A coach accused, again and again

SANTA YNEZ, CALIF. - In 2019, Conal Groom, a former Olympic rower and U.S. national team coach, dropped seismic news on his Seattle-area junior athletes and their parents: He was leaving town.

“I will give you a moment to breathe and collect your thoughts,” Groom wrote in an email. “The mark we have left on rowing in this region will not be erased anytime soon.”

Groom had become the top junior coach in the city, using intense, Soviet-inspired training methods to mold dozens of members of national teams over the previous decade-plus. He had then been handpicked to coach those teams in international competitions.

Now he was leaving Seattle, the rowing hotbed where he built that reputation. His sudden departure was made more unusual by his destination: a man-made lake in the mountains outside Santa Barbara, Calif.

A thousand miles from Seattle, Groom’s tactics only intensified. His protégés toiled on rowing machines under a grimy tent, continuing even as the coronavirus pandemic froze the world around and wildfires consumed the surrounding hills. He sprayed them down with a water hose as temperatures topped 100 degrees. He screamed and cursed, a constant of his coaching that parents appeared to accept as part of the package. And as he rebuilt his empire, living in a shipping container in his business partner’s backyard, he made little secret of his heavy drinking and problems with rage, according to emails he exchanged with a parent.

But Groom had a long record of seeing his athletes recruited by universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Princeton, and tapped for prestigious national teams. So with few exceptions, parents stuck by him, even moving to California so their children could be closer.

Then, in the summer of 2021, one of his favored athletes accused him of attempting to sexually assault her. He was 48; she was 17. That began the unraveling of Groom’s career, and with it soul-searching by some rowers and parents as to why they ignored for so long what they now see as obvious warning signs.

“We are kicking ourselves for a lot of different reasons looking backwards, when it all kind of seems so clear what was going on,” the father of Groom’s alleged victim told The Washington Post. “It’s like, ‘Oh my God, what idiots we are.’ "

An investigation by The Post revealed a years-long trail of records documenting allegations against Groom, including hundreds of pages of police reports, emails, text messages and diary entries. In those records, and in interviews, male and female athletes claimed Groom verbally and physically abused them. Two rowers he trained as underage girls, including his alleged victim in Santa Ynez, said they now believe he sexually groomed them. The results of those alleged abuses, athletes and their parents say, were devastating: suicidal ideation, persistent panic attacks and rowers abandoning a sport once central to their lives.

But the allegations against Groom were routinely ignored or downplayed, The Post found, including by regulators. When USRowing, the sport’s governing body, was confronted years ago with accusations against Groom, its lawyers produced a 198-page report that confirmed some of those claims. Yet the report was not released publicly, and the organization continued to hire Groom to lead junior athletes. And for months after Groom was accused of attempted sexual assault in 2021, regulators did not bar him from training minors.

The allegations against Groom, which have not previously been reported, provide a window into how the promise of Ivy League admission and other accolades, together with a disjointed regulatory system, combine to allow alleged abusers to thrive in the multibillion-dollar youth sports industry, despite much-touted reforms.

Groom declined to be interviewed. The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office investigated the alleged molestation, and though a detective reported it was “apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense,” prosecutors declined to charge Groom. He is currently suspended from unsupervised coaching pending the results of an investigation by the U.S. Center for SafeSport. That probe has been ongoing for nearly two years.

In April, Groom’s Santa Ynez accuser sued him; his boathouse, Mission Rowing; and his business partner, Carol Nagy, claiming she and the boathouse “did nothing to protect” the girl and other minor athletes. Groom has not yet responded in court. In emails to The Post, Nagy denied knowledge of any misconduct by Groom other than the alleged molestation, which she called his “only verified transgression.” Nagy blamed the alleged victim and her parents, for allowing her to “visit her male coach in the middle of the night.”

The Post typically does not name alleged victims of sexual assault unless they ask to be identified. In an interview, Groom’s accuser, who is now 18, said she did not consider him to be an outlier in a sport that has in recent years undergone a reckoning with abusive coaches.

“It’s a great spawning ground for people that want to groom children, with highly motivated children whose parents are all-in to do it,” she said. “It serves it on a silver platter. I’m not like the only kid who’s ever wanted something so bad they would do anything for it.”

Outsiders tend to notice rowing every four years, at the Summer Olympics. But for those within the sport, it is an all-consuming world unto itself: mostly homogenous, often prohibitively expensive, and saturated with unmovable traditions in the pursuit of athletic and academic prestige. The drill sergeant-like coach, lording over brutal training sessions, is part of the sport’s lore.

Groom’s résumé fit the ideal. He was the captain of Georgetown University’s lightweight crew team in the mid-1990s and is enshrined in the university’s athletic hall of fame. He rowed at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, crediting his success to training at an intensity rarely seen on this continent. One of his Olympic coaches, Emil Kossev, was a former Bulgarian national team star.

Groom barely missed qualifying for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and injuries soon forced him from competition. He followed Kossev into coaching, helping him train the elite sculling group at Seattle’s Pocock Rowing Center and ultimately becoming director of the boathouse.

But from the beginning, his training tactics and explosive temper drowned some rowing careers in their wake. In 2007, Olympic hopeful Samantha Twardowski was training at Pocock when, she said, an incoming speedboat submerged her boat. Twardowski confronted Groom for not warning her. Groom, in response, grabbed her by her shoulders, cursed at her and threw her to the ground, as other rowers stood by and watched, Twardowski said. She left the boathouse and never returned.

In a police report she filed at the time, Twardowski described the altercation similarly, saying Groom yelled that she was a “bitch” who didn’t like “playing the game.” She never heard from police again, she said, and Groom was not charged.

Given his stature in rowing, Twardowski felt perhaps she wasn’t cut out for the sport. She abandoned her Olympic dreams, too embarrassed to even tell her parents why she stopped. “I was not a quitter,” she said, “and I felt like I quit because of him.”

Pocock’s board “acknowledge[d] that the altercation occurred,” according to a draft letter to Groom obtained by The Post. But the board appeared hamstrung by Groom’s stature, said Julie McCleery, who coached at Pocock at the time and was secretary of its underlying foundation. “He was an Olympian,” McCleery said, with supporters in the sport and success as a coach. “And so there was a lot of latitude.”

The center’s plan, the letter said, was to suspend Groom without pay for two months from coaching the elite scullers. Groom, however, would remain in his paid role as director, the letter stated, adding that “it is impractical to prohibit contact with team members.”

But according to Jenn Gibbons, the current executive director of the Pocock foundation, Groom refused to take a required anger management class. “He quit,” Gibbons said, and left instead for Lake Union Crew, a boathouse a few miles away.

He brought with him a parent, Carol Nagy, who would become critical to his success - and his survival. Nagy’s daughter, Lindsay Meyer, would go on to compete in the 2008 Olympics and row for Stanford. When Groom left for Lake Union, Meyer followed, and Nagy became Groom’s assistant and novice coach, Groom recounted in an email in which he called her “the real wizard behind the curtain” of his career.

At Lake Union, not much changed. One rower there, Michael Lukas, said he endured Groom’s angry tirades and 30-to-40-hour training weeks on his way to a spot on the Harvard rowing team. When he arrived in Cambridge, though, he was diagnosed with fractured vertebrae, which he said “was directly linked to the intensity” of Groom’s training. He never rowed competitively again and dealt with pain for years. But with a Harvard degree, he said recently, “I definitely came out ahead on the bargain.”

In 2010, Groom and Nagy struck out on their own, opening the for-profit Seattle Rowing Center out of a canal warehouse. Groom said their goal was to emulate European training methods by starting rowers as young as 8 years old in small boats. Young children, Groom told The Seattle Times, “don’t believe in limits.” SRC crews dominated national championships, with Groom boasting online that the boathouse never went a year without at least one gold medal in a national competition.

His power in the sport rose. He was regularly joined on the water by kingmakers such as then-University of Washington coach Bob Ernst, former rowers said, and had a direct line to Yasmin Farooq, who coached at Stanford and then University of Washington. (Neither coach responded to requests for comment.)

Nathan Pihl, a high school rower, had trained with Groom at Lake Union but initially decided not to follow him to SRC. When he visited Harvard, though, a coach there questioned him at length about his decision, Pihl said, and a varsity rower urged him to stick with Groom, which he ultimately did.

At SRC, Nancy Miles became one of Groom’s most successful protégées. His obvious power in the sport normalized his conduct, she said.

She transferred to SRC at age 17. He named a boat after her - the “Golden Miles” - displaying a favored status that came with few boundaries. At the 2011 Youth National Championships in Tennessee, Miles said, Groom, then 38, stashed his beers in the hotel room tub where Miles, 18, was taking an ice bath in a sports bra and shorts. And during one training session, when Groom saw her mimicking his instruction to another athlete and got annoyed, she said, he “backhanded me across my face.” Groom claimed it was an accident, Miles recalled, but she said his strike caused her to fall, knocked the glasses off her face, and bruised her nose.

Still, when she achieved her dream of being accepted to Stanford, they stayed in touch. Groom sent her a necklace and told her she was “more than just another athlete,” Miles said, and visited her. While watching television together in his hotel room, she said, he put his arm around her. “I shrank away,” said Miles, who described feeling betrayed: “I thought I had a trusted adult figure who cared about me, and now he’s making it sexual.”

Yet she returned to the boathouse every summer, feeling beholden to his power over her rowing career, she said. When Miles was training with other scullers for the World Rowing Championships in 2013, Groom grew angry that they didn’t follow an instruction. Miles said Groom cornered one of the women and while screaming at her, used his hand to pound the wall beside her head.

“I remember feeling incredibly afraid,” Miles said. Groom banished the other women due to insubordination, she said, but informed Miles she could return. She faced a choice, she said: rowing alone with Groom or following the exiled rowers elsewhere. “I am inexperienced and if I fall, I’ll fall hard, meaning my college coaches will know,” reads her journal from the time.

But Miles said she never considered reporting Groom, and wouldn’t have known who to report him to. “I think I just got stuck at, ‘This must be okay because everyone’s saying it’s okay,’ " Miles said.

Adults who didn’t think Groom’s conduct was okay said they found they could do little about it. Briana Schulte, a coach at a nearby boathouse, said she was with her own rowers on Union Bay when she heard Groom yelling at four junior females in a boat that they were “f---ing c---s.”

“To talk to high school girls like that was a hundred ways of wrong,” Schulte said. She attempted to complain to USRowing, she said, but the organization never followed up.

USRowing CEO Amanda Kraus said she didn’t know about the complaint but blamed poor record-keeping at the time: “Because I don’t have a record of it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, unfortunately.”

Not all of Groom’s young athletes sought scholarships or accolades. In 2010, an introverted 14-year-old boy signed up to train at SRC. “As long as [my son] doesn’t drown, or become suicidal, homicidal or an arrogant ass, I’m fine with the results,” his father wrote to Groom.

But when Groom, apparently upset at the boy and his fellow rowers for not following instructions, sent them into perilous conditions, it led to the only serious effort in Seattle to hold the coach accountable.

It was a windy and frigid winter day on Lake Washington. Their boat began to take on water. They were so afraid that they considered climbing the ladder of a nearby bridge onto the highway overhead. Ultimately, they bailed out their boat with water bottles and returned, according to a written account he later shared with regulators.

When the boy confronted Groom, according to his account, the coach responded that his teammates did not like him and that he needed to “own his mistake” of challenging him - or leave. The boy, in tears, chose the latter.

The boy “spun downhill” without rowing, including contemplating suicide, his father said. “His social life was rowing, and all of a sudden that’s jerked out from under him,” his father said.

In 2014, the boy shared his story with Margaret Christopher, a Pocock coach. Christopher, an attorney, knew Groom and said she had witnessed his inappropriate conduct with athletes. In this case, she believed his behavior could’ve been life-threatening. She interviewed other rowers and their families and filed a grievance with USRowing.

The Post reviewed a summary of the grievance that was emailed to USRowing. In it, Christopher highlighted allegations similar to those that would surface later, including that he “engages in inappropriate touching and sexually suggestive conversations” and that he doted on favorites - always underage girls - in a way that “caused alarm in parents and coaches.”

Groom, she wrote, “has done far too much damage to athletes, to the community and to the sport to allow him to remain part of competitive rowing.”

According to Nagy, the complaint is part of a “false narrative” Christopher has been spreading about her and Groom for years. Christopher has twice been suspended from practicing law, records show, in 2005 for forging her secretary’s signature and in 2016 for allegedly neglecting a client’s case. Christopher said her bar history was irrelevant but that she suffered severe, transparent consequences due to her mistakes as a lawyer. “I wish SafeSport/USRowing worked as well as the bar,” she told The Post.

USRowing hired an outside law firm to probe the allegations but continued to hire him to coach junior athletes while the firm investigated. In 2015, USRowing picked Groom to oversee a selection camp and then coach men’s quadruple sculls at the World Rowing Junior Championships in Rio de Janeiro, the fourth year in a row the organization chose him to coach a junior team.

One rower said they were contacted by an investigator on behalf of USRowing to discuss allegations they had made about Groom. The rower, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy, said they declined, given Groom’s position. “It’s insane that you’re asking me to come forward with my name when I have a horse in the race trying to make the U.S. team,” the rower recalled telling the investigator. “This person’s still in charge of s---.”

Glenn Merry, CEO of USRowing at the time, declined to comment. Kraus, the current CEO, would not discuss “the organization’s decision-making at the time,” she wrote in an email. “What I can say is that the current leadership team has zero tolerance for this sort of behavior.”

In June 2015, the law firm produced the nearly 200-page report. It found that Groom “violated USRowing’s then-current SafeSport rules,” USRowing said in a recent statement, though there “was not sufficient evidence” to substantiate allegations of sexual misconduct. USRowing said that the organization “implemented certain disciplinary and probationary protocols” but would not specify what they were.

The case had little impact on Groom’s standing. Around the same time, he and Nagy were the subjects of a fawning cover story in Rowing magazine, the sport’s glossy bible. Two years later, Groom helped coach the men’s national team at the World Championships in Florida.

The boy whose altercation with Groom sparked the grievance later lost contact with his family, his dad said, and he did not respond to attempts by The Post to reach him. In August 2015, his father wrote Merry a letter expressing his dissatisfaction with how USRowing handled the investigation.

“Given Conal’s history this failure and its implicit sanctioning of his behavior ensure you will have the opportunity to revisit the issue,” the father wrote. “The children who will inevitably be harmed in the interim are on you.”

One evening in May 2019, a 14-year-old girl used boat straps to dangle over a wall of the Montlake Cut, a section of the canal bisecting Seattle.

It’s an unofficial tradition in Seattle rowing. Each spring, just before opening day, athletes graffiti the cut with boastful slogans representing their boathouses. That year, this girl helped to do the honors for Seattle Rowing Center. She cleaned moss off the wall with a steel brush. Then she painted: “Suffer with a [smile],” with a happy face.

She had been introduced to SRC a few years earlier through her private school’s physical education program. Now the girl, short for the sport but with a powerful stroke, was Groom’s new favorite, she and other rowers said. While other athletes re-rigged a boat, he allowed her to hang around the racks, fetching things for him and eating pie, she later recalled in a written statement.

But that season would be their last together in Seattle. A couple of months earlier, Groom had emailed that he and Nagy were leaving town, blaming their departure on rising costs on the city’s waterfront. “I ask that instead of being angry, upset, and disappointed, we all take a moment and celebrate the community we have grown,” he wrote. The girl said she cried herself to sleep.

Groom and Nagy’s new base of operation was on the patchy banks of Cachuma Lake, land owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. Nagy formed a nonprofit led by her and four longtime friends and supporters of Groom, public records show. They named it Mission Rowing.

They initially rented a house nearby, with Nagy on an air mattress and Groom on the floor. “Coaching wise I have set up a new standard and a new process. July, August, and half of September and never once yelled,” Groom emailed to a parent in September 2019. “I drink a ton less and every few weeks don’t drink at all.”

Rowers followed. Sophie Heywood, an Olympic hopeful from Arizona, traveled to Santa Ynez in 2020 to train for the U.S. Olympic trials. She encountered a makeshift operation in which rowers pulled machines out of a shipping container and then rowed under a tent in sweltering temperatures while Groom sprayed them down with a hose. They continued even during wildfires, as emergency aircraft scooped up water nearby.

Heywood, a former University of Wisconsin rower who had medaled in national championships, said she was stunned by the intensity. “It isn’t even productive, from a physiological standpoint,” she said.

And Groom’s plan to cut back on yelling - and drinking - didn’t last long. On her first day, Heywood said, Groom cursed out a group of rowers in what she described as a “public humiliation routine.” When she asked if that was normal, she said, the other rowers responded: “Yeah, it’s just Conal.”

But the Seattle girl missed the intensity, according to an email her mother wrote that summer to Groom. At Thanksgiving, her family joined Groom and Nagy in California. Then the girl’s parents sent her alone to California to spend winter break training with him. She stayed in his room, which she described as being decorated with toy rockets, peanut butter and a bottle of booze. He camped in the yard. Groom later moved into a shipping container in Nagy’s backyard.

The pandemic was a boon for Groom’s business, as remote school and work allowed wealthy families to relocate to Santa Ynez. Among the parents who made the move were a CEO of a publicly-traded tech company and an executive at Facebook. In the Summer of 2020, the Seattle girl’s parents rented a house in the Santa Ynez Valley, allowing her to continue training full-time with Groom. Later that year, they purchased a house there.

Groom’s close relationship with the girl was no secret. He cooked her a special meal on her 16th birthday and gifted her $800 worth of gear. But the parents said they only later read his text messages to her - and then began to understand the depth of their inappropriate relationship.

In messages reviewed by The Post, Groom wrote that she was “f---ing model beautiful,” called her “babe,” told her he loved her and that he was not “breaking up with [her] never ever.” He urged her to send him “modeling shots.” “Yum, yummy,” he wrote when she obliged and sent him selfies. Groom offered to buy alcohol for the girl and her underage friends. He asked if she would be a “friend that will keep secrets to let me vent,” and said she may have to lie for him but he would “make it worth [her] while.” The girl said Groom sent her even more Snapchat messages, which automatically delete, and in total messaged her more than her boyfriend.

Her mother said she didn’t think to be vigilant about Groom. “I think most parents think that if I need to watch over my kid’s social media, it’s because of their interactions with other children,” the mother said. “Not because of her 48-year-old coach who presents himself as her uncle. Looking back, it was happening in plain sight.”

The girl said Groom, “extremely drunk” and wearing a T-shirt and underwear, once berated her for hours on FaceTime for “being lazy.” On another call, she said, Groom instructed her to find her hip flexor by touching her “private parts” and then moving her hand toward her leg.

At practice, she said, he screamed that she was replaceable and would be average forever. The other rowers noticed that she developed a tendency to flinch, and one jokingly asked if she was being hit. The girl later said that the tic was a result of Groom yelling and throwing objects at her.

Heywood, the Olympic hopeful, lived for a time with the girl’s family in Santa Ynez. Groom screamed at the girl more than others and “tended to get more physical with her,” Heywood said. She recalled the girl appearing to suffer a panic attack while training on a machine. Groom, angry that she had stopped rowing, grabbed the handle out of her hand, pulled her to the side and screamed in her face, Heywood said. “I’ve never seen anything like that, really, with an athlete that’s that young,” she said.

The girl’s parents, like others, excused his behavior, Heywood said. “I think they were like, ‘Oh, well, Conal’s really tough, but that might be what it takes to get a kid up to this level,’ " Heywood said.

As the rowing world emerged from the pandemic in 2021, athletes said, Groom acted more erratically than ever. He broached sexual topics and touched Heywood in inappropriate ways, she said, including pulling her sports bra to the side to photograph a tattoo on her rib while she rowed and drunkenly putting his hand on her upper thigh during dinner. Heywood ultimately left Mission Rowing due to what she called “the seriously problematic nature of the training environment that Conal created.”

The Seattle girl said she was making a similar realization. Before a national regatta, she was required to watch a SafeSport video on identifying abusive coaches. As she learned of the warning signs - coaches who throw objects, who are prone to unnecessary touching of their subjects, who scream, who curse - she realized she recognized Groom in every one.

But adults who could have intervened were either oblivious or unwilling to act, she said. When the girl told another coach at Mission Rowing that Groom’s verbal abuse was causing her panic attacks, that coach, Derek de Leuw, “ended the conversation by essentially telling me that he would get fired if he said anything,” the girl later recounted to police. (De Leuw did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Before a regatta, the girl said, Groom pointed out every SafeSport official at the event and told her to “act normal” around them. But when they were back alone, she said, he continued to yell at her, including that she was a “bitch” and a “slut.”

The girl’s parents acknowledge that they weren’t completely in the dark about Groom’s flaws; the girl’s mother said she recommended to him a psychiatrist to see about his anger problem. But she still traveled to a competition with her daughter and Groom days afterward, with all of them sharing a rented home. “I don’t think that we would have understood how crazy the environment was,” the girl’s mother explained, “because we had been manipulated by him as much as all of the other parents had.”

She was 17 that August, when it all fell apart.

Her parents were back in Seattle; she would be soon, too, starting her junior year. But before school started, she and four friends spent a couple of weeks in Santa Ynez, training with Groom.

On her last night in town, Groom messaged her on Snapchat, she said, asking her to stop by to “say goodbye in private.” Another rower who was with her when she got the message recalled the unusual request. But their whole relationship was “strange,” that rower said.

When she got to Groom’s shipping container after 10 p.m., the girl said, she found her coach “sloppy drunk.” He offered her wine, which she refused. She sat on a stool, which he moved closer to himself so that her legs were between his. When she nervously fumbled with her keys and phone, he took them and placed them on a shelf out of her reach.

Groom then placed his hands on her upper thighs, she said. He brushed his hand across her breast, knocking off the spaghetti strap of her dress. When she stood up to leave, Groom grabbed her by the arms, saying: “No, you can’t go.” He had her sit across his lap.

“This isn’t SafeSport,” the girl said she told Groom, and that he responded: “No one’s here, everyone’s asleep.”

She said Groom attempted to kiss her on the lips, but she turned her face so he kissed her on the cheek. Ultimately, after Groom hugged her multiple times and grew agitated, the girl said she was able to “break away,” get her keys and drive off.

The girl immediately texted de Leuw, the other coach. She asked him not to report it because if Groom lost his job, “it’s my fault.” But de Leuw did report the alleged assault to a child abuse hotline, a police report shows, and the Santa Barbara Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation. He also notified SafeSport within days, according to the girl’s mother, and the organization launched its own investigation.

A few days later Nagy sent an email to the other directors of Mission Rowing saying that she had a “long and productive conversation” with Groom about the girl’s allegations. “He owned the behavior, the drunkenness and sadly acknowledged that he’d spent most of the weekend considering committing suicide,” Nagy wrote, according to a later police report that quoted the email in full.

But Nagy didn’t appear to consider cutting ties. Instead, she detailed a plan in which Mission Rowing would temporarily curtail his involvement in junior rowing while keeping him in a central role. “I think we can find a path forward for 6-12 months where he has no contact with youth, but has plenty of productive projects,” Nagy wrote, suggesting they “be really creative and we can keep him in the Regatta Director scope of things.”

Nagy said she spoke with Groom about a plan “so he stops shooting himself in the foot.” He should limit himself to a couple of beers a night and seek therapy, she wrote, and encouraged the other directors to “reach out to him as I think he’s really lonely.”

She expressed less sympathy for his alleged victim, referring to her “manipulative behavior,” saying that she had a “daily mental breakdown,” and calling Groom an “easy target.”

Groom stayed on the water. A mother of other rowers at Mission said she continued to see Groom train minor athletes in the days following the alleged assault. Nagy told The Post that Groom “only coached a handful of times” - including one instance with junior rowers - following the allegation.

SafeSport’s code states that it is able to take temporary measures, such as suspending a coach pending a full investigation to maintain the safety of athletes. But in Groom’s case, it didn’t act for months. (SafeSport declined to comment.)

Finally, in March 2022, seven months after the girl made the allegation, USRowing stepped in, stating that it had “determined it was necessary” to take action while the SafeSport investigation was ongoing. The organization prohibited Groom from coaching minors under its purview. The following month, SafeSport temporarily suspended Groom from unsupervised coaching.

The girl and her parents initially told police that they didn’t want to pursue charges against Groom. But around the time that USRowing suspended Groom, the mother went back to police, saying they had changed their mind after learning he had previously been accused of misconduct. The department reopened its investigation.

A police report states that Groom for days ignored a detective’s attempts to contact him. When they finally connected, Groom told the detective: “I am happy to contact you, if and when, after I speak to an attorney.” Groom, the detective wrote, never called back.

The detective did interview Nagy, who described Groom as a “great guy with a hot flash temper - Irish temper.” She told the detective she had been informed that the girl came to visit Groom that night without being invited and that Groom hadn’t given her any details about what happened. The detective concluded Nagy lied on both counts, his report shows. (Nagy told The Post she does not “believe” she lied, saying her memory of her conversations about the incidents was “murky” and “disjointed.”)

In July 2022, nearly a year after the alleged sexual assault, the detective sent his report to prosecutors. “Based on the information learned during this investigation,” the detective wrote, “it is apparent that Conal Groom committed the offense” of annoying or molesting a child, an offense that in California requires those convicted to register as a sex offender.

But the Santa Barbara County District Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute Groom. It did not respond to requests for comment from The Post.

Last October, according to records reviewed by The Post, an attorney representing the girl’s family sent a letter to Nagy and another Mission Rowing board member outlining the allegations that would form the basis of her lawsuit. Two months later, Mission Rowing President Brian Bolton announced in an email that Nagy “has decided to retire.” The email made no mention of allegations against the boathouse and lauded the “intrepid” Nagy for the work she invested in “her vision for bringing rowing to Santa Barbara County.”

There would be no retirement ceremony, Bolton noted: “In typical low-key fashion, Carol has requested a minimum of fuss around this moment.”

Bolton declined an interview request, writing in an email that “we strongly believe that no athlete should ever suffer abuse at the hands of a coach, and Mission Rowing categorically condemns any such behavior.”

SafeSport, meanwhile, continues to investigate. Investigators at the notoriously short-staffed nonprofit have reached a formal resolution on only 1,877 of 12,751 complaints - roughly one out of seven - in its history, according to its most recent annual report. In March of this year, more than a year and a half into its probe, SafeSport told a witness in Groom’s case that its report on Groom is “currently under review” and that there was no timeline for its completion.

Nancy Miles, the Stanford rower, last trained with Groom in 2013. It wasn’t until years later, she said, that she began to re-examine her coach’s alleged conduct - Groom’s verbal abuse, him striking her, and his sexual advances.

The realization occurred in late 2020, while she was training to be a doctor at the University of Washington. Miles said she began suffering crippling panic attacks. The worst bouts occurred when she made a minor mistake, or when her colleagues were kind to her. Miles said she expected to be screamed at, or for ulterior motives to emerge. Miles had achieved success at top competitions around the world, including claiming silver in her category at the 2013 world championship in South Korea. But instead of pride, Miles said, she felt “a lot of shame and a lot of guilt that this sport that I thought I had been empowered in I had been abused in.”

When Miles learned there was a SafeSport complaint against Groom, she worried that if she spoke out, “no one was going to believe me, and that they were all going to say that this was normal and that I was wrong to expect anything better,” Miles said. “There was a pretty dark period where I had thoughts like, ‘It would be better off if I was dead.’ "

Nonetheless, Miles contacted SafeSport. So did Sophie Heywood, calling Groom in a letter “emotionally unbalanced, volatile, sexually inappropriate, basically disrespectful, violent, and unprofessional.”

One day in May, with Opening Day approaching, the girl, back in Seattle, found herself once again on the Montlake Cut, scrubbing away at the moss that had grown over the slogan - “Suffer with a smile” - she had painted four years before.

She wasn’t sure how her plan to erase her former paint strokes would be received. Some rowers in town, in response to the allegations against Groom, planned to paint messages supporting victims of abuse on the cut. But the girl received pushback from some former SRC rowers, who said that if she painted over an artifact of the boathouse, she would be erasing its legacy.

“That’s not a legacy we want to support,” the girl said recently. “That’s like a legacy of abusing athletes and burning them out for some small gain of winning nationals.”

After the wall was sufficiently clean to expose her old paint, she left for the night. The next day, she rowed by and saw that her new teammates had finished the job for her, covering the area with blue paint. At the sight of the blank wall, no longer adorned with the reminder of her former coach, she surprised herself by starting to cry.

Gus Garcia-Roberts is an investigative reporter in the sports department of The Washington Post.