And in Ireland, which has pervasive problems with paedophile abuse and not just in swimming, that is the conversation that must be kept alive
By Irvin Muchnick
I panicked. “Out of sight, out of mind”, I said. But you heard me say it, you heard and listened
— popular unconventional translation of Psalms, 31:22
Perhaps unsurprisingly, on 14 August, the media relations department of America’s ‘newspaper of record’ declined the invitation to tell Village that there will be any addition to its coverage four years ago of an Irish coach who had attained a dubious diversity lottery visa – which a federal judge suggested had been facilitated by the American Swimming Coaches Association – and who thereby traversed the country across three decades, despite having been rejected for citizenship. The reason being that he had lied on his application about his prior criminal indictment in Ireland.
At least the New York Times is consistent. In March 2024, a 277-page congressional commission report, co-authored by sports law experts and Olympic legends such as track and field’s Edwin Moses, recommended restructuring the American youth sports system to stem the scourge of coach abuse. The Times has yet to inform readers of that report’s release and content, either.
“We can’t and don’t cover every study, and do not comment on what may or may not publish in future editions”, said Times spokesperson Nicole Taylor.
When I pointed out that the congressional commission report had been covered by the Washington Post, USA Today and other outlets, and was a thorough and much-anticipated fulfilment of a legislative mandate to offer the first significant reforms of America’s nearly-half-century-old Olympic and Amateur Sports Act, Taylor doubled down: “We can’t and don’t cover every study, and do not comment on what we may or may not publish in future editions. We’ve covered the issue of abuse and accountability in amateur, professional and Olympic sports with sensitivity and rigour”.
According to the poet Wallace Stevens, there are thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird. When it comes to sexual abuse, there are only two. One is not to talk about it. The other is to talk about it.
A list which shows the difficulties in bringing border-hopping coach predators to book
In that spirit, Village submits for your consideration a list which shows the difficulties not just for law enforcement but for journalists in bringing border-hopping coach predators to book.
Our list drops just as Michael Phelps, perhaps the greatest male swimmer ever, and other American Olympics legends are lambasting the leadership of USA Swimming in the wake of a tepid national team performance at the recent world championships. As Britain’s Guardian notes: “Notably, Phelps’s broadside does not directly address the most damaging area of USA Swimming’s recent history: its handling of sexual abuse, harassment and athlete safeguarding”.
Rick Curl
In the summer of 2012, an ex-swimmer, now living in Texas in her 40s, was watching the US Olympic Swimming Trials on television. The former Kelley Davies spotted on the pool deck a coach named Rick Curl. In abuse survivor vernacular, this sighting “triggered” her. She chose to speak out to the media, and in the aftermath Curl was banned by USA Swimming and incarcerated in Maryland state prison.
Curl had been the founder and co-owner of one of the country’s largest and most prestigious swim programmes, out of several locations in the Washington, D.C., area. He began having sex with Davies, one of his top swimmers, when she was 12, and he molested her throughout her teen years.
Around the time Kelley started swimming on an athletic scholarship at the University of Texas – at which point Curl also held the post of coach at the University of Maryland – her mother and father learned details and sought Curl’s prosecution. The Davies parents were advised that their evidence was less than iron-clad for that purpose, and that they should pursue civil action. They achieved a $150,000 financial settlement tied to that bête noire of transparency: a non-disclosure agreement or “NDA”.
In utmost quiet, the University of Maryland dismissed Curl. He moved to Australia and coached with Carlile Swimming, the top programme in Sydney. By 2012, presumably calculating that the coast was again clear in the US, he returned to his eponymous club.
David Berkoff is an American Hall of Fame swimmer who is rightly credited with being an early whistleblower on abuse. In 2010, about to run for the USA Swimming board as an insurgent, he had told another activist in an email:
“Denying knowledge of Rick Curl, Mitch Ivey and others banging their swimmers! It’s a flat out lie. They knew about it because we (coaches and athletes) were all talking about it in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I was told by several of Mitch Ivey’s swimmers that he was sleeping with Lisa Dorman in 1988. I heard the whole Suzette Moran from Pablo Morales over a handful of beers and nearly threw up. I was told Rick Curl was molesting Kelley Davies for years starting when she was 12 by some of the Texas guys. That was the entire reason I formed the abuse subcommittee [at USA Swimming]. I was sick and tired of this crap. No one was standing up. No one was willing to take on these perverts”.
When Davies noticed Curl at the 2012 Trials in Omaha, Nebraska, Berkoff was in the stands. By now he had been elected to the USA Swimming board as technical vice president. Anti-abuse activists who thought he was one of their own now were complaining he was a sellout who, once on the inside, was doing little about the problem in the sport’s higher councils.
Berkoff defended himself in an interview with the Independent of Missoula, Montana. He said he had had no idea that Curl was coaching at the Trials. Berkoff also disavowed knowledge of Curl’s abuse of Davies. “I don’t know”, Berkoff said. “I heard rumours”. And so, in a rhetorical instant, the circle between “flat out lie” and “rumours” was squared.
Alex Pussieldi
Alex Pussieldi
Alexandre Azambuja Pussieldi is a Brazilian swimming coach who made his way to Florida in the late 1990s. I trust it does not violate the implicit promise to readers not to inundate them with elaborate Venn diagrams when I simply point out the backgrounds of two of his colleagues on the staff at the Fort Lauderdale Swim Team of that period
One was the head coach, Jack Nelson, who had led the U.S. women at the 1976 Montreal Olympics. Several years before that, celebrity open water swimmer Diana Nyad maintains, Nelson molested her when he was her coach at the Pine Crest School. (Nelson died in 2014.)
One of Pussieldi’s fellow assistants under Nelson in Fort Lauderdale was a Canadian named Cecil Russell. After turning state’s evidence on charges of having been an accessory to murder in a drug deal gone bad, Russell had pleaded out for a light sentence. Upon release, he moved to Spain and landed in prison there, as well, when he was caught running an ecstasy-smuggling operation. He then moved to his next swim coaching job for Nelson in Florida.
Pussieldi, meanwhile, was importing to the state promising male swimmers from Brazil and throughout Latin America. He became the legal guardian of some of them and boarded them at his house, where he installed a hidden bathroom camera to peep on them. One swimmer, a Mexican, discovered the peeping system (along with a stash of videos of the coach having sex with underage kids) and called out Pussieldi at a practice. Pussieldi beat him up.
In their discretion, the police did not charge him with assault and battery, but Nelson did dump Pussieldi. A journalist for Fort Lauderdale’s Sun Sentinel muted the story and advised Pussieldi on quickly landing other coaching jobs in the region. Eventually he became head coach of the Kuwait national team and the celebrated mogul of his own club in Davie, just outside Fort Lauderdale.
In 2013 my website, ConcussionInc.net, investigated a range of Pussieldi’s shady activities. These reports included publication of a USA Swimming investigator’s report on the Mexican swimmer’s Peeping Tom allegations. The document was part of thousands of pages of discovery materials in many civil lawsuits against the organisation. The tranche was acquired by an FBI field office in California.
Pussieldi’s club in Davie descended into chaos. The regional affiliate of USA Swimming fined and suspended him for manipulating meet entries.
Pussieldi returned to Brazil most of the time and became an Olympic commentator on the country’s SporTV network. Today he is the communications director of Confederación Sudamericana de Natación, the governing body of swimming in South America. He runs lucrative clinics across Brazil. He is the honorific of the annual Alex Pussieldi Trophy event in Recife.
Danny Chocron
Simon “Danny” Chocron coached at the Bolles School and its resident USA Swimming club in Jacksonville, Florida. In 2001 he was charged with 14 felony counts of sexually abusing underage swimmers, both male and female, based on testimony from the victims and his own confession. Chocron jumped $250,000 bail and fled to Spain, with which the US has an extradition treaty. In 2004, learning of his impending collar by extradition marshals, he absconded to his native Venezuela, with which there was no extradition treaty. There, he resumed his coaching career without missing a beat.
In 2017 the national governing body, Federación Venezolana de Deportes Acuáticos, suspended Chocron for one year, based on reports at Concussion Inc.
Joe Bernal, aka Hugo Calderon
Joe Bernal
David Berkoff, the swimming great, abuse whistleblower and controversial USA Swimming board member, revered his coach at Harvard University, a seven-time Ivy League coach of the year. Joe Bernal was on Olympic coaching staffs and named to three Halls of Fame. Shortly after his 2015 induction into the American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame, multiple allegations of sexual abuse arose against him for episodes at his age-group club in Waltham, Massachusetts; they included impregnating a teenager. USA Swimming investigated and added him to its published list of banned coaches.
Joe Bernal had been born Hugo Calderon in Colombia. After his scandals broke, he fled his home in the Boston area and lived intermittently in Colombia, with a newly acquired passport under his birth name, in the Cayman Islands and in Florida. He died in 2022.
The above seems sufficient for establishing the border-free nature of coach abuse. And in Ireland, which has pervasive problems with paedophile abuse and not just in swimming, that is the conversation that must be kept alive.
Irvin Muchnick is author of ‘Underwater: The Greed-Soaked Tale of Sexual Abuse in USA Swimming and Around the Globe’