One of the lasting headlines of the Rio Olympics was the scandal involving swimming star Ryan Lochte and his teammates James Feigen, Jack Conger and Gunnar Bentz. The four swimmers filed a police report Aug. 14 stating they’d been robbed at gunpoint after attending a party.
It later turned out that the incident did not happen at all.
Instead, the Brazil police reported that the four Americans had, in actuality, vandalized a gas station and engaged in hostilities with security guards there.
So the swimmers issued apologies all-around. As you might expect, their apologies were the typical platitudes of privileged, fallen-from-grace-athletes — you know, emotional professions of regret (in Lochte’s case, he was “truly, 110 percent sorry”) confessions of immaturity, and, of course, the old standby, the blaming of drunkenness for their behavior.
In short, there was hardly anything original in the fallout of this scandal. The athletes did penance for their crime. In the case of Feigen, he had to donate $11,000 to a Brazilian charity to avoid prosecution by the Brazilian government for the scandal.
As one might expect, the media soon moved on to the next big story, as did the rest of the public — including Lochte, who is now blissfully waltzing past the scandal. Literally.
As it turns out, Lochte will be joining the cast of “Dancing with the Stars” this fall, along with fellow Rio Olympian Laurie Hernandez and several other celebrities.
Lochte is not the person to blame in this situation. He’s not doing anything out of the ordinary in profiting from his fame.
No, instead we should be censuring ABC, the network that is still allowing Lochte to still be on the show despite his horrendous behavior. They had been negotiating for Lochte to be a contestant before the Olympics even started, and his wrongdoing, as it seems, is no reason to lose out on TV ratings. One might even argue that he became a more lucrative contestant after his Rio scandal.
What did Lochte have to say about this new endeavour?
“Hopefully, this show will definitely bring out my personality, you know, laid back, go-with-the-flow, (a) loving and caring person that likes to have fun and just enjoys the moment,” he said.
I think that it goes without saying that his Rio shenanigans did not, in fact, bring out the more admirable traits of his personality.
It should also go without saying that Lochte is a bit on the, uh, dull side (for further proof, check out any clip of his short-lived reality TV show, “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?”, which only aired for about a month in 2013). But this is reaching new levels of stupidity, even for him.
The upshot is this: The Rio games were monumental for Brazil and the rest of South America. Admittedly, there were complications leading up to the Olympics. In the end, though, the Rio games serve as a meaningful step toward moving past the narrative of drugs and crime that plagues South American countries.
Lochte and the other swimmers, in their drunken stupidity, put the focus back on that narrative. And they should be shamed for it and made to feel the consequence of their actions--not allowed to sashay past them back into fame and fortune. Shame on ABC for allowing this to happen.
