With the prospect of another Michael Phelps Olympic gold rush still two years away, at the 2012 London Games, and the rubber suits that rewrote swimming's record books now banned, the sport's biggest news this year is of a seamier variety.
USA Swimming, an umbrella organization that oversees events such as this one Wednesday in Rockville, Md., has been named in five lawsuits alleging sexual misconduct by coaches.
USA Swimming, the organization that fields the Olympic swim team, has been hit with a firestorm of allegations that it has done little to prevent or punish coaches accused of sexually abusing underage female swimmers.
The latest came Wednesday, when 28-year-old Jancy Thompson appeared at a news conference announcing she has filed a lawsuit alleging her former coach at a Northern California swim club committed a range of offenses, from unlawful sexual touching and harassment to molestation and sexual abuse, over a five-year period beginning when she was 15. USA Swimming is named as a defendant, along with coach Norm Havercroft. Attempts to reach Havercroft were not successful.
"I am here today in hopes that USA Swimming will retain new leadership and clean up its program -- get rid of abusive swim coaches and create a safe environment for young swimmers," she said.
Like the Thompson case, all of the incidents alleged in the five lawsuits pending against USA Swimming involve club-level coaches and athletes. Only one Olympian, 1972 Olympic medley champion Deena Deardurff Schmidt, has made any claims -- saying at a March news conference that in the 1960s her coach repeatedly molested her -- and she is not a plaintiff in any suit.
Nevertheless, swimming's problems have put the U.S. organizations that govern Olympic sports on alert, spurring them to unprecedented discussion and action on an issue that affects them all because of the hundreds of thousands of coaches and young athletes they oversee but one that they admit has been difficult to openly address before.
"What's happened recently has sensitized people to the fact that they may have issues in their own sport that they didn't know or didn't think about in the past," says Scott Blackmun, chief executive officer of the U.S. Olympic Committee.
Lynn Johnson, who filed a lawsuit against USA Swimming in April, says his Kansas City firm has received calls in recent months alleging sexual misconduct by coaches training athletes in four other Olympic sports. No lawsuits have been filed.
"This is not just USA Swimming," Johnson says.
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SOURCE: USA Today
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