After claiming on Instagram that Stanford swim team coaches ousted him because of “homophobia,” Abrahm DeVine, the gay two-time NCAA champion, has since admitted that he violated the National Team Honor Code by drinking at a Team USA swim meet when he should’ve been supporting his competing teammates.
The Stanford Daily clarifies that DeVine wasn’t kicked off the Stanford men’s swimming team. Rather, he was “barred from the University’s pro-training group after finishing his collegiate career.”
DeVine told The Stanford Daily he intended his Instagram statement to call out homophobia in sports generally rather than Stanford specifically, and admits that he drank instead of supporting his Team USA teammates “because he felt that neither coaches nor athletes on the team respected him and his experiences as a gay swimmer.”
DeVine says coaches used “masculine stereotypes to motivate swimmers” and generally ignored or refused to listen to him when discussing the exclusion he felt as a gay athlete. He added that teammates mocked “fragility and privilege as the concerns of social justice warriors.”
Devine told The Stanford Daily:
“I think that I wrote this entire Instagram post where every sentence is very important, but the only one that people are really focusing on is me calling out Stanford, and that makes my message sound very aggressive and that I’m out for blood, when in reality that is not what I wanted at all. I’m here to just say this is a systemic issue.”
“Between coaches and other athletes, I feel there is so much ignorance to what it means to be gay in a sports world that my character is not recognized. Although I feel I can participate by being silent and non-disruptive, I feel that my identity as a gay man is incompatible with the swimming world.”
In his original Sept. 29 Instagram post, DeVine wrote, “I was kicked off the Stanford swim team … [due] to the fact that I am gay.” His post contained no specifics and differed from his 2018 statements praising his entire team for embracing him after coming out.
Outsports has reached out to DeVine for comment, but DeVine hasn’t responded.
