Ryan Lochte, who elected to compensate for not being the most decorated Olympian of all time (an honor his teammate, Michael Phelps, swam to instead) by decorating a Rio gas station with urine, is on an apology tour.
Lochte, the broiest bro who e’er broed, told the world he’d been held up at gunpoint at a Rio gas station at three o’clock in the morning on August 14, alongside a few younger — and, in Lochte’s telling, far less heroic — American swimmers.
Lochte’s original version of events, as told to NBC:
“We got pulled over, in the taxi, and these guys came out with a badge, a police badge, no lights, no nothing just a police badge and they pulled us over. They pulled out their guns, they told the other swimmers to get down on the ground — they got down on the ground. I refused, I was like we didn’t do anything wrong, so — I’m not getting down on the ground.
“And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, ‘Get down,’ and I put my hands up, I was like ‘whatever.’ He took our money, he took my wallet — he left my cell phone, he left my credentials.”
Yes, these alleged thieves opted to let Lochte keep his cell phone — robbery in moderation, if you will. But it didn’t take long for the inconsistencies to emerge, as an International Olympic Committee spokesman described early reports of the incident “absolutely not true.” Brazilian authorities said that Lochte’s version of events was fabricated.
Surveillance footage obtained by Rio authorities told a different story than Lochte. The gas station owner told O Globo that, though the swimmers were asked to use the gas station bathroom, they peed on the wall instead. Turns out the whole incident was less “innocent Olympians were robbed at gunpoint by bad guys” and more “drunk Olympians vandalized a bathroom at a gas station and were stopped by security guards when they tried to leave without offering payment for the damages.”
As Sally Jenkins asks in her glorious, scathing review of Lochte’s entire personality: “Is there anything worse, in any country, than a bunch of entitled young drunks who break the furniture and pee on a wall?”
Once two of the guys who were with Lochte that night, Gunnar Bentz and Jimmy Feigen, released public statements completely contradicting Lochte’s original description of the events, Lochte came clean. (On Saturday, Jack Conger, the fourth member of this boy band, issued a statement as well.)
On Friday, Lochte posted an apology letter on Twitter:
https://t.co/n82dZH2gfl pic.twitter.com/rGp1nmA94G
— Ryan Lochte (@RyanLochte) August 19, 2016
And on Saturday, a brunette Lochte — his hair no longer dyed his Rio color of Glacier Freeze Frost Gatorade— told Matt Lauer and, by extension, America, that he took “full responsibility” for what happened in Rio.
“I over-exaggerated that story,” Lochte said in his typical, eloquent way, particularly the juicy detail about the gun pressing up against his forehead. “That didn’t happen and that’s why — I over-exaggerated that part.”
Lochte said he was still drunk hours after the incident when he added that flourish to his story. “I’m not making me being intoxicated like an excuse, I’m not doing that at all. It was my fault and I shouldn’t have said it.”
Asked why Lochte and his teammates kept referring to themselves as “victims” in their interviews with the press, Lochte said:
“It’s how you want to make it look like. Whether you call it a robbery, whether you call it extortion, or us paying just for the damages, like, we don’t know,” Lochte responded. “All we know is that there was a gun pointed in our direction, and we were demanded to give money.”
In his statement, Bentz claims that an English-speaking man told the swimmers the guards wanted them to pay for the damage; if the swimmers refused, the guards would call the police. Lauer asked Lochte if he understood what, exactly, the guards were offering. Lochte said:
“We just wanted to get out of there. We were all frightened. And we wanted to get out of there as quick as possible. And the only way we knew is — this guy saying, ‘You have to give him money.’ So we gave him money, and we got out.”
Lauer called out Lochte for the fact that “the version we’re hearing now is much more about a negotiated settlement to cover up some dumb behavior.”
“And that’s why I’m taking full responsibility for it. Because I over-exaggerated that story,” Lochte said. And if I had never done that, we wouldn’t be in this mess … None of this would have happened. And it was my immature behavior.”
Lochte also expressed his hope that his criminal behavior, and the fallout from his lie, didn’t distract from what he believed were a “great” games. “My immature behavior tarnished that a little, and I don’t want that.”