While American swimmer Ryan Lochte seems to be on the other side of the Rio gas station incident which saw him and teammates Gunnar Bentz, Jimmy Feigen and Jack Conger involved in a drunken altercation of sorts, 23-time Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps has offered a helping hand to his longtime comrade.
“Ryan and I have been teammates forever, and it’s always hard to see a friend and a competitor going through a hard time like this — I know what it feels like. I’ve been through it before,” Phelps told People.
“Hopefully he can come out of this a better person,” Phelps said. “I’ve reached out to him a couple times, and I think he understands a lot. He will be able to grow from this.”
Since the incident, Lochte has issued a public apology in the form of a lengthy Instagram post, but it did little to calm his four major sponsors of AirWeave, Speedo, Gentle Hair Removal and Ralph Lauren, all of whom ended their relationship with swimming’s 2nd most decorated Olympic athlete.
Since, however, there is talk of Lochte potentially appearing on the next season of ‘Dancing With The Stars’, of which the public will hear confirmation tomorrow. Lochte also landed a new sponsorship with Pine Brothers cough drop company within the past week.
Maybe we’ll see Lochte if he continues swimming repping Michael Phelps gear!
Phelps was laughing his face off the whole time during Jimmy Fallon’s Ryan Lochte sketch at the VMA last night. He also filmed it with his cell phone. Probably will send it to Lochte later.
FYI Jenny Thompson has the same number of medals but more golds than Lochte. So he technically is third most decorated.
With all due respect to Jenny Thompson (the greatest relay swimmer ever), but individual golds >>> relay golds.
Glad to see Dancing with the Stars is there for him too.
Glad to see MP there for his friend. That’s what it is all about.
Open letter to Phelps, Schmidt, Bowman and Keenan Robinson: you have a young man coming to ASU who just performed very well at Jr Pan Pacs. He is an incredible talent but prone to issues that may detract from his schooling and swimming. Please, please, please take the time to mold him and intervene as has been needed for Michael and Allison recently and what Lochte needs now. This guy needs that type of atmosphere or he will get lost in the ASU scene.
He will get top of the line treatment and training from Bowman and co. without a doubt. Speaking from experience he’s going to have it much better than those without as much success before entering ASU.
ASU fired their last coach because they placed near the middle or bottom of the Pac 12.
So Bob needs his best swimmers so they can climb higher in the standings.
Unless your swimmer breaks the rules, he should be fine.
Tell him not to break the rules. If he screws up anyway, then he’ll get what he deserves.
In addition, he should get a solid academic advisor and also a counselor not affiliated with the swimming program to provide balanced advice. Good luck.
You can’t do this. This is a violation of that swimmer’s privacy and perhaps defamation/libel on a very public forum. This is the swimmer’s job and perhaps the parent’s job in direct private communication with the coaching and academic/support staff, and even then there are strict limits for sharing of information under FERPA. Good intentions I understand, but you just cannot do this.
He never mentioned the swimmers name
He gave 2 key pieces of key info (Jr Pacs and ASU) that would take 2 secs to cross reference and identify the swimmer.
Who?
Cameron Craig?
A child with Internet access could figure it out in five minutes. It’s inappropriate, at best. And hurtful and damaging at worst. And if Swim Swam were paying attention, they’d pull the comment and our comments afterwards.
How is this a violation of privacy or defamation? There’s nothing private in this post. The worst thing written was that he is “prone to issues that may detract from his schooling and swimming”. This seems to be an extremely vague opinion that could be used to describe most freshmen. Comments are moderated, so I doubt SwimSwam would allow defamation or a FERPA violation. Also, none of this has anything to do with FERPA.
Swimmy, He will get a lot of support – but if you are a friend, or someone who claims to have his best interests at heart, why would you call him out like that? You have given information that would make it very easy to identify him. What purpose does it serve to post an ‘open letter’?
I mistrust the motivations of someone asking for help for another in such a public forum. I feel if Swimmy is privilege to some information about said swimmer, and is truly wanting to help, he or she would contact the ASU staff personally. To post this here is to direct this statement to Swimswam readers, clearly not to Bowman et al. as it purports. I would like to think Swimmy’s intentions are good, but I’m not sure. This is either a ridiculously inappropriate and foolish act or a malicious one.
Michael is the best! :))))