Australian child sex offender Brett Sutton has been accredited as a triathlon coach at the Olympic Games

An Australian who coached the women’s triathlon silver medallist is the second known child sex offender to be accredited for the Paris Olympics.

Brett Sutton is a child sex offender who has been coaching at the Olympic Games.

An Australian who coached the women’s triathlon silver medallist is the second known child sex offender to be accredited for the Paris Olympics.

The presence of the Dutch beach volleyball player Steven van de Velde, who was jailed for raping a 12-year-old British girl, caused a storm of protests when he competed last weekend.

Now The Sunday Times can reveal that on Wednesday Brett Sutton, 65, who had been given accreditation by China, attended the triathlon to watch his athlete, Switzerland’s Julie Derron, take silver ahead of Team GB’s Beth Potter.

Sutton pleaded guilty in 1999 to five counts of sexual abuse of a 13-year-old Australian girl, a talented swimmer he had been coaching. He was sentenced to two years in prison the year before the Sydney Olympics, but the sentence was suspended for three years.

The judge, Robert Hall, said that Sutton had interfered with the girl in a “gross and disgraceful way” and “abused his role to an inexcusable degree”, but he took into account that, as the national triathlon coach, Sutton was preparing a number of athletes for the Games. “A large number of leading athletes will suffer disadvantage from your absence from the scene,” Hall said.

Brett Sutton with his athlete Julie Derron who won silver.

Sutton has been at the Olympics despite being banned from coaching by several federations.

A spokesman for Sutton, while declining to provide a comment on his presence here in Paris, said that he had served a three-year sanction imposed by the International Triathlon Union and Triathlon Australia. But a spokesman for Australia’s National Olympic Committee said that Sutton was “banned for life from swimming in Australia following his sexual offences conviction”. Since 2021 he has also been banned for life by USA Triathlon.

Soon after his conviction, Les McDonald, then the president of the International Triathlon Union (now World Triathlon), said that anyone coached by Sutton should not be allowed to compete internationally. But triathlon has allowed Sutton to rebuild his coaching career.

His marriage collapsed after his conviction and he moved to Switzerland, where for more than 20 years he has had a family-run professional coaching business based in the ski resort of St Moritz.

According to the company website it costs $999 (about £780) a month to be coached by Sutton. But he delivers success, claiming to have masterminded the careers of “many of the sport’s icons over the past 35 years”. These include Nicola Spirig, the Swiss Olympic gold medallist in London, and the Swiss five-times Ironman world champion Daniela Ryf. He has also coached some top British triathletes. He was described on Chinese television as China’s national triathlon coach.

This comes despite the graphic details that emerged at Sutton’s case in 1999 in which the court heard a string of allegations, including that he had forced the girl to give him oral sex. The incidents happened in the late 1980s, but it was not until the victim was an adult, and married, that she found the courage to go to the police.

Sutton was convicted after the woman worked with the police to record secretly a phone conversation in which Sutton made a series of admissions.

There is protest around Van de Velde’s place in the Netherlands beach volleyball team.

While he pleaded guilty to five offences, he declined to give any evidence. This meant the victim never had to endure cross-examination but, according to a report in The Observer in 2002, it also allowed Sutton’s lawyer, in his plea for mitigation, to make assertions that could never be challenged in court.

In 2002 he told The Observer that he no longer coached children under 16. “It’s the age of consent,” he said. “My lawyer told me. That way, no one can say I am a paedophile.”

According to World Triathlon, he is in Paris as an accredited coach for China. This was confirmed by his spokesman, who said he attended the Games in Tokyo in 2020, Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and London in 2012 as an accredited member of the Swiss team.

“It’s like a dirty, open secret in the sport,” one prominent member of the triathlon community said. “Lots of people know about it but nobody says anything. It’s shameful.”

A spokesman for the Swiss national Olympic committee said: “Brett Sutton does not work for Swiss Olympic, and he does not have any function for our organisation in Paris. Swiss athletes decide for themselves who they work with as personal coaches.”

The IOC, as in the case of Van der Velde, said it was not a matter for them but the national Olympic committee that has accredited Sutton. China did not respond to two requests for comment.

A spokesperson for World Triathlon claimed not to be aware of Sutton’s past. “We do not comment on media reports,” they said when pointed to past reports of Sutton’s conviction.

The IOC added that Sutton had now left the Games, as his athletes had finished competing.

THIS STORY FIRST APPEARED IN THE TIMES IN THE UK

Originally published as Australian child sex offender Brett Sutton has been accredited as a triathlon coach at the Olympic Games