Disgraced former Australian swimming coach Scott Volkers, who has been working as a swimming coach in Brazil since 2011, has been denied accreditation for the Rio Olympics.
Volkers, 57, was arrested in 2002 and committed to stand trial on seven charges of indecently dealing with a child under the age of 16. Charges were eventually dropped after finding there was no reasonable basis for conviction, however Volkers was prohibited from working with children aged under 16.
In 2014, the Royal Commission Into Institutional Responses To Child Sex Abuse turned the spotlight back onto Volkers. Many of the allegations were horrific.
Long-serving Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates has been lobbying for Brazilian authorities to ban Volkers from the Rio Olympics in August. He made an appeal in writing to Brazilian Olympic Committee president Carlos Arthur Nuzman, and to the Rio 2016 Organising Committee.
"We believe Volkers should not be involved in any way with Rio 2016," Coates concluded in his letter. His plea was successful. Volkers will not be accredited to the Olympic Games.
In his letter to Nuzman, Coates recommended Volkers be banned not just from the Rio Olympics but from all swimming coaching. He noted in his letter that the Royal Commission strongly criticised the legal processes under which charges against Volkers were dropped in the 2000s.
Volkers has been working at the exclusive Minas Tennis Club in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, where many of Brazil's top swimmers train. He once worked with Cesar Cielo, the Brazilian who won the 50m freestyle gold in Beijing in a race in which Australia's Eamon Sullivan took bronze.
The Minas Tennis club said it had done "extensive research and interviews" on Volkers and that the coach had received "a vote of confidence" from parents of young swimmers.
But Coates said he recently had "a duty" to draw the allegations against Volkers to the attention of Brazilian authorities, despite Volkers not having been convicted by the courts.
Volkers rose to fame in swimming as the coach of Sam Riley and Susie O'Neill, both of whom were multiple Olympic medalists.