Jack Nelson, an Olympic swimmer and coach who directed a quartet of American women to a surprising gold medal in the 400-meter freestyle relay at the 1976 Games in Montreal, died on Wednesday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 82.
The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, said his wife, Sherrill.
Nelson was a widely known figure in swimming, a gregarious man with an infectious love of the sport, with a reputation for motivating athletes at all levels and a long list of champions who came under his tutelage. But late in his career, his reputation was tainted when he was accused by one of his most prominent former swimmers, Diana Nyad, of having repeatedly molested her when she was a teenager. No charges were filed against him, but Nyad, who would become famous for her long-distance ocean swimming, persisted in her accusations for more than a quarter of a century, as recently as this year in an interview with The New Yorker.
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Nelson was the swim coach at the Pine Crest school in South Florida in the 1960s, when he helped the young Nyad win state championships in the backstroke. It was later, when she was in her 20s, according to The Broward/Palm Beach New Times, that Nyad and another swimmer first accused Nelson of sexual misconduct, taking their charges to the Pine Crest headmaster, William McMillan. Nelson denied the accusations but left the school soon after.
Nyad has repeated the charges throughout the years, including once on a television talk show in 1989 and, long after the statute of limitations for bringing charges had passed, in statements to the police in 2007. Nelson always maintained that Nyad’s charges were baseless
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