Michael Phelps, USA Swimming GOAT, maybe the GOAT U.S. athlete in any sport, isn’t sure he’d want his four young sons to be competitive swimmers.
How does that strike you?
“I’ve watched too many teammates struggle to compete in a sport they love without the support they need. I’ve also seen the sport struggle to return its membership numbers to pre-pandemic levels, and I’m done pretending this system works just because it produces medals. Swimming to me was always about more than just medals – it’s supposed to be an environment that builds champions in and out of the pool,” Phelps wrote in a lengthy Instagram post on Thursday.
I’m probably reading Phelps differently than other journos who have written about what he’s saying because I’ve been reporting all summer on the disgusting situation at the University of Virginia.
ICYMI
- Cav Aquatics, UVA Swimming coach Gary Taylor on probation after admitting to emotional abuse of athletes
- D1 swimmer: ‘It was hard for me to go to practice every day and face Gary Taylor’
- UVA extended contract of coach two weeks after he was put on probation
- Former Y swimmer: Unable to get through practice ‘without planning how I’d end my life’
- UVA All-American: ‘The kids that quit at Cavalier Aquatics had horrible attitudes’
- I gave UVA Athletics a chance to make amends on the coach misconduct story: They don’t wanna
UVA Swimming continues to employ as its associate head coach a man named Gary Taylor, who is serving a two-year probation handed down by the U.S. Center for SafeSport after admitting to emotional misconduct while coaching swimmers from 2015 to 2022 at North Carolina State, Auburn and Cavalier Aquatics.
UVA Athletics has exercised its right to remain silent on the sanction, as horror stories of the emotional misconduct that Taylor put athletes through piled up.
One young swimmer at the Charlottesville YMCA, the home of Cavalier Aquatics, felt pushed to the brink of considering suicide; other top swimmers at the high school and college levels quit the sport altogether, citing lack of support either from the YMCA, which ignored their complaints, and threatened retaliatory action against parents and swimmers raising issue, or from college administrators, who allowed the complaints to gather dust in file cabinets.
Money, Phelps wrote in his Instagram post, is a “factor” in his criticisms, “but poor operational controls and weak leadership are a cornerstone of the sport’s problems.”
I assume here that he is referring to issues at the top of the USA Swimming infrastructure, which fired CEO Tim Hinchey last year, citing declining membership, eventually replacing Hinchey with Chrissi Rawak, who was at the time at the athletics director at the University of Delaware.
Rawak only lasted nine days on the job; she stepped down under pressure on March 1 after it was revealed that she had been named in a complaint filed with SafeSport, dating to her tenure at the University of Michigan, her alma mater, where she had worked as an assistant swim coach from 1992-1997.
The Notice of Decision from SafeSport in the Gary Taylor case, incidentally, was made official on March 17.
USA Swimming at least took action quickly once it learned of an investigation involving its new CEO; UVA Swimming continues to hope that the Gary Taylor story, which involves a negative finding and probation, will just go away.
“I don’t have all the answers,” Phelps wrote on his Instagram post, using his fame to bring attention to the rot from within the swimming community, “but I know this: we need accountability. We need transparency. We need athlete voices at the center, not in the margins.”
The thing about history’s most successful competitive swimmer not wanting his kids to follow in his footsteps is telling.
“It pains me to say that I’m not sure if I’d want my sons to be a part of this sport at a competitive level. Yes, swimming changed my life, but it also caused a lot of heartache, and its current state makes me both sad and angry,” Phelps wrote.
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Chris Graham
