This article is adapted from the prologue to “Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe,” portions of which have been published previously at Salon in different form. The book will be released Sept. 10. Information on pre-ordering is here.
In 2010, seven years before his death, USA Swimming chief executive Chuck Wielgus established a so-called SafeSport program, the first by an Olympic-sanctioned sport governing body. In 2017 this reputed model for the investigation and adjudication of claims of sexual abuse by coaches led to the creation of an Olympics-wide agency, the U.S. Center for SafeSport. Earlier this year a congressional commission report said the center was a failure and recommended its spinoff as an independently funded federal agency.
I came to be reporting on the Olympic movement’s systematic predation of underage athletes through an accident of timing: I happened to have a young daughter who swam competitively for more than five years with our local USA Swimming-sanctioned club. Thankfully, she wasn’t a victim. In any event, I believe, victim-centricity isn’t the right lens through which to critique sexual abuse in swimming; the problem is much more diffuse and insidious. A better way to view things is to ponder why the U.S. Olympic Committee and its associated entities call the shots for all kid athletes, not just aspirants to gold medals and college athletic scholarships.
A recommendation in this area became another key part of this year’s congressional commission report. Full consideration of this question requires an un-blinkered look at the tragically flawed system we have now — how it codifies the casual commodification of kids, turning physical education and mastery of a life skill into the developmental arm of professionalized sports. Unexamined, these objectives splash around in public subsidies and in exaggerated and wrongheaded assumptions about their positive impact on our society.
My daughter Mara was eight years old when she began swimming with the Berkeley Bears. Her mother and I have four kids, and we were thrilled when our older girl was the one who turned into the family jock. I myself was what’s known as a “sinker”; in my youth, I’d learned to overcome fear of the water and to get around in it, but I never mastered technique. Inspired by Mara’s example, I decided to take some lessons of my own, and I finally got the hang of freestyle side breathing . . . sort of. One day, on a family vacation, I found that I could make it the whole distance of the 137-meter-long salt water pool off Kitsilano Beach in Vancouver, Canada. Through our children, we learn.
Our club coach was good at stroke-coaching, inept at organization and tended to flirt with the high school-age girls. At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
Mara was a very good little swimmer. Never Olympic-class or athletic scholarship–bound, mind you, nor so aspirational. But she excelled at breaststroke, butterfly and distance freestyle. At meets, Mara racked up prize ribbons: lots of third-places, fourths, fifths, and sixths, the occasional second, the very rare first. One time she got disqualified, and we proudly displayed the DQ slip on the cork board on the wall of her bedroom, along with all the participation ribbons; after all, they said you weren’t a real competitive swimmer until the first time you got busted for an illegal turn. I chaperoned Mara to daily practices, and once a month or so, we got up as early as 5 a.m. for drives to meets as far away as Santa Rosa and San Jose. At the end of her first year, she won the Most Improved Swimmer award at the team banquet.
The head coach was a former University of California backstroke specialist named Jesse Stovall. He was good at stroke-coaching, even if he was inept at organization, always hid his eyes behind sunglasses and behaved immaturely. Near the beginning of one season, the Bears staged a poolside ice cream social to gather all the athletes and their families. I expected Stovall to welcome everyone with some community-building remarks. Instead, he just stood off to the side, flirting with the high school-age girl swimmers. At the time, I didn’t think much of it.
I was further nonplussed by a bizarre incident at a large end-of-summer meet. This was what’s known as a “trials and finals” meet: Instead of just culling best scores from the various earlier heats to determine placement, the swimmers with the top times in each event moved on to a head-to-head competition in a late-afternoon session. This meet was close to home, and Mara had a full family contingent of cheerleaders, including her visiting aunt from out of town. Preparing for a final in the warm-up pool, she didn’t notice that the sequence of events had been scrambled out of numerical order. The result was that she found herself still in the warm-up pool, instead of being on the starting block of the main pool, at call time for the final heat. She was disqualified.
As I always did, I lurked outside the team’s E-Z Up tent to listen to the post-race words of wisdom imparted to Mara by an assistant coach. Usually they involved advice about pacing her race lap to lap, or some similar technical tip. This time I heard the assistant, Rick, say to Mara, “Pacific Swimming has an automatic $50 fine when a swimmer misses a final. It’s to keep swimmers from cutting out and no-showing after the trials round. Pacific Swimming sends us the fine, and we put it directly onto the bill for your team membership dues the next month.”
I thought this gazebo was kidding around. But Mara obviously internalized what he said: When we got home, she opened her piggy bank, which held her income from recent babysitting jobs, to see if she could scrape together the 50 bucks. Fining an 11-year-old kid who, in her exuberance to prepare for her final heat, simply got confused about procedures? She wasn’t, for God’s sake, a New York Yankees player who’d missed a hit-and-run sign. Surely this little sports league didn’t actually impose monetary consequences for such mistakes, and its coaches didn’t shove them in the faces of little kids, in lieu of discreet conversations with their parents? Yet when I confronted Rick the next day, he confirmed, with a deadpan, that he’d spoken for real. I told the head coach, Stovall, that this was unacceptable, and pointedly alerted fellow parents by email. The team backed down. We never again heard about the “$50 fine.”
Later, as the team fell into arrears on pool rent payments, we learned that Stovall was accused of pilfering funds. Then came the day we noticed that the Bears’ star swimmer, a 16-year-old girl (also a top student, and pretty), was no longer there. The official story was that she and her family had decided to switch to another team, a short distance away, with better facilities and training resources.
It turned out that our club’s top swimmer, a 16-year-old girl, had traveled alone with her coach to a national tournament in Orlando. When they got back, she told a friend what had happened there.
By this time, Mara was approaching 13, and she was winding down her own competitive swimming career. Along with one of her friends, she soon moved to another team, whose coach had a healthier, laid-back attitude and style. There Mara put in another year of practices and meets. I was hoping she’d continue to swim on her high school team, because I’d heard that kids with years of club swimming experience often dominated at that level, but Mara wasn’t interested. She’d had a nice run, but she’d also had enough. Henceforth, and for life, she would just be a skilled swimmer.
It was later that year, 2009, when someone forwarded to me an email chain involving our former coach Jesse Stovall. He’d been ousted from the Bears club, presumably because of the financial improprieties, and now he was coaching an adult group, called a masters team, on the university campus. The startling information from the emails was that one day recently he’d been arrested on Sproul Plaza, the Berkeley campus’ iconic gathering place, on a fugitive warrant from Orange County, Florida.
What was that about? I decided to explore.
Police records from Orlando told the whole sordid story. It turned out that the Bears’ top swimmer, that 16-year-old girl (whom I’ll call “Ivory”), hadn’t left on a whim or simply to improve her college athletic scholarship prospects. Rather, she’d stomped off the Bears’ practice pool deck after a shouting match with Stovall, days after they had returned together from a national invitational meet in Orlando. Stovall, who was married and had a baby daughter, had told Ivory’s parents that they could stay home and he’d chaperone her to Florida himself. While they were in Orlando, Stovall had sexually assaulted Ivory in two separate incidents. When they got back, she told a friend about it. The friend told her own therapist — who in turn, as a mandatory reporter of child sexual abuse under California law, informed Berkeley police.
Stovall was arrested. He copped a plea to the criminal charges in Florida and was banned by USA Swimming.
Our local alternative weekly newspaper, the East Bay Express, did a cover story on the scandal. I was the main source, on the record. One other former team parent spoke to the reporter, not for attribution. One of the team’s board members, a professor at Cal, either denied to the Express that the episode had been covered up or justified the decision to cover up, depending on how you interpreted his remarks. He vilified me as a disgruntled troublemaker.
A week later I tuned in to “20/20” on ABC, which aired a two-part investigation of USA Swimming sexual abuse. That’s when I realized that what I’d witnessed with Jesse Stovall and the Berkeley Bears was just the local precinct of a national problem. I corresponded with USA Swimming boss Wielgus and others in Colorado Springs. They were cagey. Wielgus touted the launch of his SafeSport program.
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When I decided to check in on the progress of SafeSport two years later, it became immediately clear that the program was a sham and that the scandals of the sport were profound and far-reaching. One key narrative was that of a former swimmer in California, Jancy Thompson, who was suing over USA Swimming’s exposure in the actions of her coach, Norm Haverford.
In the Thompson case, USA Swimming was in the middle of defying multiple California lower court discovery orders to produce the organization’s internal documents; in lieu of complying, the group was writing checks totaling tens of thousands of dollars to pay off contempt sanctions, as if they were parking tickets. Litigation of this stonewalling reached the California Supreme Court, which USA Swimming asked to vacate discovery orders. In July 2012, the court refused, compelling enforcement.
Later in the year, USA Swimming finally submitted, under seal, thousands of pages of papers memorializing discussions of abuse, and with dossiers on scores of accused coaches. Many exploded with seedy information. That massive filing, in turn, was subpoenaed by the FBI field office in Campbell, California, near San Jose. Copies of this tranche of documents were later leaked to me and my reporting partner at the time, Tim Joyce.
USA Swimming finally submitted thousands of pages of papers memorializing discussions of abuse, with dossiers on scores of accused coaches. Many exploded with seedy information, and exposed a tale of corruption and big money.
These documents exposed corruption and big money. They detailed insurance fraud and the most reprehensible mistreatment of young people. Additionally, they trickled out the role of gullible parents, who had outsourced the supervision of their children to Svengali coaches who were purportedly their tickets to athletic success, college scholarships and Olympic medals.
These stories were set in almost every state of every size in every region. When caught, some of the bad guys fled to the more obvious enclaves, such as Canada and Mexico. (Or, like Jesse Stovall, they found refuge in U.S. Masters Swimming, a kind of old folks’ home for some of the sport’s shadow-banned rejects.)
But that was far from the geographical extent of the bigger story. The Caribbean island nation of Barbados — home of swimming’s captive self-insurance subsidiary, the United States Sports Insurance Company — was key. Other foreign locales making appearances were Spain, Venezuela, Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Australia, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates.
At one point I traveled to Ireland to find out more about the background of the most notorious at-large sex criminal in sports history: George Gibney, who coached the 1984 and 1988 Irish Olympic swimming teams. Gibney had fled the country in 1994 after getting the Irish Supreme Court to toss his indictment on dozens of sexual molestation charges, thanks to a controversial statute-of-limitations technicality. Gibney moved to the U.S. and briefly coached in suburban Denver before his Irish past caught up with him; moved again and then again; and as this book was being written, was still playing out the string in a central Florida suburb. Nazi concentration-camp guards used to enjoy unobtrusive second acts by embedding themselves into American middle-class communities. George Gibney, whose past included no massacres but a serial history of serious violations, did the same.
For Olympics viewers, swimming is a spectacle of glory, the setting where athletes like Michael Phelps and Katie Ledecky break world records, garner gold, retail backstories of grit and overcoming personal obstacles, and stir upswells of patriotic pride.
Treading under the surface of the water, for generations, has been a darker narrative. It’s time to tell that tale, in all its global slime. And it’s past time to appreciate that youth sports coach abuse isn’t one of those problems that will be solved by law enforcement breakthroughs or a new insight out of ethics handbooks. The only real fix is cultural, and it will need to be owned by all of us.
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