underwater: the greed-soaked tale of sexual abuse in usa swimming and around the globe

While the celebrity victims of Dr. Larry Nassar and the USA Gymnastics sexual abuse scandals rightly got a lot of attention, the number of affected kids is far more numerous in swimming. Underwater tells the almost unbelievable story, in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East, of coaches who preyed on children while hopping from program to program, state to state, and even country to country, in a pattern similar to the pedophile priests of the Catholic Church.

Irvin Muchnick, an experienced investigative reporter of the dark side of our popular sports entertainments, gained access to thousands of pages of FBI files and other sources to expose scores of such scenarios, as well as the inaction of bureaucrats and even the most highly regarded politicians. The ranks of abusers include some of the most famous and celebrated coaches in swimming history. And there’s no fixing the problem, the author says, so long as hundreds of thousands of young swimmers annually -- elite and casual athletes alike -- remain at the mercy of the Olympic system’s money-hungry priorities.

Irvin Muchnick is the author of Wrestling Babylon, Chris & Nancy, Concussion Inc., and Without Helmets or Shoulder Pads: The American Way of Death in Football Conditioning. He has written articles for the New York Times, Salon, the Washington Monthly, People, Spy, Sports Illustrated, and other major outlets, as well as for Ireland’s Broadsheet and Village magazine and San Francisco’s Beyond Chron. He lives in Berkeley, CA.