In Rio Debacle, Ryan Lochte Reveals a Thoughtlessness of Olympic Proportions
A few days ago, the image of Ryan Lochte was of a silver-haired dude keeping his cool while an armed robber pressed a gun to his forehead. Now, it's of Lochte sitting at home in the U.S., tweeting for people to watch his interview with Matt Lauer while he left his friends to sit in a prison in Brazil and answer for his lie.
Lochte apologized Friday morning in a letter he posted on Instagram. It was a lengthy and well-worded apology about stealing the spotlight and not being careful and blah, blah, blah. It would be worth getting into the details here if there was any chance in the world he had anything to do with writing it. But it stretches belief he crafted that letter.
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I would say that he must be as dumb as a box of rocks, but there's really no need to insult rocks over this.
In the end, it appears Lochte's story was a little off. According to Rio's chief of police, he wasn't robbed. Instead, he and his Olympic swim teammates, drunk after all-night partying, stopped into a gas station to go to the bathroom. When they found that the door was locked, one of them kicked the door in and broke a mirror while a couple of others urinated on the wall of the gas station. Then, when they tried to leave in a cab, an armed security guard got them out of the car and demanded they pay for their damage.
It didn't occur to Lochte or his teammates that they were in Rio representing the U.S. in the Olympics? He embarrassed the U.S. and didn't seem to realize it all that quickly. The U.S. Olympic Committee apologized for his actions before he did. Or, whoever wrote that letter for him. He hurt Brazil and cast a shadow over the Olympics, stealing the spotlight from the other athletes who worked for years for their moment.
But the Olympic spirit still exists. It's easy to stop believing when you see the entire Russian track team banned for a state-run doping program. Or when you see that the Russians doped Paralympians to cheat disabled athletes from around the world. Or when International Olympic Committee people take bribes. Or when huge amounts of money swirl around a sports event that was built around an amateur ideal.
The amateur thing is dead. But not the overall spirit of bringing together cultures from all over the world to compete together. It is a beautiful thing, actually.
On Tuesday at the women's 5,000-meter qualifying heat, New Zealand runner Nikki Hamblin and American Abbey D'Agostino collided and fell to the ground. D'Agostino got up, and rather than trying to catch up to the pack, she went back and helped Hamblin up and offered her encouragement to keep running. It then turned out D'Agostino was worse off than Hamblin, and Hamblin stuck around to help her.
These two women did not know each other. But they put themselves behind something bigger.
On Tuesday, Lochte tweeted on something a little different:
D'Agostino is an American Olympic hero. Lochte is an ugly American, so entitled that he thought it would be OK to relieve himself on the walls of a public place, damage property and hide behind the American flag to stay out of trouble.
People magazine quoted someone it identified as an eyewitness saying one of the swimmers had told the gas station employees that if they didn't let him go, America would be angry.
America should be angry. And Lochte's friends might not be real happy, either.
Lochte isn't the devil. He's just a self-absorbed screw-up.
He's a 32-year-old hipster still trying to live a frat-boy life. Somehow, something about our culture has bought into this reality-show behavior as if it's a real and acceptable thing. Actually, he did have his own reality show called What Would Ryan Lochte Do? On the first episode, we got to see him get drunk with his friend and pee on a golf course. The bro lifestyle
And Lochte has been rewarded for that behavior. He has made a fortune in endorsements from it, though it's a good bet many are going to dry up now.
But in Rio, Lochte got back to the Olympic Village, where he was staying, at roughly 7 a.m. local time after the incident, talked to his mommy and told her he had been mugged. She then told an Australian reporter, who tweeted it. The story took off on social media, and then traditional media started checking into it. With all that attention, Rio police decided to dig further.
And it blew up in Lochte's face. He wasn't even trying to make a big deal out of it. When the U.S. Olympic Committee asked him about it, he denied it. He told USA Today he didn't say anything because he didn't want to get in trouble, which is an embarrassing enough thing to say.
But it was too late by then.
Simply put, it's time for Lochte to grow up already.
That goes, too, for his partying teammates James Feigen, Jack Conger and Gunnar Bentz, even if they are younger than Lochte. He just happens to be the famous one. The older one, at age 32.
For Rio's part, officials completely overreacted. They pulled two of the swimmers off a plane, and an order was given to seize their passports so they could be interrogated. Officials spent the better part of a week investigating whether Lochte had filed a false police report. You wonder if that time could have been better spent making sure people were safe for the final few days of the Olympics.
Lochte's story was fiction, but it's a good bet he got it from reading about true things that happened to other athletes. According to media reports, a New Zealand jiu-jitsu athlete said that two Brazilian cops—or fake cops—forced him into a car and made him withdraw money from two ATMs; a British athlete said he was robbed at gunpoint; an Australian athlete said he was forced to withdraw money from an ATM.
The Guardian reported that British athletes have been warned not to leave the safety of the Olympic Village.
So it was easy enough for Lochte to concoct a story to tell his mommy, and then Matt Lauer.
There's enough human drama going on in Rio—not that Lochte would notice anyway.
Greg Couch covers the Olympics for Bleacher Report.
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