Teen’s swimming career in limbo after he is accused of slapping teammate on backside

DENVER, Jan 3: The email, addressed to the 13-year-old swimmer from the U.S. Center for SafeSport, came out of the blue. “Between approximately 2019 and 2022, you allegedly engaged in a pattern of behavior which constitutes Sexual Misconduct,” it read, with both final words capitalized.
That was in April 2022. It took three months for the 8th grader to learn what the accusations were: A claim he had slapped another teammate on the butt in a locker room 10 months earlier, in June 2021.
More than 20 months later, the case remains open, even after local police in the town 40 miles north of Denver investigated and dismissed it within weeks. Now 16 and a high school sophomore, the teen’s promising swimming career has been plunged into uncertainty by the temporary sanctions imposed by SafeSport — and the hard-to-escape taint of presumed guilt as the case drags on.
“Their allegations are entirely untrue,” said the teen, whom The Associated Press is not identifying because he is a minor. “So my reaction, when I heard them, I was thrown off and confused. And then I was upset.” The SafeSport Center was established in 2017 to investigate and punish abuse in Olympic sports in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar gymnastics molestation cases that revealed flaws in the way U.S. sports leaders handled sex-abuse cases.
The center’s mandate extends well beyond the Olympics, however, reaching into the grassroots level of more than four dozen sports. The teen swimmer’s situation illustrates the impact of that broad authority as its overtaxed investigative team takes on cases that often don’t involve elite athletes in the Olympic system or even directly entail sexual abuse or misconduct.
The teen’s mother says most of the family’s questions to SafeSport have taken days or weeks to be answered. Many of the responses, she said, are the equivalent of a shrug — they don’t know, or they’ll get back.
“I think the guilty-until-proven-innocent aspect is what bothers me the most, because right now, he’s still (considered) guilty until the case is finalized,” she said.
The slow-moving timeline fits into a common theme at an organization that operates on a $24 million annual budget, received around 7,000 complaints last year and has about 65 employees in its “response and resolution department.” Cases take too long because there are too many and too few people to handle them.
“I asked if I could see a copy of the report. They said ‘Yes, eventually,’” the teen’s mom said. “I asked, ‘When?’ They said ‘When we’re done.’ I asked, ‘When’s that?’ They said, ‘We don’t know.’”
“I scratch my head and wonder if they’re overwhelmed, if they just don’t have the staff to take care of all the complaints that are coming in. Or, are they incompetent?” she said.
When the family reached out in November for an update, a SafeSport investigator told them he “could not provide a firm timeline” for resolving the case, the mother said.
The center’s spokesperson, Hilary Nemchik, told the AP she could not speak about specific cases, but “those types of responses are not consistent with the center’s values or our commitments to athletes and will certainly be reviewed.”
Not until fall of 2023 was the teen able to register for a USA Swimming event, and then, only with restrictions: He had to be chaperoned on the pool deck and could not come into contact with his accuser.
This reached a boiling point at a swim meet in November, when the swimmer’s mom, who has taken over duties as his full-time coach, briefly turned away from her son on the pool deck. He was then approached by a meet referee who notified him he was breaking the rules and wouldn’t be allowed to come back for the second day of the competition. (AP)