It was one of those things.
It was so horrible I couldn’t turn away.
Is your IRL name Ryan? :o
I wouldn’t tell you even if you held a gun to my head…
Still playing devil’s advocate here but I’m not giving full credibility to these statements. After a few hours in police custody, these two might be willing to say anything.
For a point of reference this is how other teams deal with issues in Rio:
i.e. privately, aware from the media, letting legal process do its job and not trying to make you the important thing.
Lochte just looks an enormous narcissistic, self aggrandising dick.
I don’t know much about Lochte other than he’s a pretty and talented idiot, but how is he coming across as a narcissistic, self aggrandising dick? He didn’t go to the media about this, word leaked out, either through his mother or some other way, and he’s just given one interview about it.
To be fair, I think he just told the original lie to his mother, who than, unaware that it was a lie, passed it on to the media. At which point Lochte decided to keep running with it rather than admit he’d lied.
A 32-year-old man with green/silver hair, a bad reality TV series and tragic fashion choices has been an international douchebag because he was worried his mom might find out he lied. And left his friends/compatriots hanging in the process.
Pretty much sums it up right there.
“I win X gold medals representing my country - do they call me Gold Medal guy? No! But fuck ONE goat…”
To nitpick, I think all we know at this point is that the police are saying that the two admitted that Lochte lied. That may be true, but it will be good to get some independent confirmation in time.
What a bunch of douche bags.
You know, I get why Brazil’s pissed about it, but what they are doing seems to be over the top. Ryan may have gotten into some trouble and lied and made Rio seem super unsafe, but he didn’t really do anything illegal. There was no police report filed, so this can’t be a case of filing a false report and being charged for that. The police should have just let them go and now they’ve made it an international incident.
Sure, objectively it’s a little over the top, obviously politics in play. But I guarantee that if this turns out to all be bullshit and the “robbery” turns was really a security guard demanding they pay some money for peeing on the wall/breaking stuff then the vast majority of opinion will be against the swimmers.
I imagine the people who were upset by The way Gabby Douglas stood for the anthem, must be outraged at how these entitled douches acted.
Best article so far on this fiasco.
Arrogant, self entitled douchebag dialed up to 11.
Ryan Lochte: A champion swimmer caught in a riptide of self-absorption
Imagine if an African-American athlete had gotten caught up in something like this. “Thug” would be grown around left and right.
Yup. A black Olympian gets criticized for how she stands, while these bros trash a gas station and piss in public.
Latest info I’ve seen seems to confirm parts of the atheletes story;
Brazilian police release video from the gas station. But forgetting (or not knowing) that digital video has internal time codes, which people look at and find that a critical 3 minutes have been edited out of the released version.
One shot in the released video shows 3 of the atheletes sitting on the ground with their hands in the air, just as they described.
A summary:
He should maybe get one of those unreality shows with Hope ‘they were cowards’ Solo and call it The Ugly Americans.
I’m loving how folks automatically believed Lochte’s story because it involved furriners dressed as police officers in a country perceived to be “corrupt third world”. But every day, people accuse American police officers of less severe crimes, and it’s always, “Let’s wait for all the facts to roll in!” Even when all the facts do roll in, the victim is blamed for their role in the situation.
But so many people (including myself) automatically gave Lochte et al. the benefit of the doubt because “Why would they lie about something like that?”
My hypothesis? He lied because he knew the gas station would likely have survelliance cameras and that the video footage would be in circulation very soon. So he fabricated a “we wuz robbed” story to get control of the situation. And because he’s an idiot, he couldn’t keep the lie straight or make the basic details be in line with what actually happened. And his teammates, being considerably younger than him, wrongly assumed that he knew what he was doing…never thinking that the lie would grow legs the way it did.
Tragedy, all around. Moral of the story, kids: Don’t hang out with douchebags.
In the “arrogant” department, I’m reminded of a quote from Lochte in London four years ago:
This was uttered shortly before being soundly upstaged by Michael Phelps (who, with class, later declined to comment on Lochte’s ill-advised claim).
Maybe Lochte is starved for attention after living in Phelps’ gold-medal shadow for so long, but this whole robbery thing is bizarre. If the reason you get robbed at gunpoint is because you’ve trashed a gas station bathroom in a drunken, urine-soaked stupor, the smart thing is to say “let us never speak of this again.” Instead, Mr. MyTime decides to try to paint himself as a hero who doesn’t flinch when staring death in the face and impugns the Rio police in the process, somehow never imagining that the attention he invited would lead to the truth being discovered - which is that he’s simply a mendacious, vandalous drunkard.