BAN SHORT BUT SIGNIFICANT
Suspension could effectively end Lochte’s career
From the moment Ryan Lochte hijacked the Rio Olympic Games for nearly a week with the incendiary and ultimately untrue statement that a gun had been put to his forehead during a night of drunken shenanigans, it was a foregone conclusion that suspensions and sanctions were coming for him and his three U.S. Olympic swimming teammates.
And so it is that 32-year-old Lochte will receive a 10-month suspension Thursday, a person with knowledge of the situation tells USA TODAY Sports. Lochte is being hit with the ban for behavior that embarrassed and infuriated the International Olympic Committee, U.S. Olympic Committee, USA Swimming and his Rio hosts.
The three teammates are expected to be banned for several months each, and other sanctions could be added for all four as well, according to the person who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the decision had not been announced publicly Wednesday.
Lochte’s suspension is longer than the two Michael Phelps received for his behavior, including six months for his second DUI arrest in 2014. It’s shorter than the 18 months two U.S. male swimmers received for stealing a Korean mask from a bar at the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, but that was a generation or so ago.
In some ways, 10 months seems too short for Lochte’s selfish, boorish, immature behavior last month. But this is a suspension that comes with a crucial ad- dendum: It is scheduled to end June 30, 2017, but it also bans Lochte from the 2017 world swimming championships in Budapest, Hungary, which begin July 14.
This means that Lochte, should he want to keep swimming, will not be able to return to a world championships meet until 2019, when he will be 35. USA Swimming gave Phelps the same kind of punishment after his DUI, extending the suspension to the 2015 world championships. Phelps obviously recovered quite nicely, winning five gold medals and a silver in Rio.
But Lochte might not be so lucky. This 10-month ban knocks him out of any serious competition until 2018. For a fellow nearing his mid-30s, that’s significant.
And deliberate. The USOC and USA Swimming are nothing if not old school and no-nonsense. They still buy into the quaint and wonderful notion that when you make an Olympic team and sign the athlete’s code of conduct, as Lochte and the others did, you’re representing not only the U.S. Olympic team, but also, by extension, your nation.
You’re not just four young people on a boozy escapade on a college campus. You mean more than that, at least for three weeks.
You’re four Olympians from the most-watched nation on Earth, and in this case, you’re in Rio, a beautiful but troubled city riddled by street crime, and then you make up a story that plays right into a narrative that causes proud Brazilians to shudder in embarrassment.
And then one of you — Lochte, the four-time Olympian, the guy who should know better — slips out of town even as his story was still changing and escapes to the United States, leaving the other three who cheered for him as kids and apparently covered up for him as adults to fend for themselves back in Rio.
The chaos that ensued, which included two of the swimmers being taken off their flight back to the USA and held for questioning for another day, became one of the most embarrassing stretches in recent memory for any U.S. Olympic team.
Meanwhile, while his teammates dealt with the significant fallout from Lochte’s drip-dripdrip of public fibbing and tall tales, Lochte was slow to show remorse or even a hint of understanding about the gravity of his situation. He didn’t publicly apologize for days, and even then, he told one story, then another, then another. He did, however, send a tweet that his greenish-gray hair had gone back to its original color and sent a silly photo of himself to a friend to celebrate a birthday.
This stunning lack of awareness and contrition turned out to be worse than whatever happened at that Rio gas station and led to a banishment that will forever be part of his once-so-illustrious résumé.