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Last edited Sat Nov 22, 2014, 08:35 PM - Edit history (2)

There’s a horror in the shadows of American competitive swimming: a continuing legacy of sexual abuse, usually involving male coaches who prey on young women—and a governing body that looks the other way.




By: Rachel Sturtz

“‘Don’t cry Anna. Didn’t you say I am like a father to you? (smack, blood in my ear) You have all those boyfriends anyways. I want to keep you focused on swimming.’ I am thirteen and in a private discussion with my coach that was set up after nationals. Ripping pain, grunts that sound like the monster in a horror movie, blood, my hair pulled out lying on the ground, the smell of fear. It smells like fresh chlorine and metal.”

—From an essay by Anna Strzempko, describing an alleged 2008 rape at the hands of her swim coach say by Anna Strzempko

At thirteen, Anna Strzempko was nine years into her amateur career when she reached the finals of the 2008 YMCA Long Course National Championship, swimming for the Greater Holyoke YMCA Vikings in western Massachusetts. Over the past five years, only one other female Viking had made it to the individual finals at nationals, and this was a turning point, that quiet moment when Strzempko’s potential went from competitor to contender. The curly-haired middle-distance freestyler was the baby of the swim team, and in a sport where young promise follows a quick route to glory, she now had her start.

Anna Strzempko says she was first raped by her coach at age 13.



Strzempko’s swim coach was a tall, gray-haired taskmaster. He’d trained and built swimmers for 30 years, some going on to the Olympic Trials and NCAA Division I schools. According to Strzempko and other swimmers, he threw clipboards at his athletes and screamed when they made him mad, either for a slow interval or just by catching him on a bad day. They were used to the mood swings, but they were still terrified of swimming badly. Parents generally didn’t mind. They saw it all as part of his method.



remainder in full: http://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/water-activities/swimming/The-Sex-Abuse-Scandal-Plaguing-USA-Swimming.html