Snowboard Coach Peter Foley Faces New Abuse Charges


Longtime U.S. Olympic snowboarding trainer Peter Foley is accused by a former athlete of sexual misconduct during the Winter Games in February and sacked over the weekend, facing a wider and more formal investigation into new sexual assault allegations.

Lindsey Sine Nikola, who worked for US Skis and Snowboards from 2006 to 2010, told The New York Times that she was sexually assaulted by Foley and contacted the US SafeSport Center last week.

Nikola is one of at least four women who have accused Foley. According to the allegations first reported by ESPN. Three of them are former athletes, including an unnamed Olympic medalist who reported being sexually abused by Foley at a training camp when she was 19, ESPN said.

Foley’s lawyer told ESPN the accusations were false and that Foley would cooperate with the investigation.

Foley, head coach of USA Ski and Snowboarding since 1994, was fired last week amid an investigation by SafeSport, an independent organization that deals with allegations of misconduct and misconduct in Olympic sports. On Sunday, US Ski and Snowboard announced that it is no longer employed by the organization.

The former athlete, whose name has not been released, said he was sleeping in a hotel room shared by several national team members when Foley walked in behind him, “putting his left arm over my body and putting his fingers inside me,” ESPN reported.

As head coach, Foley determined which athletes made up the teams.

“There’s this power position now,” the athlete told ESPN. “That might say I can’t start the World Cup and be in the Games.”

The allegations against Foley were first made public during the Winter Olympics in Beijing in February. Competing with the national team in snowboard cross at the 2010 Vancouver Games, Callan Chythlook-Sifsof said in a series of speeches: Instagram shipments On Friday, Foley took “nude photos of female athletes for over a decade.”

He described a broad culture of sexual misconduct, including an episode in which Foley said he made sexual remarks to himself and another snowboarder.

Foley denied these allegations to The New York Times on the same day that Foley coached Lindsey Jacobellis and Nick Baumgartner won gold medals in the snowboard cross mixed team event, a subset of snowboarding that was Foley’s primary focus.

But Chythlook-Sifsof’s public accusations caught the attention of other women, including Nikola, who works in communications for USA Ski and Snowboard.

“Rethinking made me understand the intent. [of the photo shoot] ‘We have a secret,'” Nikola told ESPN. “Photos like this, once they exist, become their powerhouse. It was definitely a tool to silence me. I felt like I couldn’t say anything because it was these images that discredited me.”

Nikola later reported that he was sexually assaulted by Foley.





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