endeavor, the thick file of victims’ abuse stories, and how the swimming powers denied them into oblivion, is obviously important. But so are the logic and the borderline (at best) business principles and practices that have been hijacking good, clean American sports in the name of “branding” and profits.

We start, in the next post, with background on what must be the creepiest entity ever formed in the name of youth athletics: USA Swimming’s $20 million-plus wholly owned subsidiary, United States Sports Insurance Company.