Ryan Lochte looking to get back into ...
Olympian Ryan Lochte was one of the most famous athletes in the world less than a decade ago. The golden boy hopes a new documentary may help get him back in the game.
The upstate New York native was a star in the swimming pool from the time he was a youngster all the way through college at the University of Florida, where he consistently broke records and repeatedly took home medals. At the Olympics, he won six golds, three silvers and three bronze in games in 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016.
A golden boy in and out of the pool, Lochte made appearances on “90210” and “30 Rock” and had his own reality show, the short-lived “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?”
Then came the Rio de Janeiro Games, when he and three teammates claimed they had been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station. Their story quickly fell apart, and Lochte faced a charge of providing a false claim of a robbery; it was later dropped.
Lochte was suspended by USA Swimming for 10 months. Almost two years later, he was suspended for an additional 14 months by the United States Anti-Doping Agency for using an IV for an infusion of a legal substance that was over the legal limit; the transgression was caught when the swimmer posted a photo of the treatment to his own social media account.
Since then, he’s done an apology tour and had occasional appearances, including .a 13-day stint on “Celebrity Big Brother” in 2019 and a successful run on “Celebrity Family Feud” later that year.
But for the most part, Lochte has been quiet.
Quietly training, it turns out. Lochte, 35, is working toward his fifth Olympics, delayed a year by the coronavirus pandemic.
“I’m in better shape than I was before all this. I’m in a good spot and I’m just getting ready for another year,” he told the Daily News. “I have an extra year of getting stronger in the water, of fixing certain things … that I wasn’t ready for.”
He’s working on technical things,, but also wants to fix his public image. And for that, he’s relying on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming site, and “In Deep,” his hourlong documentary about his past, and present.
“A lot of people have a different perception of me, but that’s not me. I want people to see the real me. That’s what you’re going to get in this documentary: you’re going to see the real me,” Lochte told The News.
“You’re going to see how hard it is training every day to make the Olympic team and to go home and you have two kids and you’re a husband and a dad and you have to juggle both of them. It’s not easy. You’re going to see how much I have grown up. I’ve matured.”
His kids have helped, he said: son Caiden, born in June 2017 and daughter Liv, who just turned 1. In a way, they’ve given the former party boy structure, just like his training does.
The 2020 Olympics (now set for 2021, if the pandemic is under control) are structure, and a chance to get it right.
“I’m a jokester. I love being happy and I joke around all the time. But a lot of people don’t know that when I go to the swimming pool, I’m 110% committed. I work, I bust my a— every day to get where I’m at,” Lochte told The News.
“People think that just because I’m a jokester that I don’t care, that I got here because of talent and I can just go to the bars and get hammered with my friends and I don’t care about anything. But that’s not me. I have a family that I care more than anything about. I train my butt off every day to provide a better life for my family.”
The Rio scandal, he said, wasn’t a joke.
“It was a mistake that happened in my life that I paid for,” Lochte told The News. “I’m human. I made a mistake and that was a big cost to me and my family and now I’ve moved forward from that and I’m going to keep moving forward and focus on my family and focus on, hopefully, making my fifth Olympics.”
Lochte, with his familiar brand of self-assurance, puts his odds at making the Olympic team at “99.8%.”
“I definitely do feel like this is a blessing,” he told The News.
“In Deep with Ryan Lochte” premieres on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s new streaming site, on Wednesday.