Sexual predator Phelps walks free but his sickening crimes escape attention because it’s not football
It’S Brian Phelps’s swagger which takes your breath away and reveals how the perpetrators of sport’s most unspeakable crimes have much in common.
the charismatic former Olympic diver was engaging in the routine sexual assault of young girls at the gym he had set up when he gave several interviews to promote the place, in the 1980s.
He joked with one interviewer about how, when younger, he’d enjoyed ‘finding a nice bit of skirt, some little East German or Russian diver that I fancied’.
He told another that parents were not welcome at his gym. ‘Mothers are terrific,’ he said. ‘But perhaps not when you’re working with their children.’
When some of the girls he abused became women and testified to his crimes, Phelps was found guilty of multiple charges of rape and indecent assault of children aged between six and 15 at the gym, where he coached trampolining after retirement from diving. He served six years. His brother John, a former Olympic squad canoeist turned gym owner, got 12 for similar crimes. they were sentenced together.
Anyone who has followed the case of Barry Bennell, the football paedophile whose name is a byword for predatory abuse, will discern some chilling parallels here. Phelps, just like Bennell, basked in publicity and paraded a charisma which left parents unaware or in denial that he was abusing their children.
He boasted about his physique. ‘I haven’t any surplus flesh on me,’ he told one interviewer. He entered bodybuilding competitions. He even commentated on diving for the BBC’s Grandstand around the time he was abusing.
yet there is a significant difference between these two serial abusers. It is when we come to public awareness that the paths of Phelps and Bennell diverge.
the prominence of football in public life helped generate justifiable outrage about Bennell, when his victims bravely testified in 2016. He was brought back to court and sent down for 30 years.
Not so Phelps. We were hardly in the dark ages when he admitted 42 charges of sexual assault in 2008, yet his conviction elicited only a few paragraphs, or nothing at all, in national papers.
Even the devastating interview that one of Phelps’ alleged victims gave to the BBC’s Natalie Pirks last week did not bring wallto-wall coverage. that victim’s testimony was shattering. She spoke of girls like herself being raped and molested by Phelps in a gym basement room called ‘Happyland’ — decorated with images of Disney characters.
Experienced police officers say there will be many more cases to bring against Phelps than those he was convicted of at Bournemouth Crown Court, 15 years ago. that’s how these patterns of behaviour work.
‘there will be countless victims out there, still not seeing justice,’ one former senior detective tells me. ‘ With Bennell, it gained traction as it was football. But if others make themselves known, this might too. It’s not too late. Judges have become more accepting of ambiguity in their summing up of these cases. there’s an acceptance not every detail can be recalled from 40 years ago.’
But agreeing to press charges entails the ordeal of testifying and it is impossible to ignore the gender issue here. the victims are almost exclusively women. Conviction rates for rape are desperately low: 0.1 per cent.
the obfuscation from British Gymnastics in this realm has hardly given women much optimism that the establishment is actually on their side.
It’s nearly a year since a devastating report by Anne Whyte KC laid bare the governing body’s failure to deal with the despicable treatment of young gymnasts. It’s two years since 38 cases, being handled by the respected Hausfeld practice, were first pursued. yet only one civil case against the governing body has been settled.
FROM his retreat in France, Phelps appears confident that having reached his 70s, he will find no more police officers knocking at his door. In response to the latest testimony, he asked why it hadn’t been picked up in 2008. Investigators back then were ‘looking for victims who had “slipped through the net” — with zero response,’ Phelps said, by email.
He’s used to women finding the ordeal of testifying too much. It has been happening since 1966, when he was charged with indecently exposing himself to an 11-year- old girl at a swimming pool, with intent to assault her.
‘I was signing an autograph for the girl,’ he explained in court back then. ‘I’ve been to many countries and signed millions and millions of autographs for little girls.’ Case dismissed.
He represented Britain in the Commonwealth Games soon after. Allegations of child abuse against Phelps in 1999 were also dismissed for ‘insufficient evidence’. But times have changed. the latest gymnast’s testimony has prompted others to come forward, bringing more leads.
Detectives say many victims of this kind of abuse are often not ready to report it until they reach their 40s. the supremely self-confident Brian Phelps may not be quite as untouchable as he considers himself to be.