Underwater
The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and around the Globe
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Horrifying stuff that we desperately need to know.” — Scott Ostler, sports columnist, San Francisco Chronicle
Backed by hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of USA Swimming files subpoenaed by the FBI, Irvin Muchnick uncovers a generation of cover-ups involving some of the sport’s biggest names
The hundreds of millions who watch the thrilling spectacle of the Olympics are unaware of the extent to which their entertainment is undergirded by the systematic abuse by coaches of the underage athletes they develop. Many flag-waving fans gained some sense of the problem from the USA Gymnastics scandals, but for generations, the crimes in swimming have caused a much wider tsunami of pain and trauma around the world.
Backed by thousands of pages of FBI files and the author’s independent investigations, Underwater is the first comprehensive account of this ongoing and unacceptable phenomenon. Irvin Muchnick, a well-known chronicler of the dark side of sports, pulls together shocking stories involving some of the most iconic coaches in swimming history and some of the sport’s most celebrated programs — including Michael Phelps’s. The book lays the blame not just at the feet of individual villains but also at a system that casually commodifies and sexualizes the vulnerable and non-consenting, prioritizing the pursuit of athletic scholarships, Olympic medals, glory, and riches.
Underwater arrives just as a congressional commission has called for the first fundamental changes in the U.S. youth sports system in half a century. In the author’s estimation, this reform is the only real way to protect kids from the predation of the money-first stewards of professionalized sports.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
USA Swimming, the sport's national governing body, has a sordid history of looking the other way when coaches sexually abuse athletes, according to this searing report. Detailing how abusers evade accountability, journalist Muchnick (Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads) describes how after national team director Everett Uchiyama's sexual abuse of a 16-year-old athlete came to light in 2006, USA Swimming club development director Pat Hogan, who was himself the subject of a sexual assault complaint in the 1980s, kept the scandal quiet and helped the coach secure a cushy position as a country club aquatics director. The stories of abuse survivors make clear that such underhanded dealings have long been unwritten policy at USA Swimming. For instance, Muchnick discusses how Sarah Ehekircher, who was raped by her high school coach in the 1980s, was among the first athletes to file a complaint with USA Swimming's Safe Sport department, which dismissed Ehekircher's allegations after a perfunctory hearing. Former USA Swimming director Chuck Wielgus comes in for particular opprobrium for hiring a lobbying firm in 2013 to defeat a California bill that would have extended the statute of limitations for sexual assault claims. The subject matter makes for grim reading, but the abhorrent institutional wrongdoing Muchnick uncovers deserves to be widely known. This will make waves.