Pablo Torre

But you're describing an ecosystem where there is a very powerful coach who is making them do things that they're actually not supposed to be doing.

Yeah.

And they would talk about depression being super common, a lot of behavior that looked like disordered eating.

They said that Coach Lars pressured them or their teammates to lose extreme amounts of body fat down to 10 or 12%, which can be in the unhealthy range.

They said that he would make fun of other teammates for being fat.

And these are, let me remind you, D1 swimmer's

It's like, okay, this person is one of the best swimmers on her team, and you're making jokes about her being fat and not needing to eat cookies?

Like, I'm a worse swimmer than her, so that must mean that I need to lose weight too.

The way that he talked about and treated weight was just not normal.

And they had all of this sort of insecurity that they described based on what they were going through with Coach Lars on the team.

And I'm not going to sit here and say that, like,

Kentucky swimming is a source of all my mental health problems and why I struggled with food in college and still sometimes do now to this day.

But I know that if I hadn't been in that environment, I wouldn't have had a lot of the thoughts or struggles that I did.

I can't think of a single teammate I had where now I'm like, wow, that person was really confident in themselves and their body.

They spoke about themselves very well.

I can't think of anyone.

And that's where it's like, this is nuts.

Which is to say that this is not the way that Riley Gaines characterized her swimming experience in Swimming Against the Current.

No, you wouldn't get any of this if you read Riley's memoir.

She does call some of his comments, quote, utter savagery, end quote.