As many as half a million young Americans are potentially being exposed to predatory coaches on pool decks and in locker rooms – in a secret scandal that threatens to eclipse that of disgraced gymnastics coach Larry Nassar.
As recently as last month, USA Swimming and retired coach Scott MacFarland attempted to dismiss a federal lawsuit brought by a swimmer in the 1980s and early 90s.
Sarah Ehekircher claims MacFarland groomed and raped her when she was a vulnerable young teenager, and went on to abuse her over seven years.
A magistrate judge in Colorado denied the attempt to throw the case out – moving Ehekircher closer to the day in court she has been seeking for decades.
In ‘Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe’, critics tell me that attempted cover-ups like this continue to silence the victims.
The Nassar scandal saw the former team doctor for USA Gymnastics sent to prison for 60 years
Celebrated gymnast Simone Biles was one of Nassar’s victims
Sarah Ehekircher claims swim coach Scott MacFarland groomed and raped her when she was a vulnerable young teenager
The sporting world suffered the biggest sexual abuse scandal in its history when Nassar was convicted of molesting Simone Biles and hundreds of other young athletes in 2017.
The Nassar scandal saw the erstwhile team doctor for USA Gymnastics sent to prison for 60 years and the case led to half a billion dollars in civil lawsuit settlements.
Just as that was exploding – with high-profile victims including not just Biles, but also McKayla Maroney, Jordyn Wieber, and Kyla Ross – the US Center for SafeSport was set up, tasked with investigating and adjudicating allegations of coach abuse.
CEO Ju’Riese Colón boasts that, since then, the agency has made huge strides in neutralizing the historically abusive culture in sport: more than 2,100 individuals are now listed as restricted or banned in its centralized disciplinary database.
However, critics say it has been bogged down by red tape and conflicting loyalties, while some insist cases of abuse are repeatedly hushed up or covered up – and that the numbers could, in reality, be much higher.
‘SafeSport has lost the trust of athletes and other movement participants as a result of a growing case backlog, cases remaining unresolved for long periods, and a policy of closing many cases administratively,’ found a congressional commission earlier this year
It reported that many victims fear filing a complaint will only expose them to being re-victimized, and believe the deck is stacked against them because the center relies on funding from Olympic bodies.
The commission has now recommended that SafeSport become a truly independent, federally funded entity – similar to those found in peer countries.
And, in a damning judgment, it proposes that the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee – under which USA Swimming is one of the recognized governing bodies – be confined to training only elite, Olympic-track athletes, banning it from operating youth sports programs at grassroots level.
Since USA Swimming started publishing the names of banned coaches in 2010, more than 200 have been added to the list. Seven more appeared in 2023 and four so far this year.
But that doesn’t include a still-secret ‘flagged’ list, exposed in private litigation, that consists of coaches – retired or otherwise not in the jurisdiction of USA Swimming – who are not banned but are unofficially not welcome because of abuse claims against them.
Insiders say that list contains the names of multiple famous coaches.
Massive evidence of the problem was first found in leaked internal documents of USA Swimming, subpoenaed by the FBI in 2012, after the California Supreme Court forced it to stop defying lower court discovery orders in abuse cases.
George Gibney was indicted on dozens of counts of indecent carnal knowledge of young athletes under his command. Now in his 70s, he lives a reclusive life in Florida
In July, Derry O’Rourke, coach of the 1980 and 1992 Irish swimming teams, was convicted for raping a teenage girl in the late 1980s
The records included thousands of pages of internal discussions of assault and dossiers on scores of accused coaches.
And offending coaches continue to be exposed.
Joe Bernal had a long and celebrated career on US Olympic staffs, as well as at Harvard University and his own age-group club in Massachusetts. But just after being named to the American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame, he was added to the banned list in 2016, as allegations of his sexual abuse emerged.
According to a federal court lawsuit filed just this June by one of his swimmers, Amanda Le, Bernal started grooming her when she was 13, had sex with her when she was underage, and impregnated her and arranged for an abortion when she was in college.
And in July, just as Paris put the finishing touches to its controversial Olympics opening ceremony, Derry O’Rourke, coach of the 1980 and 1992 Irish swimming teams, was convicted for raping a teenage girl in the late 1980s.
It was his third conviction: O’Rourke had already served a dozen years in prison on 29 counts of defilement, sexual assault and indecent assault against 11 girls between the mid-1970s and early 1990s, and of counts of rape and indecent assault against another victim in the 1990s.
O’Rourke is just the tip of the iceberg in Ireland. His contemporary, George Gibney, who filled his shoes at the LA Games in 1984 and Seoul in 1988, was accused of equally depraved crimes – but still managed to have a second act in America.
Armed with a diversity lottery visa of mysterious provenance, he traveled to Arvada, Colorado, where he briefly coached a USA Swimming-sanctioned team before his past caught up with him.
In 1993, Gibney was indicted on dozens of counts of indecent carnal knowledge of young athletes under his command.
One of his alleged crimes happened on American soil: the alleged rape of a 17-year-old Irish girl at a Tampa hotel in 1991, during his team’s training trip in the US.
And, while he got a reprieve when the Irish Supreme Court ruled that the long passage of time prejudiced his ability to get a fair trial, it wasn’t enough to drum him out of the sport for good.
Jack Nelson was accused by Diana Nyad of having molested her in the 1960s
Nyad first made the accusation in 1989 and repeated it in a New York Times op ed in 2017, at the height of the #metoo movement
Diana Nyad was portrayed by Annette Bening in the 2023 movie about the swimmer, playing opposite Jodie Foster
Department of Homeland Security records, uncovered in a Freedom of Information Act case, included a heavily redacted job offer letter in which, Federal judge Charles R. Breyer noted pointedly, the American Swimming Coaches Association was suspected of having ‘greased the wheels for Gibney’s relocation’.
Now in his 70s, Gibney lives a reclusive life in Altamonte Springs, Florida. In 2020, the BBC podcast series ‘Where Is George Gibney?’ triggered more than a dozen new accusers to come forward. Ireland’s director of public prosecutions is reportedly considering whether to seek Gibney’s extradition for a second prosecution on fresh charges.
He has never been charged in the USA.
Meanwhile, in Canada, coach Cecil Russell was banned after being sentenced to prison as a member of a drug-trafficking ring in 1997. He also admitted to being an accessory to murder (specifically, he helped burn the corpse of the victim and dispose of his bones and jewelry).
He served a reduced sentence in exchange for testifying against one of his associates, and moved to Spain after he was freed. However, Russell landed in jail again for running a black market in ecstasy from the Netherlands to the US.
Despite all of this, he was still regarded as upstanding enough to join the staff of Jack Nelson at the age-group program out of the International Swimming Hall of Fame complex in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the following year.
Nelson, best known for guiding the dominant US women swimmers at the 1976 Montreal Games, was himself accused by Diana Nyad, the celebrity open water marathoner, of having molested her in the 1960s at Fort Lauderdale’s Pine Crest School.
Nyad first made the accusation in 1989 and repeated it in a New York Times op ed in 2017, at the height of the #metoo movement.
Nelson had previously denied the allegations before he died in 2014.
Nelson’s questionable judgment doesn’t end there. He also employed Brazilian coach Alex Pussieldi who, in 2004, had a violent confrontation on the pool deck and in the locker room with a Mexican swimmer in his charge.
Brazilian coach Alex Pussieldi (left) was accused of drilling a hole in the bathroom wall and video taping his young proteges
Roberto Cabrera Paredes, then 20 years old, had been one of many teens Pussieldi had transferred to the US from Latin American countries. Pussieldi also often became these young swimmers’ legal guardian and housed them in his own home.
Paredes had recently learned his mentor had allegedly drilled a hole in the bathroom wall, where he planted a video camera to peep on his young protégés on the toilet and in the shower – and decided to defy his instructions in the pool in protest.
Cops were called following the tussle, and Paredes was treated for ‘multiple contusions’.
No criminal charges were brought, nor were the claims against him made public, but Pussieldi resigned from Fort Lauderdale Swim Team, only to see his career soar to greater heights; his portfolio even included head coach of the national team of Kuwait.
Pussieldi finally ran aground when rival coaches complained that he was stacking his team’s meet entries with ringers. USA Swimming’s regional affiliate fined him and he retired – moving back to Brazil and becoming an Olympic commentator on a sports network there.
Pussieldi still does not appear on the USA Swimming banned list.
Venezuelan native Simon Daniel ‘Danny’ Chocrón offered yet another blueprint for international deceit.
In 2001, when he was 27 and coaching at the Bolles prep school in Jacksonville, Florida, Chocrón jumped $250,000 bail on charges – some of which he admitted in written police confessions – of mutually masturbating with a 16-year-old male swimmer, having intercourse on multiple occasions with a 17-year female swimmer and abusing a third minor.
He managed to get to Spain, and when authorities were closing in on him there, made his way back to Venezuela, with which the US had no extradition treaty, and resumed coaching.
Curiously, the person managing Chocrón’s case before USA Swimming’s National Board of Review 23 years ago, following his indictment and flight from justice, was one Travis Tygart – even though Tygart himself was a Bolles School alumnus and had been on the athletic department staff there prior to earning his law degree.
This was nine years before USA Swimming began publishing its banned list, and with skillful tamping down of the publicity of Chocrón’s crimes, the organization both minimized embarrassment to itself and enabled the abusive coach to carry on unchecked in new locations.
In 2017, Chocrón was suspended for a year by Federación Venezolana de Deportes Acuáticos. It’s not known if he resumed coaching again.
Today, Tygart is CEO of the US Anti-Doping Agency – cited in this year’s congressional commission report as a model of the kind of independence wished for the beleaguered Center for SafeSport.
USA Swimming declined to comment.
Irvin Muchnick is author of ‘Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe’ published by ECW Press.