Ryan Lochte: ‘I was headed to a dark, dark place’

The second-most decorated swimmer in Olympic history became a global symbol of privilege in Rio en route to rock bottom. Now the 36-year-old father of two will try to reach a fifth Games

It’s been a roller-coaster five years for Ryan Lochte, even accounting for the ample fluctuations of a celebrity athlete whose nearly two decades in the public eye have been defined by in-water excellence measured against self-sabotage out of it. The second-most decorated men’s swimmer in Olympic history has married and become a father of two. He’s also been branded as a global symbol of privilege after an eponymous Rio Olympics scandal where he lied about being robbed at gunpoint, served two lengthy suspensions and admitted himself to rehab for alcohol addiction after one TMZ headline too many. Peaks and troughs, as they say.

Yet through all the tumult, Lochte has never meaningfully wavered in his goal of swimming in a fifth Olympics. And when the US swimming trials begin on Friday in Omaha, the 36-year-old will attempt to make it a reality. His best chance is expected to come on Sunday night in the 200m individual medley, the event where he set a world record nearly a decade ago that stands today. Should he earn a spot on the US team for Tokyo, he will become the oldest American male swimmer to ever compete at an Olympics.

“Right now I am racing against people half my age,” Lochte told the Guardian on a recent Zoom call from Gainesville, where he’s returned to train and live with his wife, Kayla Rae Reid, and two children: three-year-old Caiden and one-year-old Liv. “I don’t have the luxury they have where, after swim practice, they can go home and they can take naps. I have a family now, and keeping up with my kids, that right there is hard itself.”

If a fifth Olympics seemed a bit of a lark after Lochte was banned for 10 months over his principal role in vandalizing a gas station with three other American swimmers during a drunken night out at the Rio Games, it felt downright quixotic two years later when he was hit with a separate 14-month suspension for receiving an intravenous infusion without a therapeutic use exemption. That Lochte went into rehab early into the second punishment didn’t exactly raise expectations.

Whatever your thoughts on Lochte’s extracurriculars, there’s practically nothing left for him to prove in the water. But as he approaches what almost certainly will be his final Olympic trials, Lochte describes a pressure unlike any he’s experienced in an international career that reaches back to his Olympic debut aged 20 at Athens 2004.

“I didn’t have pressure back then,” Lochte says. “I had no responsibilities. It was just me, the goofball Ryan Lochte, getting on the blocks and just racing. In some ways I have to think like that, that mindset of there is no pressure. But to be honest, this is the most pressure I’ve ever had in my entire life because I have so much to prove, not just for myself, but for all the doubters out there, all the naysayers, that are like rooting against me. It’s my chance to prove that in the past I was a goofball, but I’ve changed.

“Now I’m a family man. And I’m doing this to prove to my kids that in life, you’re going to get knocked down. You’re going to get knocked down a lot, but it’s how you get yourself up and how you keep moving forward that is going to define you as a person.”

He adds: “I’m fighting a lot of things, but I’m the happiest I’ve ever been.”

There is a genuine sense of contentment and even self-reflection that comes through in our conversation, but it’s been a serenity hard won after an extended comedown since Rio that sent Lochte spiraling to what he describes as “the very bottom”.

It started only days after Lochte teamed with Phelps, Conor Dwyer and Townley Haas to win gold in the 4×200m freestyle relay at the Rio Olympics, moving him level with Jenny Thompson, Dara Torres and Natalie Coughlin as the second-most decorated swimmers in history, male or female.

Chances are, that’s not what you remember about his time in Brazil.

Their competition finished, Lochte and three teammates followed a night of carousing by urinating outside the bathroom at a gas station. A confrontation with security guards ensued, but Lochte’s next-day tale of being held up by armed robbers who may or may not have been police became an international scandal as quickly as it unraveled. By invoking the ugliest stereotypes of Rio criminality in a clumsy effort to conceal his fratboy antics, Lochte was cast as the embodiment of American entitlement while also overshadowing the achievements of countless athletes during the final week of the Olympics.

Shortly after, Lochte was slapped the ban by USA Swimming and the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee, dropped by four major sponsors and made to forfeit $100,000 in bonus money that came with his gold medal. Then, in 2018, Lochte was suspended for 14 months by the United States Anti-Doping Agency after a social media post showed him receiving an IV infusion of legal vitamins, which is prohibited under doping rules without a therapeutic use exemption.

Only three months into the second suspension, Lochte landed himself in the headlines again for an early-morning incident at a southern California hotel when he found himself locked out of his hotel room and tried to kick down the door. That’s when, Lochte says, he made the decision to spend six weeks in an outpatient alcohol use treatment program.

“I was just headed to a dark, dark place,” Lochte says. “It just seemed like every time that I was drinking heavily, I was doing something stupid and it was a pattern. It made me realize the path I was heading down if I kept going that route. And if I would have kept that pattern, who knows what could have happened? I could have ended up in a car wreck. Or killing someone else. So it was definitely a wake-up call. I needed to grow up, smell the coffee and be like, this is not you. You need to change who you are.”

Lochte’s insistence on looking forward rather than behind him when Rio does come up could be read by his critics as a lack of contrition – for the lying, for leading his younger teammates astray, for embarrassing his family and for trying to blame it on the locals – or by his fans as a triumph of positive visualization.

When Lochte finally resurfaced after more than a year away from swimming for the 2019 US national championships, he won the 200 IM fast enough to qualify for a spot at the US Olympic trials. Then came the March night in the family’s living room when Lochte caught a breaking story on the evening news.

“We’d heard the Olympics might be postponed, but I never thought it would happen,” he recalls. “Once I heard it, I was in shock. I was pissed off. But then I had to take a step back and start thinking, like, everything happens for a reason.

“So I started looking at the positive sides. I was like, man, I get a whole other year of training: tuning up my strokes, making sure my starts, my turns, my underwaters, everything is flawless. I think I’m going to be a 10 times better swimmer than I was last summer, which I feel like I am.”

Even if the Tokyo Games had gone ahead as scheduled in 2020, Lochte, then 35, still would have been the oldest American man to ever swim at an Olympics. Still, he insists he was never deterred by the prospect of another year of punishment.

“There’s still times where it gets hard mentally,” he says. “It’s beating up your body and I’ve been doing it for 28 years without really taking a long, long break. It takes a toll, but that’s where your goals and what you want to accomplish in the sport really come back into play.”

All eyes will be on Lochte at this month’s trials, which have been split into a pair of meets in an effort to provide more room for social distancing on the typically crowded pool deck. Regardless of whether he makes a fifth US Olympic team, he promises it won’t be the end of his competitive career: “No matter what the outcome is this summer, I’m still going to be swimming. I’ve never been to the [International Swimming League] meets or the World Cup meets. There’s still things I want to do that will be fun.”

But as his moment of truth draws nearer, Lochte finds it’s his darkest moments that forced him into the self-reckoning which has made his greatest happiness possible.

“Being knocked down so many times – and when I say knocked down, like knocked down to the very bottom – and being able to get myself back up and keep moving forward, I can honestly say I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” he says. “I have a beautiful wife, two gorgeous kids, and it’s everything that I’ve ever wanted in life. This trumps every gold medal I’ve ever won. This hands-down is my calling: being a dad, being a husband. The swimming is just the cherry on top. Before I couldn’t say that. Swimming was my world. Swimming was everything. But life has changed and I’m happy it did because, me inside, I’m proud of who I’ve become.”

• Ryan Lochte is a spokesperson for healthy aging supplement Tru Niagen.

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