Ryan Lochte’s Last Try – Sports Illustrated
Chest heaving in the water, Ryan Lochte peers at the whiteboard above him and despairs. It is mid-February, and the 36-year-old has already devoted four hours to pulling himself through the pool, another exhausting day in an unrelenting string of them. Now, instructions scrawled in black dry-erase marker demand he wring nine more 300-meter sets, with little rest between each, from his already burned-out body.
When the second-most-decorated men’s swimmer in Olympic history finishes those merciless final 2,700 meters, he flings his swim cap and goggles against a wall behind the starting blocks. On his way to the locker room, limping noticeably, he shuffles under a University of Florida records board that bears his name five times, though his marks read like relics (even if his 200-meter individual medley world record still stands). The most recent was set in 2012, an eon ago in a sport that favors youth. Reminded of that reality by the sting in his muscles and joints and lungs, the 12-time Olympic medalist plops down on a bench and begins to sob. The pain is the price of his improbable pursuit: a return to the Games this summer in Tokyo.
Still despondent, Lochte makes the 20-minute trip to his new home in an unremarkable subdivision in west Gainesville, Fla. His father, Steve, rides shotgun in Lochte’s slate-gray Chevy Tahoe, having learned long ago to let Ryan’s breakdowns—whatever their cause—pass unacknowledged, wary of amplifying the hurt. This marks the third time in recent months that Lochte’s legendary tolerance for physical pain has reached its limit. “Week after week, practice after practice, the intensity that he puts in, he gets to a point of mentally breaking,” Steve will say later. “It’s his body crashing. His mind has been strong enough to hold it together—and then, eventually, it snaps.”
Simon Bruty/Sports Illustrated
Lochte is greeted on this night by hugs from his children: three-year-old Caiden and one-year-old Liv. For the entirety of his adult life, Lochte says, he guzzled booze in extravagant volumes to dull the aches bred by his sport and the spotlight. But after spending six weeks in outpatient treatment for alcohol use in 2018, he says that big smiles and little squeezes from a young son and a baby girl are sufficient salves. After embracing the kids, he swills a beer on the couch, which he says helps wash those last 2,700 meters away, but he doesn’t crack open another.
Because his tolerance for pain has long been matched by his tolerance for alcohol, the people who love him most have had to learn to tolerate him, each mistake costing trust and money and an Olympian’s most valuable commodity, time. To atone, he has convinced himself that the final miles of water ahead of him are more important than the thousands in his wake.
He is fixated on redemption: both the shallow sort that brands and broadcasters could sell this summer, enriching him and his family, and a more substantive kind. He is certain that if he rebounds and becomes the U.S.’s oldest-ever men’s Olympic swimmer—or even perhaps the oldest individual gold medalist—in Olympic swimming history, he will finally salvage his legacy, among both loved ones and the masses.
Really, though? At 36?
Both Lochte’s father and his coach insist this isn’t some quixotic quest. Steve declines to share specifics, but talks of practice times on par with those logged a decade ago, when Lochte was breaking world records and piling up medals. Like the rest of the family, Steve desperately wants his son to find peace.
“Everyone around me is putting a lot of pressure on me—more than I’ve ever had in my entire life,” Lochte says. “I feel it from everyone. Like my family. The people that live in this house. My agent. It’s just everyone.
“I feel like, if I don’t [make it], I’ll become a failure.”
Lochte raced as part of the U.S. men’s 4×200 freestyle relay team in the 2016 Games (above), helping to snag gold with his 1:46.03 leg in the final.
Donald Miralle/Sports Illustrated
When Steve dropped off Lochte at Florida in 2002, then assistant coach Anthony Nesty could sense apprehension in the teenager’s father, who had long doubled as Ryan’s swim coach. As he led Lochte away, Nesty turned to Steve and assured him: “Coach, we’ll take care of him.”
Three weeks later, the Gators’ head coach (and Steve’s close friend), Gregg Troy, called to report that Lochte had stumbled out of a Florida football game and sliced his hand open on a shard of beer bottle. Lochte had been drunk before—he says the first time came in high school, after he and friends tossed back some Mike’s Hard Lemonade—but now he lived in a town laden with dollar beers and cheap shots, and where his propensity to run through life at full bore could easily translate to dangerous excesses. From then on, Lochte would be watched over by a cadre of caretakers.
Over time, Lochte’s teammate and roommate Elliot Meena learned that he could help the Gators most not by stacking up points at meets, but by keeping Lochte upright enough so that he could do that. “I had to keep his head out of the toilet and [him] from choking on his own puke,” Meena says. “If I kept Ryan healthy and eligible, single and sober—just awake—those points I felt somewhat [responsible] for.”
When Lochte arrived at the pool reeking of alcohol, coaches tended to go easy on him, because he’d still dominate every single practice rep. Steve and Troy shared a mantra: If you’re going to be a man at night, you have to be a man in the morning. So Lochte lived by it, outdrinking anyone who tried to keep pace under the neon lights, and then outracing them at sunrise, along the way accumulating seven NCAA championships. No matter how he treated it, Lochte’s body was always able to do what he demanded of it in the pool—and more. “I’ve worked with a lot of Olympians, a lot of gold medalists, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody who can endure the way he does,” says Matt DeLancey, his strength coach at Florida.
After returning from the 2004 Olympics with a pair of medals, Lochte morphed into a campus celebrity, holding court at the Grog House, a dingy bar in Gainesville where he bought drinks for strangers and often slipped behind the bar to hand out shots. From the time he was a child, Lochte’s motivation had been to please those around him. In his youth, that meant refining his backstroke for Steve; in college, it meant being the sun around which the Gainesville party scene revolved. (The house he rented with Meena and other swimmers had $5,500 worth of damage to show for it when they moved out.) Lochte also had a propensity to rip signs and posters off walls when he had been drinking; he faced no consequences for this destructive habit in Gainesville.
Another Olympic cycle later, having collected four more medals at the 2008 Beijing Games, Lochte, then 24, used his newfound international fame and substantial endorsement deals to fuel a supercharged version of his old college life. His brother Devon, six years younger, moved into the off-campus house Lochte had purchased after graduating in ’07. And while Devon idolized Ryan, he grew alarmed as the crowd of hangers-on grew wider and their connections shallower. Four nights a week, bouncers would usher Lochte past lines, and he would become the evening’s entertainment wherever he flashed his Ralph Lauren–sponsored smile. To Devon, it seemed the entire town was eager to drink on his brother’s perpetually open tab.
Friends say Lochte handed out expensive watches and wallets like party favors. He surprised people by paying for lavish sound systems to be installed in their cars. He bought four Xboxes at a time, intent on giving them away. He once returned home with $30,000 in winnings from an overseas event and gave away $1,000 to a loose acquaintance who dropped by to ask for that much in “gas money.”
“For other people to come in and take advantage of his hard work, I wasn’t a fan of it,” Devon says.
Despite his high-octane lifestyle, Lochte, for a time, rivaled Michael Phelps as the best swimmer in the world. At the 2011 World Championships, in Shanghai, he won five golds and a bronze, and he edged Phelps in the 200 freestyle and 200 individual medley, setting a world record in the latter that still stands. The ’12 London Games would bring five more medals.
In 2013, E! aired an eight-episode reality series, ironically titled What Would Ryan Lochte Do?, in which the by-then-famously loutish celeb-athlete pounded tequila shots the night before an early-morning practice, contemplated publicly urinating on at least one national monument and attempted to make various catchphrases happen. Meena, watching at home on TV, says he had trouble telling whether his old roommate was being his genuine self—an occasional dunce, but unrelentingly kind—or playing the part of a vapid and obnoxious party boy to…
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