The U.S. Center for SafeSport is in the process of updating its database of banned individuals to include people banned before the Center’s establishment in 2017.
The Center has taken over authority in investigating allegations of sexual abuse, and also has discretionary authority to investigate other forms of misconduct among coaches, athletes or officials in Olympic sports. Where individual national governing bodies (like USA Swimming) used to be in charge of investigating reports and handing out punishments, the Center for SafeSport has now taken over that work for all Olympic sports.
We’ve covered the new system as exhaustively as possible, and you can read more about it below:
- Digging in on Safesport’s investigative process, ban terminology
- U.S. Center for SafeSport: Understanding the new structure of SafeSport
Previously, the Center’s database of banned individuals only included bans the Center itself handed out – meaning anything pre-2017 (when the Center was established) was only reflected in banned lists published by the national governing bodies who had banned the individuals. But this month, names began appearing in the Center’s database with bans dated pre-2017. We asked the Center for clarification, and were told that the Center is working on centralizing all the records into their database.
The process, a Center spokesperson says, involves national governing bodies submitting their own historical records of bans, certifying that the lists are accurate and making sure that the banned individuals “have been sanctioned for offenses that would fall under the Center’s jurisdiction.”
In the case of swimming, the bans seems to be trickling in in reverse alphabetical order from USA Swimming’s banned list. The SafeSport database now carries 21 new swimming-related names who were banned between 2008 and 2015, all with last names between “S” and “Z.” These aren’t new bans, but rather old bans where the names previously only appeared on USA Swimming’s banned list, but now appear on both USA Swimming’s list and the Center for SafeSport’s database.
The new additions bring the banned database to 57 names listed for the sport of swimming. The database now also shows who handed down the ban: The U.S. Center for SafeSport or USA Swimming. You can view the full database here.