Rooting For Ryan Lochte As American Swimmers Head To The Olympics

Courtesy: Charles Hartley

People may climb to the top of their sports, become the best at what they do, and yet their lives are never as idyllic as they appear to be. Or they just get unlucky. Something bad happens.

Tiger Woods won 15 major golf championships but we all know the sadness that has occurred in his life. Michael Phelps became the greatest swimmer who has ever lived yet afterward struggled. Payne Stewart won a major golf championship but soon thereafter died in a plane crash.

It doesn’t matter how great you become. You can’t escape the bad parts of life. Champions don’t avoid tragedies; none of us do.

No. That’s not how things work.

Don’t we all wish this wasn’t so? Why does life have to be such a mixture of good and bad, rises and falls, triumph and despair?

It’s the way life is. Sometimes people who rise the highest seem to fall the hardest and deepest. Or at least more publicly.

I have been thinking about these sobering truths these past few days as I have been learning about the horrible car accident Ryan Lochte was in last November that broke his leg and injured his head and could have been much worse. He was interviewed about all this recently and told the sad story. Why was Ryan Lochte in a tough situation again?

He has had a lot of bad breaks in his life with this accident being the latest. I feel bad for the guy.

You may remember what happened at the Rio de Janeiro Olympics when he went out one night and got caught up in a dispute at a gas station that turned into an international scandal that made him look like he made up a story.

His reputation took a major hit. Sponsors left him. He was interviewed about it and it was painful to watch. It seemed to me then – and now – that the whole situation got blown way out of proportion to what actually happened which was he exaggerated a story about a gun being pointed at his head at the station when it was pointed at his chest.

A rather small incident, actually, that people wanted to shout from the highest mountains that he was a fool and liar and bad American. What I disliked most was when people liked to make fun of him. They wanted you to think he wasn’t intelligent, just an undereducated swimmer without much to say, not someone to go to for keen insights about world affairs or anything else. There is nothing I find more abhorrent than people making fun of someone’s intelligence.

He took all that abuse. None of us will know how much that hurt him, but I suspect it was devastating. He said in an interview he thought maybe it would be best if he just went to sleep and didn’t wake up.

It was never fair to him what all those people who didn’t even know him said about him. He was made fun of on Saturday Night Live. They used his misfortune to get laughs.

This is a guy, remember, who spent a huge part of his life practicing his craft, swimming, and ascended to win 12 Olympic Medals – 12 more than every single person who criticized him. They disrespected him mercilessly and it was horrible. The worst part of human nature came out.

Do you have any idea how hard it is to work so hard at your craft that you win 12 Olympic medals? That takes perseverance, intelligence, toughness, grit, supreme pain tolerance, and elite focus.

None of the people who trashed his character, reputation, and intelligence had the right to take him out the way they did.

Last night I started watching the YouTube videos of his classic and unforgettable race with Michael Phelps in the 200 individual medley at the FINA World Championships in Shanghai, China.

That was 12 years ago. Feels so much longer ago than that. Ryan Lochte’s life already seems quite long.

They went at it – the two best swimmers of their generation – like Frazier and Ali.

At the end, Lochte won. This was rare. Phelps beat him many times. But Lochte got him that night.

But there was more. He broke the world record with a time of 1:54.00.

Twelve years later the record still stands.

That was one of, if not the, finest swimming performance of Lochte’s swimming career filled with so much success.

It was a moment. It is still a moment.

Herculean swimming.

Doing something faster than any person ever has.

Ryan Lochte.

He did that.

It was his moment.

But it didn’t last.

Up, down, life.

At the London Olympics in 2012, Phelps beat Lochte. So Lochte never won a gold medal in that event at the Olympics – despite doing that race faster than Phelps or anyone ever has.

This seems to be the life story of Lochte, and so many sports stars, and other people we know, in some cases me, and maybe you.

He rises to the top. He gets knocked down. He gets caught up in an international controversy that hurts his personal reputation and sponsorship opportunities. He was at the wrong place and said the wrong things to the wrong people.

I imagine if he had to do it again he wouldn’t allow that situation to devolve into an utterly exponentially out-of-control scandal. It wasn’t that big of a deal – wrong yes – but the world made it out to be cataclysmic. And he was at the center of all the acrimony.

How did this all happen to Lochte? Why him? A swimming sensation, he was just trying to be elite at his craft and he did that and yet it got all messed up.

It disrupted his life. None of can know how much. A life cursed by a person blessed with enormous talent.

In my life there have been situations that have come about that I had no idea were headed my way that I didn’t understand, didn’t want to happen, couldn’t control, never got an explanation, couldn’t figure out, and ended up the one feeling the pain and embarrassment. I suppose it may have happened to you or someone you know.

And so this is what I’m thinking: I’m thinking about the Paris Olympics U.S. swimmers and how profoundly I respect the toughness they have shown to train to the level where they are fast enough to be on this team.

I am thinking about how much I want them to win but also to feel good about themselves no matter what happens. I am thinking about all the emotions they’re going to feel after their races, some bliss and others despondency, and all the soul-searching they’re going to do after about whether they want to keep going to swim practice for four more years to try to get back to the Olympics.

I am thinking about what will happen with the rest of their lives. I hope none of them have to go through the miseries that Ryan Lochte has had to.

But I know it could happen.

Because this is what life is.

We excel. We compete. We lose. We win. We get accused. We get scared. We do something wrong. We pay a price for it.

We could be driving somewhere, like Ryan was last November, and suddenly a car is right in front of his and we have no time to do anything and crash into it.

For reasons none of us will understand. At times we don’t expect.

We get injured. We go to the hospital. We do rehab.

And we carry on. We wake up and face another day. It may be swim practice. It may be writing. It may be rehabbing a broken leg as Ryan has had to do.

We all go through this stuff.

I am wishing right now all the best for Ryan Lochte. I hope he watches the Olympic swimming and enjoys the thrills and it reminds him of how great a swimmer he was and that all the bad stuff that has happened to him isn’t as important as his ability to keep striving to be the best.

I want him to sit back and think to himself:

“I still have the world record in the 200 IM. No one has gone faster in the history of the world.

“I was a great swimmer. Life has thrown me some tough situations, but I know I can rise above it all because I proved I could that day in Shanghai.

“I showed the world I was a great swimmer and I will use that as motivation to do even more great things with my life from this day forward.”

About Charles Hartley

Charles Hartley is a freelance writer based in Davidson, NC. He has a masters degree in journalism and a masters degree in business administration.