Hiea-Yoon Kang was appointed to the U.S. Olympic team coaching staff despite many reports to SafeSport since 2022.
It was a special day, Hiea-Yoon Kang told the group of young athletes she was coaching at La Mirada Aquabelles, one of the nation’s most successful artistic swimming clubs, as they prepared for a practice in 2011.“She got us in the water and announced that we would be celebrating by doing 29 50s in the lap lane timed on 29 seconds for the 50 yards,” recalled Miranda Marquez, a member of the Aquabelles at the time. “One way would be butterfly and the way back would be an underwater lap.
But Marquez also knew how Kang treated athletes who couldn’t finish practice or drills, or who made a mistake in training or suffered an injury. Kang in January was named assistant coach for the Los Angeles-based U.S. national team and tasked with playing a leading role in preparing Team USA for the Olympic Games in Paris later this summer. It was the latest in a series of Team USA promotions for Kang, who has been part of U.S. national team staffs since 2011.
“Still these are just allegations,” Andrasko continued. “This is not an admission of Coach Kang’s guilt. But at the end of the day, my responsibility is to the of the athlete.” The allegations undercut assertions USAAS officials made when Kang and Stanford coach Megan Abarca were named to the Team USA coaching staff in January that the coaches would have a “positive impact” on the Olympic and World Championship teams’ culture.
It is why Marquez carpooled 90 minutes each way, each day to train in what she and other Aquabelle swimmers and their parents characterize as a “culture of abuse” created by Kang. “Those are both hypoxic exercises so the pain in my back and my kidney was getting so excruciating,” she said. “Because I knew I was peeing blood and I knew I was going to throw up and I ran to the bathroom.”
What also stung, Marquez said, was Kang’s next comment in which she questioned both the athlete’s truthfulness and her desire to make the U.S. national team while the swimmer was doubled over in pain. But “Kang is different,” continued Marquez, who had previously competed for Riverside Aquattes before joining the Aquabelles. “She is crueler and was cruel right off the bat. Didn’t want to know the first thing about us. And the few questions that she did ask were what our goals were and I remember the conversation that we had when me and my teammates first came from Riverside, basically telling her we wanted to be on the national team. We wanted to be the national team.
A U.S. national team member recalled Kang laughing as 11- and 12-year-old swimmers cried in pain during a two-chair drill designed to create greater flexibility. In the drill, a swimmer does the splits, resting the bottom part of her front leg on the front chair, her lower part of her back leg on the chair behind her, her torso and upper part of both legs suspended between the two chairs with Kang sitting on the hamstring area of a girl’s unsupported back leg.
“My daughter was even scared to eat her dinner a few times on the way home in the car because she thought Kang was driving next to us,” an Aquabelles parent said. The parent asked not to be identified because of concerns that Kang or USAAS officials would retaliate against their daughter. “When we previously spoke Coach Kang held the assistant coach position with the senior national team. I shared this openly with you at that time. Her performance and behavior with that level of athlete has been exemplary. This is not to dismiss the information you provided,” Andrasko, the USAAS CEO recently wrote to an Aquabelles parent who had complained that Kang had been named to the U.S.
“What are you guys doing?” Fuentes said, according to the swimmer. “Why don’t you come inside and shower?”Fuentes said she did not recall the conversation. Kang was named USAAS age group developmental coach of the year in 2008. In 2011, she received her first Team USA post, named U.S. junior national team coach. She coached the U.S. at the 2013 and 2014 Junior World Championships.Kang’s coaching stock continued to rise in the ensuing decade as the sport became more physically demanding and technical in the decades since it was introduced as an Olympic sport at the 1984 Los Angeles Games as “synchronized swimming.
“By adding Hiea-Yoon’s technical expertise, I anticipate a significant improvement in our execution under her guidance,” Fuentes said when Kang and Abarca were named to her U.S. national team coaching staff in January. “I value unity in a team, and it all begins with the coaching staff. Bringing on coaches developed in the United States system adds an extra layer of excitement, contributing to the team’s culture and strength.
An Aquabelles swimmer told SafeSport that “I noticed more dangerous mental and physical abuse patterns between” Kang and the athletes she coaches.It was the pursuit of that Olympic dream that led Marquez and a group of her Riverside Aquattes teammates to join the Aquabelles in the summer of 2011 after their Aquattes coach retired.
Field and her mother relocated from Delaware to train with Kang when Field was 10 after meeting the coach at a U.S. national team development camp. But the mother, echoing other Aquabelles parents and swimmers, said Kang’s treatment of young athletes crossed the line between tough and demanding and abusive and physically and emotionally damaging.“We were forbidden from speaking the entire time ,” she said. “And she would hold that over our heads that we wanted to be on the national team and she said any amount of talking was absolutely unacceptable. We couldn’t greet each other .
“I don’t want to get emotional,” Marquez said. “And she would yell at us during this whole time saying, ‘If you’re talking, I don’t think you’re that serious about what it is you want. I think that you’re liars. I think that if it really mattered to you, you would shut up.’ We spent a lot of time together. We spent a lot of time driving at that point an hour and a half in one direction for those practices. And she would get very emotional.
Kang on an almost daily basis screamed at swimmers for mistakes while practicing routines or struggling during conditioning. All the swimmers interviewed said they were verbally abused by Kang but interviews and documents also reveal a pattern of the coach allegedly targeting specific swimmers for almost daily bullying.
Team USA competes in the preliminary of the Team free artistic swimming event during the World Aquatics Championships in Fukuoka on July 20, 2023. One of the frequent ways Kang tried to turn swimmers against a targeted teammate was to require the team to do additional excessive amounts of training or conditioning when a targeted swimmer made a mistake, swimmers and parents said.
“So we’re going into showers to yell at her because she was getting us all in trouble and Kang would be yelling at her all the time. Pitting us all against herMeza was asked if Kang knew about the girl being bullied by her teammates in the showers?The girl quit the team soon after the showers incident and no one from the club checked up on her after she left, Meza said.
But a former Aquabelles swimmer recalled a training session when a group of athletes on the club’s Under 12 team were covered with KT tape because of injuries.“I just knew these girls were far too young to be going through such physical problems. Nevertheless, practice was still enforced, and those who tried to get out of it faced verbal and emotional consequences in the most demeaning way,” the swimmer said in a SafeSport complaint.“Both led me to the ER,” the swimmer wrote.
Kang, the two parents said, had a similar reaction when a member of the Aquabelles junior team suffered a concussion shortly before a competition. Swimmers were instructed to hang onto the pool wall, do a vertical split with one leg out of the water straight up with their toes pointed and their pelvises flat up against the wall, according to SafeSport complaints and interviews.
“I went last, unafraid because I had hyper-flexible feet,” Marquez wrote to SafeSport. “She stretched me and tried and tried and I contemplated screaming just so it would stop because Coach Kang was getting frustrated and angry. The bruising eventually faded away. The physical and emotional pain from the alleged incident, however, have continued to stay with Marquez.
A U.S. national team member recalled another incident that she alleged demonstrated Kang’s alleged lack of concern for athletes’ safety. Kang was running a timed work-out when lightning began striking near the pool, the Team USA member said. The short meal breaks, swimmers and parents allege, are reflective of Kang’s obsession with food, weight and physical appearance.Kang regularly made critical comments about swimmers’ diets and bodies, according to SafeSport documents and interviews. Lunch breaks were limited to 15 or only five minutes during practice sessions that could last eight hours, swimmers and parents allege.
“I had, basically my back muscles rippled like a horse. And at my previous team, I was able to, I was so strong, that I was able to do things other girls couldn’t do, or it would take teams of girls to do, so I worked hard. Nobody’s touching the bottom of the pool and they could lift girls out of the water with two or three people working at once and I could do it by myself. I didn’t have any body fat on me but I had breasts and I had a butt and that is not the synchro body type.
Kang, the woman wrote, agreed to teach her 5-year-old son how to swim. Instead, the boy and other small children were left by Kang to be supervised by grade school and middle school-aged artistic swimmers while she coached the Aquabelles teams. On a video of the incident obtained by the Register, Kang can be heard instructing a swimmer, appearing to be grade school or middle school age, to approach the 5-year old who was flailing while trying to float on his back.The 5-year-old, the mother wrote, consumed a lot of pool water. After this incident, was sick for three days with fever and missed school. He had stomach pains and vomited numerous times. I believe this was due to drinking a lot of pool water.
Meza was a national Junior Olympic champion at 12. Two years later she left the sport, physically and emotionally broken she said.
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