USA Swimming is most likely, the worst sexual abuse scandal in sports history.
To understand how that can be, you first need to understand the gymnastics scandal. Larry Nassar was not a one off. The same newspaper that was largely responsible for exposing Nassar also found cases involving 54 gymnastics coaches involving 368 gymnasts. LINK In the end the pattern of abuse has similarities to the Catholic Church scandal. These abusive coaches move from gym to gym as soon as people start seeing the red flags allowing them to slip away with a fresh start at a new gym before they are caught.
So a scandal involving one man is ultimately a scandal involving rampant abuse within an entire sport. But the issue is not limited to one sport. Pick any Olympic sport and it most likely has the same problem. Sports such as Diving and Taekwondo are currently dealing with lawsuits regarding sexual abuse. In the end if every single Olympic sport were held under the same microscope as USA Gymnastics has been held under in the past few years, you will find similar issues in most of these sports. Specifically any sport that has young athletes.
People need to think of Larry Nassar as a general Olympic sports scandal in line with the Catholic Church to get a proper understanding of it. But in the end what should be a general sports scandal involving every Olympic sport reverts back to a scandal involving a single sport. That is because the problem exists in USA Swimming with such frequency that it is genuinelly horrifying at how much it surpasses the other Olympic sports.
A similar investigation into USA Swimming found cases involving 252 coaches and 590 swimmers as victims LINK which absolutely blows away the 54/368 figure involving USA Gymnastics.
Now to interject a personal story about why I care so deeply about this issue. I love going through and studying sports data. It's basically my hobby. And one of the topics that has always fascinated me was the relationship between youth and gender within the Olympic sports. Virtually every Olympic sport in every decade has their youngest athletes skew female. So I decided to compile a spreadsheet of all the Olympians to answer a number of questions related to the topic of the Olympic sports and the age of all their athletes. And the data straight up horrified me when I saw the stats for swimming.
My data involves 187,441 data points and the athletes are counted however many times they went to the Olympics. Michael Phelps for example accounts for five data points listed at five different ages whereas Simone Biles counts for one data point. I haven't finalized the 2018 Olympic data and spent about a year compiling all of those athletes independently as Sports-Reference stopped covering the Olympics after Rio. But if still haven't transferred the 2018 athletes into the data.
-10,763 data points were 18 years old or younger, 3,584 of them were swimmers compared to only 1,013 for gymnastics and 494 for figure skating.
-481 data points were under the age of 15. Of which 48 were figure skaters, 75 were gymnasts, and 249 were swimmers.
In the end swimming produces the lion's share of young Olympians. It makes sense for swimming to produce the most amount of sexual abuse cases because the sport is so large, that simply being half as bad as Gymnastics/figure skating will produce an even greater number of cases than those two sports. But what enhances the problem is that figure skating/gymnastics have enacted age limits and at least are trying to trend older. Swimming has not. A ten year old girl competed at the 2015 Swimming World Championships. Dana Vollmer famously competed at the US Olympic trials as a 12 year old. And since 2004, there have been 50 Olympians who were under the age of 15, of which 41 were swimmers. Of the remaining nine, three were from diving. And that brings me to my last point.
Swimming is part of FINA which is the same governing body that oversees diving and synchronized swimming. Those are two more sports that trend extremely young and have their youngest athletes being disproportionally female. This means a single organization is responsible for not one, but three sports that are the most at risk for abuse.
The reason youth is relevant is because child athletes don't have the same protections as adult athletes. A reporter sensing a problem can lure an adult athlete away from the coaches and interview them in private. You can't lure away a child athlete because they have chaperones that are required to guard them 24/7. They are also subjected to abusive coaching tactics at an earlier age which allows a culture of abuse to be normalized, and only in adulthood do they have the mental capacity to identify and build the courage to resist the abuse. And these issues don't simply go away. Most notably in regards to female athletes even after they turn 20 as they not only have coaches who are more powerful than they are in a social construct, but in a physical construct as well. It's not simply a coincidence that the sports that skew the youngest are the sports where the issue of abuse (of all kinds) seems to be the most rampant. And in conclusion I'd like to leave the following two quotes:
the USA Swimming sex abuse saga is the most under-covered scandal in sports. The Penn State crisis, no matter how vile and sinister, is a fraction of the breadth of USA Swimming’s history of sexual abuse by coaches and ensuing - and documented - cover-up by USA Swimming officials.
https://thehill.com/opinion/op-ed/221837-congress-and-the-usa-swimming-scandals
“I think in terms of scandals, [USA Swimming is] on par with USA Gymnastics,” he says. “Just the neglect and the culture that created these abusive coaches. There’s not a Nassar-figure we’ve found so far, but I think eventually it points to the [US Olympic Committee].”
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/usa-gymnastics-orange-county-register.php
The reality is that USA Gymnastics went down because the abuse within that sport victimized high profile Olympians. Whereas the other sports have the same issues, but is going largely unreported in the media because those sports don't have high profile Olympians to put a face on the scandal and bring the spotlight down on their sports.