I once had an old friend accuse me of ruining her cherished childhood memories of her time on the swim team. Her evidence? I told her that our team’s head coach, Andy King, had groomed and sexually assaulted my sister. I was rather shocked when my friend got mad at me, but not at the coach. Why was she mad at me? What had I done?
At the time that my sister was being assaulted, it was actually well known that something was happening. But back in the 80s they didn’t use such big nasty phrases such as sexual assault. Instead they used words like affair. So the story went that my underage sister was having an affair with her coach. This became so widely known that people from other teams were asking my sister about it. Eventually the board of directors of the swim team decided something had to be done and they fired Andy.
Sadly that’s not where his sick twisted story ended. Andy masqueraded as a swim coach, but his actual profession was sexually assaulting minors, and he was disgustingly good at his job. He wormed his way into your world, inserting himself into every piece of the lives of his victims. Everything he did was an attempt to further his goals of having free unfettered access and complete mental control of his victims. King sexually assaulted an unknowable plethora of underage, female swimmers, and that ongoing sexual abuse occurred up and down the Pacific Coast for more than 3 decades before he was arrested in 2009. Thankfully he was convicted and sentenced to 40 years and will most likely never see the outside of a prison in his lifetime. If you want some more info, check these links, first, second, third.
This story isn’t that story; this story instead is of a small nobody swimmer, me.
I was never a great swimmer, but I was also not the worst. On my team, in my age group, I was actually the top swimmer. It was just that once I got to larger area swim meets, I was way out of my league. For swimmers, what that meant was that I needed to work longer, harder and more intense than I ever had before. I was swimming almost every day of the week, in the morning and the evening. Because that’s what you do when you’re trying to make it to the Olympics, or get a good scholarship, or at least make your time to make it to the next big swim meet.
That is what the cult of swimming demands. You work harder, you work longer and if you don’t make it, then it is because you are not doing enough. It’s weird. It helped to create an amazing work ethic for me, but it was also very obsessive, and very demanding, and it can be very exclusionary of beliefs that contradict that message. Because, anything that goes against working twice as hard as everyone else is just loser talk, and you can’t listen to those losers, because they’re losers, and their loser-ness will get all over you if you stand too close.
But I loved swimming. It is such a Zen meditative sport. And I loved the connections with other humans that swimming afforded. I was such a complete nobody at school that I felt as though nobody would have really noticed if I ever just disappeared. But on the swim team, I was part of a team. I wasn’t a big deal like some swimmers, but I had friends, and that mattered.
It mattered, because I was typically so lost within the swirl of my own self absorbed gender obsessed world that I was just too weird. It caused me lots of interpersonal relationship problems, especially when I was really young. Hell I couldn’t figure out what was going on in my own head often enough to even have the wherewithal to just say hi, how are you doing? I wasn’t out as me at that point. I knew what I liked, I knew what I wanted, on many levels I knew what was going on, but I never had the language to say, hey btw, I’m transgender. And I really could have used a ton of therapy. Aw well, suffice to say, I was lost and confused and just trying to make my way through the world.
So even though there were rumors and I knew that people were saying my sister was having an affair with Andy, these were my teammates. We were on a mission together, we were going to make it to the olympics, and if not we were at least going to make sure we tried as hard as possible and then sometimes even harder. They had my back, and I had theirs’, even though none of us actually did. And besides, it allowed me my first legit opportunities to shave my body hair that I was learning how much I detested. However I had to make sure that it was at the right time of the season and that my coaches approved my shaving.
Somewhere around this time was when the team collapsed. Andy was fired, and we became the San Ramon Valley Livermore Aquatics after merging with another local team, and Richard Thornton became the head coach. I don’t know when I began swimming under him, and I didn’t even remember that my sister swam for him for several months before she switched teams. Sadly, I realize now that I have massive memory gaps. My therapist and I think it has to do with a bit of family and life trauma combined together with dissociation in attempting to ignore my gender variances.
At the time, I knew I loved having my fingernails being painted. But I couldn’t do that. I didn’t have the supplies, the knowledge, or the ability to hide that in any way. I knew that I liked wearing female clothes but I didn’t have any of my own, and I couldn’t hide that from anyone, except for the Guess jeans jacket that I obsessively stole from my sister. And I knew that I liked shaving my body. And that I had the supplies to do. And I had the knowledge to do it. And I could mostly hide that I was doing it as long as I was smart about it.
But swim team had changed. The team that I joined when I was eight, was not the same team by the time I was fifteen. I thought these people had my back, but now these people were viewing me differently. I was part of the Denithorne family. And even though nobody helped, nobody suggested arresting Andy King, the rumor mill was running on high. The whispers about me, my sister, and my family did not stop with the dissolution of the team, if anything they increased and became more hostile, and many of those comments were directed towards me from our new head coach Richard. It felt as though people were fine with the old coach having sexually assaulted children, as long as everybody kept silent about it and just blamed the victim, or at least the victim’s trashy family.
It was around this time that I also began to get questions about my body hair, from my coach. As any good trans girl in hiding does, I had a good back up story. I knew what I was doing by this point because I had shaved my legs, and I didn’t have my coach’s approval. I knew that someone, somewhere, at some point was for sure going to ask why I had shaved my legs, and I had to have a story ready. So when my coach asked, I told him that I’m a cyclist as well as a swimmer. And cyclists typically shave their legs. Never mind that I didn’t know why cyclists shave their legs, that didn’t matter. My coach’s response? He kind of laughed and said, yeah well I guess that’s a plausible story.
The thing was, he saw right through my bullshit. He knew I was shaving my legs because I wanted to and not because I had to. I knew then that my days at swimming were going to come to an end. I didn’t want to deal with questions about my body hair and I didn’t want to deal with questions about my sister, and I was tired of all of the looks and the whispers and hushed tones. I really don’t remember swimming that day, or any day after that conversation with my coach. No more practice, no more races, no more 10x100s on the minute, I’ll take a big ol slice of none of that please.
I do know that at some point my dad yelled at me about swimming and that he wasn’t going to pay the bill anymore if I wasn’t going to go. Apparently I told him that I wasn’t going to go anymore, because I wasn’t going.
I did go and see my teammates one more time. I have no idea how much time had passed, but I was driving somewhere and there was a swim meet and I knew my old team was going to be there for sure. I parked, found the pool, and unsurprisingly, I found my group of old teammates. They looked older, but they were still doing the same thing, playing cards between events to pass the time. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I left disappointed. It was very clear that I didn’t have friends, I had ex teammates, and now I was the quitter. It didn’t matter why I quit. I heard from the rumor mill it was because I had a car and a girlfriend, so of course I quit. And now I was part of the loser group, and remember, we don’t listen to or associate with the losers.
Which was a great cover story for nobody to ever feel bad about what happened. I was never asked why I quit. Nobody cared. The Denithorne problem was removed from Thornton’s magical career path. He recently passed away and I got to read accounts from some of my old teammates of his lasting effect on their lives. It allowed me to see a man that I was never shown. He sounds like he was a great coach for some.
Did I quit because questions about shaving? Did I quit as a byproduct of the Andy King era? Did I quit because I got a car? Did I quit because I got a girlfriend? It was probably a bit of all of those things. All that I’m really left with is a great deal of sadness. I hope that sports can change one day, but as a trans woman, vilified and unable compete anymore, I’ll never know. Oh and if any of this ruined your childhood memories of your cherished time on the swim team and you’re now made at me, fuck you. Be angry with the people who actually ruined children’s lives, not my recounting of abuse.
For information about the sexual abuse and assault problems within swimming go here.
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