The celebrated head of the U. Olympic Committee agency that polices performance-enhancing drugs began his career in the Olympic bureaucracy as a lawyer managing investigations of claims of sexual abuse by coaches at USA Swimming β which is now the subject of a federal grand jury investigation targeting what critics of the organization call a generation of cover-ups.
Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the U. Anti-Doping Agency, has something of a white-knight reputation in the sports world for his work in exposing the career-long drug violations of seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong. But Tygart's actual history comes with its own questions. That office has counseled the U. Olympic Committee and a number of its affiliated national sport governing bodies, including USA Swimming, which is headquartered nearby in Colorado Springs.
In , thousands of pages of internal documents, which had been withheld by USA Swimming in defiance of California lower court discovery orders in sexual abuse civil lawsuits β resulting in tens of thousands of dollars in court sanctions against the organization β were produced under order of the California Supreme Court. Subsequently, these records were also subpoenaed by an FBI field office. Among other things, this document trove, obtained by Salon, shows that Tygart served on several occasions in the s as USA Swimming's counsel of record for hearings of its National Board of Review.
That board was responsible for adjudicating abuse complaints against coaches and setting disciplinary measures for those found guilty.
The current grand jury, under the supervision of the U. The most dramatic of these alleged practices literally involved an offshore entity: a wholly owned reinsurance subsidiary of USA Swimming called the United States Sports Insurance Company, which was headquartered on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
