Sexual Abuse in Women's Sports, Part I: Three-Time Olympic Gold Medalist Nancy Hogshead-Makar

Chuck Wielgus has served as the Executive Director of USA Swimming since 1997. In that time, Michael Phelps set Olympic records, Dara Torres gave hope to those approaching middle-age, and Ryan Lochte did some things. According to public records, in 2012 Wielgus received a salary of $908,432 for his continued shepherding of the national governing body for competitive swimming in the United States.

Also in 2012, 64-year-old Andy King, who coached numerous USA Swimming member clubs over his 30-year career, was in year two of a 40-year sentence after sexually abusing over a dozen girls, one of whom became pregnant as a result. And yet this serial abuser passed a USA Swimming-ordered background check as recently as 2009. Unfortunately King is just one of many serially abusive coaches who managed to slip through the so-called oversight of USA Swimming.

In a press release dated January 28, 2014, Chuck Wielgus was announced as part of 2014 International Swimming Hall of Fame induction class (his name has since been redacted).That ceremony will take place on June 14th, but a petition protesting Wielgus's induction, written by three-time Olympic gold medalist and Women's Sports Foundation's senior director of advocacy Nancy Hogshead-Makar, and signed by 19 swimmers who were victims of sexual abuse and harassment by coaches still active during Wielgus's tenure, was released on May 29th. On June 2nd Wielgus's name was withdrawn from ISHOF consideration.

In a five-part series conducted for VICE Sports, Rob Trucks interviewed Hogshead-Makar and four of the petition's signers about their successful protest, their remarkable range of experiences, the issue of sexual abuse in sports, and how much further we have to go in order to someday put an end to these cases. This is part one.

[After these interviews were conducted, the US Olympic Committee announced the creation of an independent agency, to be in place by 2015, that will police sexual abuse in sports. It's a start.—Ed.]

ROB TRUCKS: You're the senior director of advocacy for the Women's Sports Foundation, and I imagine that at some point people have asked, "What does the senior director of advocacy for the Women's Sports Foundation do?"

NANCY HOGSHEAD-MAKAR: I do our advocacy/legal work. Anything that has to do with promoting women's access in sports, making sure they have safe access, making sure Muslim women get to compete while wearing the hijab or long sleeves, dealing with some international bodies that want women to dress in a "sexy" manner. These are all issues under my umbrella.

And writing the petition to rescind Chuck Wielgus's induction in the International Swimming Hall of Fame would fall under "safe access."

Correct. I've worked with a number of national governing bodies, but my primary expertise had come from schools, and dealing with Title IX. So now, if a school or a victim [at a school] calls me, I know where to tell them to go. There's a path. "Here's what you do." When somebody would call me and they had to do with club or Olympic sports, it's another matter. Title IX does not apply. There are no regulations. There's no playbook the way that there is for schools. And because of that I have been working with national governing bodies and Sport Performance, generally, for a number of changes. We got the United States Olympic Committee's governing board to pass a rule telling national governing bodies like swimming and tae kwon do, track and field, that, if they wanted to get their Safe Sport money, they had to agree to strict prohibition between romantic and sexual relationships between coaches and athletes when there is a power differential. And they had to have a process for getting bad coaches out, coaches who abused that policy. Before 2012, swimming had tried to pass something that would have accomplished the same thing and it failed. But with the kick of the USOC that effort passed.

Our major effort with the Women's Sports Foundation has been to try to get a separate entity, akin to drug testing, that would do the investigations and sanction sexually abusing coaches. When it came time for national governing bodies to take on drug testing, they just were not able to do it. They were not very good at policing this. There's no way Lance Armstrong would have gotten kicked out of sports if it hadn't been for this separate entity that got established. I see the exact same conflicts of interest happening when it comes to sexual abuse, meaning that if a coach is particularly well-liked and connected it's very difficult to get them out. The independence of this entity means there can be no prior relationships with the Olympic family. It needs to not be in Colorado Springs. There are lots of people with this particular expertise that will represent both coaches and athletes in a fair manner and will make sports safer for all kids. When we're talking club and Olympic sports, we're talking 3.2 million kids. This is not a small deal.

And you're trying to create a playbook, or system, like there is for schools through Title IX, within the national governing bodies so there are no sexual relationships between coaches and athletes, regardless of age or consent.

The rules are consistent with the rules and the prohibitions against sexual and romantic relationships between teachers and students, between doctors and their patients, between attorneys and their clients, any kind of counseling, therapeutic, any kind of ministerial, religious … these are normal prohibitions that exist throughout society. And it's a glaring absence in athletics.

But these rules are now in place, as of 2012, including USA Swimming?

The United States Olympic Committee gave all NGBs the whole year to change their policies. So January 1 everybody was supposed to have changed their policies. In some sports, like swimming, it required a vote. I think it was September when United States Swimming agreed to this rule to prohibit these relationships.

So they're not even 12 months in yet?

Correct.

How does the petition come about? Does it start as soon as Chuck Wielgus is voted into the Swimming Hall of Fame?

Some victims approached me to say "Can you help us to form a protest?" And after considering, we said yes. We actually had two protests at the same time. Andy Gabel is in the Speedskating Hall of Fame and has admitted to having an "inappropriate relationship." He has admitted to molesting Bridie Farrell [a speed skater Gabel coached] when she was 15 and he was 33. So we have two of these protests going on at the same time.

What's the status of the Gabel protest?

We lost. US Speedskating had a meeting. This is the second year that this has been put forward to get him out and they did not act on the petition. 66 speed skaters filed the complaint against Andy Gabel being in the Hall of Fame, and I want to say they've gotten 1,250 people on the online petition, and it did not happen. You just never know how they're going to go. The difference is speed skating is a sport of 2,000 people and American swimming is 400,000. And people had already been well primed to the problem of sexual abuse in United States Swimming due to the New York Times, USA Today, Orlando Sentinel, Chicago Tribune, Orange County Register, 20/20. Major media news outlets have been drumming the beat for four or five years now.

So some of the 19 victims approach you and say, "Chuck Wielgus can't be in the Hall of Fame, and what do we do now?"

Correct. The Women's Sports Foundation was in a unique position because we had already been dealing with this. We had a lot of this background material, so it was just a question of assembling all this material and making a case to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, to make that case for them, for them to be comfortable in making that decision. We presented materials saying, you know, Here's how he has dropped the ball in this area.

I've seen the situation compared to Penn State, and 20/20, back in 2010, compared the sex abuse scandal in USA Swimming to that in the Catholic Church. Is this like either of those two situations?

Well, schools have Title IX liability while club, Olympic sports do not. Legal liability and the possibility of plaintiffs getting a lot of money makes people protect young kids from abuse. Talk to any economist and they will tell you that economic incentives are powerful. They work. The economic incentive for preventing sexual abuse in club sports is not really there. United States Swimming's insurance limited the liability of clubs, until just this past fall, to $100,000 per year, so if you had three victims, they'd split that. And lawyers' fees were coming off the top. There was nothing really there for plaintiffs if they needed help. I really think that where Chuck fell down is that he thought it was a societal problem, a police problem, a parental problem, and a club problem. He did not see it as "this is squarely within the purview of United States Swimming and it is our responsibility to investigate and sanction sexually abusing coaches."

Schools have a legal responsibility. The executive director of USA Swimming doesn't have that same legal responsibility, but he still has a moral responsibility and that's where he fell short.

I think that's fair. You know, he thinks he's right. If you look at our materials, and he submitted materials behind them, there's a basic misunderstanding of human nature. His response is only going to put fuel on the fire rather than trying to smooth things over.

Let's revisit "economic incentive." The economic incentive for schools is to protect their students because they will be penalized financially if they do not. It sounds as if the economic incentive for the national governing bodies, specifically USA Swimming, might swing in the other direction. He's trying to avoid scandal, push what he can under the rug, so that the image, the fundraising ability of USA Swimming is not tarnished. Is that at all fair?

That's very fair. Jerry Sandusky cost Penn State $160 million dollars. I've heard $190 [million], but I can confirm $160 million. So when you look at some of the cases with United States Swimming and how they knew about coaches jumping from club to club and not doing anything about it … at Penn State, virtually everyone lost their jobs: the president, the athletic director, the football coach, the general counsel. And things just keep trucking on at USA Swimming.

Wielgus's name has now been withdrawn from the Hall of Fame induction, but is it puzzling to you that, after looking at Penn State, no one lost their job at USA Swimming, except for the abusers themselves?

I'll be happy if they have an "a-ha" moment. If they have an "a-ha" moment independently, without pressure from Congress, from the United States Olympic Committee, from the media, if they independently adopt stricter policies and have their own campaign that teaches their membership about not having these romantic and sexual relationships, that coaches do not have sexual access to their athletes, then I'll be happy. I'm much more concerned about making kids safe. I'd like to see them do things for the right reason because what has to happen is the culture of swimming has to change. Just like schools are being required to conduct climate surveys to determine the risk and what can they do to change the climate for women so they have an equal educational opportunity, the same thing needs to happen with swimming. I've talked to some good guy coaches who provide complete sexual safety for the girls. These are really good guys, but they say to me, "What's wrong with a coach having sex with an 18-year-old swimmer? It wasn't illegal for that coach to have sex with her. If it's not illegal, what's the problem?" It is hammered into attorneys, "Thou shalt not." If you want to lose your license as an attorney you either take somebody's funds or you have sex with clients. Every professional organization, every teacher, every family member has these bright-line rules that age and consent are not part of it. There are rules that exist throughout employment, throughout schools, throughout major professions. If you live in public housing there are rules, any kind of counseling role. When you think of the impact that a coach has on an athlete's life, and for the vast majority of coaches to not grasp that they're a part of those same prohibitions, it's a major cultural change that swimming needs to have.

I saw several of my peers in swimming, as I was growing up, marry their coaches. There was no prohibition. If a kid grows up and they see this happening in the swimming community, when the 13-year-old is inappropriately kissed by her coach she thinks she's headed to the altar. She thinks this is true love. She thinks that this is an appropriate relationship. She would know that if a doctor tried to do this to her, or a teacher tried to do this … everybody understands. There's a general understanding that that's impermissible, and yet there's not that same thinking going on within swimming.

Does the culture around swimming, as it currently exists, make abuse more likely than in other sports?

Because there is not this bright-line understanding, swimmers, their families, teammates don't react the way that they would if it was a teacher or family member or one of those other impermissible areas. That and the fact that there's no legal liability. Let's say there's an 18-year-old and she's terribly sexually harassed or abused. There's really no remedy. She has to quit. She has to find another club. She's out of luck.

But it's not just swimming. It's an issue with club and Olympic sports. If an abusing coach gets fired from a school, they will walk right across the street to a club program and get hired immediately. A good example of this is Mitch Ivey. He gets fired from the University of Florida in 1993, and is still able to get employed at other places in other club sports.

You wrote the petition. The effort was organized through the Women's Sports Foundation and signed by 19 female victims of sexual abuse and/or harassment. The coaches mentioned in the petition are all male and Chuck Wielgus, the executive director of USA Swimming and the focus of the petition, is male. Are you concerned that people might take sides based on gender? Would this situation have been taken more seriously, earlier, if it wasn't, in every case mentioned in the petition, a male abuser and a female victim?

I think one reason why Penn State got hammered the way they did was because he [Sandusky] was abusing young boys. If he had been abusing young girls, it would have been the question of "What did she do? What was she wearing?" It would not have been as clear cut for people as it was when it was young boys. That said, men in all-male groups pose a statistically greater risk of harm to women than men in co-ed groups. This is true in clergy. When it is all male, like in the priesthood, in the military, in fraternities. Men in all-male groups. When they're co-ed, you're much less likely to see violence against women or see policies that are hostile to women.

One of the things that I would like to see as a result of this is for at least 50% of the board members and committee members be women. The coaching staff is overwhelmingly male and it allows for a groupthink that if more women were involved would not exist.

You're a three-time Olympic gold medalist. You have spent a significant part of your life as a competitive athlete. When I asked about the Andy Gabel situation you said, "We lost." Chuck Wielgus was elected to the International Swimming Hall of Fame, and now his name has now been withdrawn because of the petition you authored. Is this a win? Is a win possible in a situation like this?

There is a win, but Chuck having his name withdrawn is not it. The win is the victims having a voice in the issue, to have them be validated by the overall public. To have this overwhelming public support has emboldened them and I think provided a measure of healing that I don't think would have happened otherwise. So if there is a win it is for the victims and their ability to heal themselves, and also make it safer for the next generation.

Read more: Part II Part III Part IV Part V

Nancy Hogshead-Makar earned three gold medals and one silver at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. As Senior Director of Advocacy for the Women's Sports Foundation, she authored the ultimately successful petition asking the International Swimming Hall of Fame to reverse its decision to induct USA Swimming Executive Chuck Wielgus. Hogshead-Makar lives in Florida with her husband Scott and their three children.

Rob Trucks interviews people. And not just former athletes. His latest book is on Fleetwood Mac's Tusk album, and some of his many conversations with 49-year-old Americans may be found at McSweeney's. Follow him on Twitter, if you must: @eyeglassesofky