Ryan Lochte: A champion swimmer caught in a riptide of self-absorption
By Sally Jenkins Columnist August 18 at 7:11 PM
RIO DE JANEIRO — Ryan Lochte is the dumbest bell that ever rang. The 32-year-old swimmer is so landlocked in juvenility that he pulled an all-nighter with guys young enough to call him uncle. His story to NBC’s Billy “what-are-you-wearing” Bush had the quality of a kid exaggerating the size of a fish, and notice how he was the hero of every detail. That was always the most dubious, implausible part.
There is a special category of obnoxious American “bro” that Lochte represents, in his T-shirt and jeans and expensive suede footwear, which he showed off on social media that night at the party along with the price tag. “We’re 6k deep here,” he captioned it. Is there anything worse, in any country, than a bunch of entitled young drunks who break the furniture and pee on a wall? There is no translator needed for that one, no cultural norm that excuses it. If I had been working at that Brazilian gas station, I might have pulled a gun on them, too.
Jack Conger is 21. Gunnar Bentz is 20. James Feigen is 26. What a leader of young men Lochte is. You can see the bathroom door appear to burst out of its wooden frame on the security video, presumably when one of those oafs couldn’t open it and decided to kick it.
Look, having a gun drawn on you in the small hours was no doubt unnerving and an overreaction by the security guard. It’s even remotely possible that Lochte really did interpret the demand for cash as a “robbery” of sorts. But to do so, he had to be so impervious to his own odious punk behavior — and his view of that gas station had to be so low — that he didn’t think the vandalizing was worth anything. He must have thought Ryan Lochte’s pee was gold dust.
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