SUTTON IS A 49-year-old Australian who's been building top triathletes for almost 20 years, among them Wellington, Loretta Harrop, Greg Bennett, and several others. In disciplines both long and short, his pupils have won some 15 world championships and two Olympic medals. He's widely considered the best, and most unorthodox, coach in the sport.

Sutton is shamelessly at odds with trends in modern-day triathlon. Most of his peers hold exercise-science degrees, still compete themselves, and love technologies like power meters and heart-rate monitors. Sutton is a high school dropout who never ran a triathlon and has no respect for gadgets. He says they're pointless in a pursuit as purely aerobic as triathlon. Instead, he draws on the performance fundamentals he learned during his early days as a swim coach and as a trainer of racehorses and greyhounds. He's famous for being a hard-ass. The running joke is that his secret formula is to treat people like animals.

But for the past ten years, Sutton has been a pariah in the sport, because of a crime he was arrested for in 1997, when he was coaching the Australian national triathlon team in preparation for tri's debut at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. In 1999 he confessed to having had sexual relations several times with a female swimmer he coached in 1987—when he was 27 and she was reportedly 14. Investigations after his arrest indicated that this episode was an isolated case; Sutton, it appeared, was not a serial pedophile. He received a two-year suspended jail sentence for sexually assaulting a minor and a three-year sanction by the International Triathlon Union and Triathlon Australia, the governing bodies associated with the Olympics.

During the sanction, he was suspended as a coach and banned from national sports facilities in Australia. He was also barred from attending national and international events, and when he showed up at a race in Japan a few months later, he was escorted out. An official told reporters, "It was like having a black cloud over the race."

Sutton never stopped coaching, though, and several of his athletes followed him, including Harrop, who would go on to win the silver medal at the 2004 Olympics. Freed from the restrictions of overseeing a national squad, Sutton assembled an international group of triathlon specialists. He set up shop in other countries, such as Switzerland and Brazil.

For years, he earned his living by charging athletes a monthly fee and taking a cut of their winnings. (Which aren't as large as you'd think. Even a star like Wellington is lucky to pull in around $150,000 a year in prize money.) Last year, a new sponsor took over Sutton's team—an Asian bike-shop chain called the Bike Boutique—so he no longer draws money directly from the athletes, a shift that has allowed him to be even choosier about whom he invites onto his team. In the past, one knock against him was that he had never produced a Hawaii Ironman champion. Now, few will be surprised if his athletes start dominating the event.

Although Sutton's home base is Leysin, Switzerland, where he holds a summer training camp, he prefers Third World countries for his fabled "heat" camps: two months of hard training in a sweltering, humid climate to prepare for the start of the race season, and two more rounds of the same thing before and after Hawaii. In February of this year, he took his team to the U.S. Navy's defunct base at Subic Bay, in the Philippines, for the first of them.

Sutton has rarely let outsiders in while he works, but when Wellington scored her historic win, I set out to meet him. After five months of back-and-forth by e-mail, he agreed to let me visit him in the Philippines. I was told that everything, including his past, would be up for discussion. I had my doubts, but when we sat down around a coffee table during my first night in camp, I was surprised that he started unloading right away.

Sort of. Sutton, who has a rugged, green-eyed face that's seen some hard road, didn't say much that was directly related to the assault charge. Instead he talked about a harsh childhood under the pressure exerted by a father who was a demanding swim coach. "I come from an extremely violent home," he said. "I was the most passive." His swimming was poor, but his father led him into coaching at the age of 10. He was almost 15 when he was kicked out of school for coaching in a professional program. He left home and found work at dog- and horse-racing stables in New South Wales. He also said he has suffered from manic depression, and that it kicked in before his arrest, at a time when he was gaining a global reputation as a tri coach.

"I had a business partner who'd killed himself," he said. "So I was already in a bad way."

It all sounded a little staged, as if Sutton was trying to offset whatever I might think about his sex crime. But I don't think the self-loathing was an act. At the hotel one morning during my stay, Sutton came by and sat down while I ate breakfast. He talked for an hour about his training philosophy, and then he visibly sagged as his mind turned to the bad old days.

"People think because you've had some success you can forget about certain things in your past, that you can get over it," he said. "It's not something that comes and goes. I've always hated myself viciously. Now I just hate myself for different reasons."