Clueless: Ryan Lochte remained defiant in baffling interview with Matt Lauer
Silence might have better.
The Ryan Lochte non-pology tour continued in utter vapidity Saturday night when the swimmer sat down with Matt Lauer to discuss, for the first time on camera, the Olympic whopper heard 'round the world. The 14-minute clip aired by NBC was a crash course in how not to run damage control as Lochte had nothing to offer other than broad apologies for his actions and, unbelievably, a refusal to acknowledge he wasn't robbed at a Rio gas station one week ago tonight.
Lochte repeatedly apologized, but never for anything specific. Then, incredibly, when Lauer asked him whether he still thinks he was robbed, Lochte insinuated that he did.
It must have taken all his power to not finish with, "you do the math, jeah."
Lauer, who's seen it all in his decades on Today, seemed stupefied. Here was Lochte's chance to make right and he demurred, stubbornly retreating just slightly and making no more admission than he did in his awful Instagram apology on Friday. He still didn't seem to understand what he did wrong. The interview was like a father gently talking to his son about why it was bad to cheat on his homework, with the son not grasping the concept at all and hoping that if he said he didn't cheat enough, his dad would believe him.
One thing Lochte did confirm during the sit-down was his selfishness. He came close to crying when asked what he felt when teammates and partygoers Jack Conger and Gunnar Bentz were pulled off their plane in Brazil to account for Lochte's story. But the tears weren't for them — they were for himself. He's sorry all right — sorry that he has to feel bad about, as he called it, "a stupid mistake."
Lochte had lied to Lauer earlier this week — the Today host and second-most decorated American Olympian swimmer spoke via phone after Lochte fled Brazil just as questions about the veracity of his story had begun to swirl. During that Lauer chat, Lochte's story, which had publically started with a retelling to Billy Bush during an impromptu beach run-in (Bush filmed it on his iPhone), began to unravel.
What had initially been an incident in which Lochte said a taxi was run off the road and a "guy pulled out his gun, cocked it, put it to my forehead and said get down" became a gas station stop with a gun pointed in his direction. (That was actually was the truth — the most watered-down, selective retelling of the story possible, but still the truth.)
Some shrugged off the story change to the understandable, inevitable alterations of a terrified victim. To others, it was the surest sign yet that Lochte's initial story had been tough-guy garbage by a 32-year-old man too soft to take responsibility for drinking and acting the fool.
Still, in that first interview when Lauer initially broached the subject that something was amiss, Lochte didn't hedge and dug himself an Olympic-sized pool.
He didn't go any deeper on Saturday but he didn't try to climb out either. The story the "victim" told was at least the fifth different account of Ryan Lochte's not-so-excellent adventure. It started with the tall tale he told his mom Sunday morning*, then continued publicly with the beachside interview with Bush, the international phone call with Lauer, the remorseful (because I got caught) fauxpology delivered via Twitter and then whatever this was.
* It shouldn't be lost on anyone, by the way, that this whole debacle started because Lochte uttered the original sin to his mom and she told a reporter. Maybe it would have gotten out anyway, maybe not. Regardless, it's perhaps the most inexplicable part of a mind-numbingly stupid week. As Lochte became buried under his mistruths while his boys were taking the rap, you can sort of understand (but not condone) why he didn't come clean. But telling his mom a story that would make her sick with worry is some kind of clinical narcissism. Of all the slings and arrows of outrageous stupidity we've been subjected to in the past seven days, a grown man worrying his mother by concocting a gunpoint robbery is the apex. Imagine doing that to your mother. If there was a lie to be told, here's how almost anyone else would have done it: "How was your night?" Mom asked. "Good," he replied.
Lauer did the interview with his trademark toughness and maybe even a little more mustard, given that Lochte played him earlier in the week. He asked all the right questions. But there are still plenty of others to ask, just not to Lochte.
Why did a security guard pull a gun on a guy who took down a poster? (Remember, the destroyed bathroom story has proved as reliable as Lochte's "gunpoint.") And why was everyone cool with Jimmy Feigen essentially getting shaken down by the courts for $11,000 in order to get out of Brazil? That's not justice, that's robbery at gavel-point.
There was so much hand-wringing, contrived empathy, pearl-clutching and self-pity from those offended anyone would dare fabricate a crime in a crime-ridden city. But did the initial so-called crime really merit that response? Guns? That's been overshadowed in the brouhaha. So was the fact that an Olympic athlete was actually robbed at gunpoint days after the Lochte tale broke. This is no defense of Lochte, by any means (I'm Team Roker), just a caution that there's far more to this tale than the convenient "ugly American" narrative many couldn't wait to tell.
Rio proved everybody wrong and ran a perfectly fine Olympics. Maybe it was slightly disorganized and sparsely attended, but it was no disaster. Pulling it off was going to be the host's legacy, not anything Ryan Lochte said. No, The bigger insult was to all the athletes who had their performances overshadowed by LochtMess.
Helen Maroulis won the first-ever wrestling gold for an American woman, upsetting a Japanese legend who'd lost two international matches in her 18-year career. When asked about whether she was disappointed that the focus of the media was elsewhere Maroulis said, matter-of-factly and without irritation, "if they covered Ryan Lochte over my match, well, I think that’s a poor decision on their part." And in the moment that felt most symbolic of Lochte's pathetic, attention-grabbing sham, Matthew Centrowitz became the first American to win the 1500m in 108 years and the live televised victory was immediately succeeded by the first snippet of the Lauer-Lochte sitdown.
With the requisite, soft-lit television apology complete, this seemingly endless story is finally entering its final stage — still less than a week after it began. Now that it's done, what was a salacious tabloid story custom-built for the world's biggest media gathering now seems like a poor man's Nancy vs. Tonya. I think the saga's place in Olympic history will be smaller than most expect.
Near the start of the interview, Lauer asked the question everybody had been dying to know all week. Why? Why tell the story? Why continue to lie about it? Why not step up to bail out his teammates — both college kids — who were stuck in Brazil because of him? Why?
"I don't know," he said.
It was the first believable thing he's said all week.
