Paedophile Swimming Coach Gets Eight Years
By Adam Fresco and Craig Lord
Originally published in The Times, June 30, 2001
A former Olympic swimming coach was jailed for eight years yesterday for the "depraved and perverted" abuse of young teenage boys in his care over 25 years.
Mike Drew, 55, former president of the British Swimming Coaches' Association, was sentenced for systematically abusing five children, aged between 13 and 15.
Detectives believe that there were more victims but say that they have no idea of the total number.
Drew had been in a position of authority as the chairman of the British Swimming Coaches' Association when Paul Hickson, a former Olympic swimming coach, was sentenced in 1995 to 17 years in jail for sexual offences against female swimmers.
Drew was banned for life by the Amateur Swimming Association (ASA) last night. David Sparkes, Chief Executive of the ASA, deplored the offences and said that sexual abuse was a problem for sport in general.
Although the offences happened many years ago, before the ASA employed its child-protection procedures, that did nothing to make the case any less serious, Mr Sparkes said. He praised the courage of Drew's victims in coming forward and urged others who had been similarly abused to follow their example.
At Snaresbrook Crown Court, Drew avoided the gaze of the group of victims who sat together to see him sentenced. He walked into the dock with a pronounced limp, the result of polio as a child, then stared at a far corner of the court room as the prosecutor outlined the case against him.
Colin Hart, for the prosecution, said the coach first started abusing children in the late sixties and continued to do so until the 1990s. He was arrested in 1999 after one boy realised that the attacks were not a normal part of swimming coaching.
Drew persuaded the trusting boys that he could help their careers by medical means, by touching them and "moving their hormones around" their body. He fondled and masturbated some of the boys and would also ask them to strip naked and measured their inside leg, touching their genitals. Attacks took place in swimming pool changing rooms, hotels around the country when he was in charge of the boys during competitions, and at his home.
During one competition he made a victim share a hotel room with him and as he fell asleep he told him he needed to feel the glands in his groin and that if they were low he would move them. He indecently assaulted the child. The victim said: "I put my total trust in Mike Drew. I never told anyone since I believed it to be part and parcel of training and necessary to become a success at a certain level of swimming."
It Drew's last victim who eventually spoke out and prompted the investigation against him. The boy had been forced to perform mutual masturbation and oral sex.
Mr Hart said that the assaults were a gross breach of trust and added: "All the boys were young, talented swimmers and they held him in great regard. The defendant enjoyed considerable success and was in a position of power and had a powerful and dominant personality."
In sentencing Drew, of Havering, Essex, Judge David Radford said that keen, committed and talented young swimmers had been in awe of him and beholden to him as their mentor and coach who was crucial to the development of their careers. "They completely trusted you and were cruelly deceived by you into accepting that which you did to them."
He said that Drew remained a risk to pre-pubescent boys and that after serving his sentence he would be placed on the sexual offenders' register.
