Lochte gets 10 months: big whoop

Ryan Lochte gets a 10-month suspension. To share the insight offered by a teen observer: big whoop.

You know who the big winner here is? Ryan Lochte.

That conclusion is as undeniable as it is undesirable. It is also, despite the best intentions of Olympic and swim officials, the most profoundly disappointing part of this entire episode — all of it, from start to finish.

From Ryan Lochte’s perspective, it was all about Ryan Lochte on that boozy night in Rio. For the next week, it was all about Ryan Lochte instead of the scores of other athletes, American and otherwise, chasing their own Olympic dreams in Brazil.

Even since then, too. Since being back in the States from Rio, there have been only two main questions — one, how was it and, two, what about Ryan Lochte?

On Wednesday night, in the hours after TMZ broke the story of the 10-month suspension, it was still all about Lochte — instead of the athletes on U.S. Paralympic team or the Paralympic opening ceremony back in Rio.

And it was all about Lochte on Thursday, when the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Swimming formally announced the sanction. The USA Today headline: “Lochte’s Brazil gas station pals also suspended.”

Dude seriously could not have scripted this any better in advance of being on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Think about this:

In Rio, Lochte put the USOC and USA Swimming between a rock and a hard place. Then he did the exact same thing this week — those sports officials caught between wanting to impose sanction and the deadline of wanting to make that sanction public before next Monday’s season premiere of DWTS.

For that matter, the USOC and USA Swimming were in the same sort of rock-and-hard place dilemma in making it plain Lochte and the three others — Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger — had to be expecting a formal response. In embarrassing themselves, they also embarrassed the USOC and USA Swimming. So something had to be done. But what should that something be, and to what purpose?

Lochte also loses $100,000 in medal bonus money. That’s inconsequential in comparison to the four sponsors who have dropped him. But another has already said it intends to pick him up so he is clearly the farthest thing from radioactive.

The other three got four months away from the U.S. national team. Big whoop.

Bentz is back in college at Georgia. Conger is at Texas. They still can swim for their college teams.

Lochte has to do 20 hours of community service, Bentz 10 for violating the Olympic Village curfew rules for athletes under 21. As swimming’s world governing body, FINA, pointed out, the International Olympic Committee insisted on a community service element.

Bottom line:

It’s all profoundly disturbing.

Lochte is not a bad guy. Indeed, he can be a very good guy — always willing to sign autographs, especially for kids. He is personable. He can be very likable.

On the theory that everyone has to navigate his or her own path in this life, let’s be honest: there have to be moments when it can’t be easy being Ryan Lochte, with 12 Olympic medals, when Michael Phelps has 28.

Even so, there is so much that remains so troubling.

In late June, GQ magazine published a feature entitled “The De-Broing of Ryan Lochte,” in which he avowed that the 2016 version of himself that would be on display in Rio would be “more mature.”

After Rio, this from Lochte in People magazine:

“I made things up. I didn’t tell the truth.  And that’s on me. I messed up and made a big mistake, and I’m sorry.”

Even if you want to believe him — and there is, again, a lot of good in Lochte — it’s wholly unclear that he gets it.

To be clear: that is not a referendum on Lochte’s intelligence. He is not dumb. Really, he is not.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I have a big heart, and I feel like [I] let down a lot of people,” he also told the magazine. “I feel bad that I have let people down.”

All good. Except for what he said next:

“It sucks that it was one of the main focuses of the Olympics. That’s what stinks. The media blew it up and talked about it. It got out of control, and this was all anyone could talk about.”

The media blew it up? Hello?

“Everyone started watching it and they didn’t watch the athletes. That’s another reason why I’m so hurt by it, because it took away from the Games.”

Ryan Lochte is hurting?

Where is the responsibility and accountability?

That whole actions-matter-more-than-words thing, you know.

The straight line from peeing on a gas station wall to lying about it to abandoning your teammates to deal for themselves with the consequences to being featured on one of America’s most popular television shows makes for a discordant message — a bad, very bad disconnect — when it comes to the values the Olympic movement, the USOC and USA Swimming purport to stand for.

Here was Lochte, in Rio, before the partying but after his last race, fifth in the 200-meter IM, off the podium:

“In life, in swimming, in sports, there are always ups and downs. It is what you do when you have those downs who make you what you are.”

Actions, words, etc.

It’s not that Lochte is going on DWTS. It’s that he’s going now — without taking a hard look at who he is and, in particular, the role alcohol plays in his decision-making.

At 32, he knows the bro thing comes with a sell-by date. But talking about it is one thing and acting like the mature role model he should be apparently another. The question he has yet to examine, and far away from the spotlight: why is he saying one thing and doing another?

For the sake of discussion, which requires in this context putting aside for a moment the peeing and the lying — it’s also a fair question to ask whether Lochte should have stuck around Rio. That is, should he have left Brazil when he did?

Should he, in essence, have kept to his regularly scheduled programming?

Or is the idea of “justice” in Brazil so fundamentally different that he did the right thing by getting out of dodge?

Here’s what Lochte should have done:

The moment Conger and Bentz were dragged off a plane, that is the instant Lochte should have called the USOC and USA Swimming and asked, what can or should I do?

Did he?

Looking at this from another angle:

Lochte didn’t hurt anyone. When Phelps was arrested for driving under the influence, it was because he was deemed a menace to the public health. So: why is Lochte getting more?

Because this is apples and oranges. Luckily, Phelps didn’t hurt anyone. And what’s at issue here is reputation and credibility — for Lochte, the USOC and USA Swimming.

In a statement sent to USA Today, Lochte’s lawyer, Jeff Ostrow, said, “We accept the decision as [we] believe it is in everyone’s best interest to move forward, adding in the next paragraph, “That said, in my oinion, while the collective sanctions appear to be harsh when considering what actually happened that day — Ryan did not commit a crime, he did not put the public safety at risk and he did not cheat in his sport — we will leave it to others to evaluate the appropriateness of the penalties.”

That sort of thing is called advocating for your client.

Back to reality: Phelps got six months. U.S. soccer goalie Hope Solo got six months, too. So six was a starting place for Lochte.

And yet — 10 months away from competition won’t achieve anything, practically speaking.

Frankly, it’s laughable.

Yes, it’s 10 months, ending in June 2017, with a plus — just the way Phelps had to stay away from the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, Lochte will now be ineligible for the 2017 worlds in Budapest next July.

So what?

The 10 months is time Lochte would have taken off, anyway.

He was never going to be serious about 2017. In Rio, after that 200 IM, he said:

“It has been a long journey. I think now it is time for me to take a break, mentally and physically, to just get myself back to when I was a little kid having fun again. i can’t say this is my last time swimming. So we will see what happens.”

For two, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a story midway through the Rio Games, Phelps’ lengthy post-London break may now well serve as a template for others, especially older athletes such as Lochte, who is now 32. Why grind away for four solid years when, as Phelps proved conclusively, you can train less — push for maybe 18 months — and still win bunches of medals? For his part, Phelps turned 31 in late June.

For three, in keeping Phelps away from the 2015 Kazan worlds, USA Swimming could not have been any more clear about how it views what is purportedly the marquee event on the FINA calendar in odd-numbered years. Same for Lochte and 2017 in Budapest.

A note: Lochte will now lose out on the chance to win a fifth straight 200 IM worlds gold. Same theme: so what? He already has four, and fifth at the 2016 Olympics hardly makes him the odds-on 2017 favorite.

For four, and this is a nugget that swim geeks would understand immediately but takes just a few words of explanation for a wider audience:

Leaving U.S. college racing aside, because it is measured in yards, there are two kinds of racing at the world-class level, both in meters: long-course events, such as the Olympics or the (2017 Budapest) worlds, which take part in a 50-meter pool, and short-course, over a 25-meter set-up.

Lochte has for years been one of the few U.S. swimmers to excel at both, a mainstay of the U.S. short-course team.

Anytime Lochte wants, he can start racing short-course to get himself back up to speed. So it’s way off the mark, as some might suggest, that Lochte’s career is at a dead-end for two or maybe even three years, until the 2019 long-course worlds, now set for Gwangju, South Korea.

At the DWTS “cast reveal” party this week in New York, Lochte also told People, “I’m excited for, not only myself, but everyone else to forget about what happened and to move forward. I think that’s what the biggest thing is — what we’re gonna do is just move forward and show off my dancing skills.”

Just — so troubling. All around.

Recalibrating the apocalypse narrative

From the Department of the Obvious: many if not most pre-Games reports of the 2016 Rio Olympics bore the tone of prophecies signaling the Biblical end of days.

From the same department: this did not happen.

It is now a week since the 2016 Games came to a close. Thus the logical follow-up question: why, before the August 5 opening ceremony, did Rio produce so many projections if not outright declarations of imminent doom?

And the corollary: going forward, isn’t it worth serious reflection and reconsideration from the many who predicted the sky would fall — not just about what they produced but about the role and value of the Olympics in our fragile world.

To be clear, the Olympics do not represent, nor have they ever, an exercise in perfection. That is not possible nor even in the least bit desirable. What the Olympics stand for is an appeal to our better selves and the notion of certain ideals, in particular friendship, excellence and respect.

To be even more clear, the Olympic movement is itself full of imperfections. This is natural. We are all human, and we are flawed. All the more so the International Olympic Committee.

Yet a Games produces a moment — 17 days, really — when athletes from all over the world, young people in the main, gather and don’t kill each other. This is not meant to be glib. The timeline of human history is replete with conflict over connection. The Olympics provide a way and a means for all of us to explore the things we have in common rather than exploiting our differences.

This is a unique thing in the annals of the human experience. It is worth celebrating.

And yet.

The IOC for sure can, and should, do a better job both of acknowledging its shortcomings and of explaining the constructive things it does, and why. Bid committees, and the follow-on organizing committees, absolutely can and should be held accountable when they over-promise and under-deliver -- see, for instance, the Rio 2016 bid's assertion that it would clean up the local bays and beaches.

Of course, it's news -- appropriately so -- when the oceanfront bike path in Rio collapsed because of high surf, killing two people.

In that spirit, it's also more than legitimate to observe that infrastructure projects in Rio, and in other recent Games cities, were either designed to or in practice have benefitted primarily the affluent. Too, Olympic-related projects have often seen the authorities push people out of their homes. Here is a key example where bid and organizing committees -- pushed by the IOC -- ought to be on the hook from the get-go, required to state in bidding documents what, if any, relocations will be required to deliver promised construction.

For all that:

No one likes criticism, least of all my colleagues, friends and otherwise in the media.

But — to the collective you:

Your scare stories were absurd. Your level of expectation: ridiculous. Your predictions of far-reaching calamity: 100 percent wrong.

The developed world’s assessment and pre-Games judgment of developing Brazil smacked, in many instances, of smug privilege if not the very worst strands of colonialism and imperialism. Why expect Rio to be London or Vancouver?

Social media amplified the predictions of catastrophe. A threat on Reddit was dedicated to the “Apocalympics.”

Consider the Zika thing — which, among other consequences, purportedly led to the withdrawal of many top male golfers from golf’s debut at the Olympics.

The World Health Organization said last Thursday that no one appears to have caught Zika at the Games. That means, according to WHO, “spectators, athletes or anyone associated with the Olympics.”

To be even more direct — not one worker at the Rio golf grounds.

Yet the world’s top guy pros wouldn't or couldn’t go?

Hello, everybody — when did it dawn on you that August in Brazil is like February in the northern hemisphere and the mosquito populations in Rio would be way, way down? I was in Rio from July 28 through August 22 and literally did not see, hear or feel even one mosquito.

For that matter — what of the onset of the virus in Puerto Rico? Or South Florida?

As an entirely reasonable pre-Games CBC story pointed out, there was entirely more risk in Rio from street crime, getting hit by a bus or developing a sexually transmitted disease than from Zika.

Translation: life. Like being out and about in any big city anywhere.

Would you know that from the hysteria level of the reportage?

Which leads, in a direct line, to this kind of abject stupidity from the likes of U.S. women’s soccer team goalie Hope Solo:

Not sharing this!!! Get your own! #zikaproof #RoadToRio

A photo posted by Hope Solo (@hopesolo) on Jul 21, 2016 at 7:57pm PDT

To be clear, accounts of this challenge or that attending an edition of the Olympic Games have been a constant for more than a century. So that’s hardly new.

Twelve years ago, things before the Athens Olympics were in such a state of unease — the first post-9/11 Summer Games — that the Los Angeles Times, where I was then a staff writer, ordered us all to undergo gas-mask and terrorism-response training before flying to Greece.

As if journalists were suddenly going to become first-responders.

Even by Athens standards, however, what was new this time was both the depth and the breadth of it all — the sustained ferocity of the pack and its collective narrative.

Many people don't like change and, by extension, anything new. These were the first-ever Games in South America. A therapist might say these Games represented a variation on the classic "other" -- a source of concern, if not fear, since the dawn of time.

As Oliver Holt of the British outlet Mail on Sunday (his reporting was thoroughly reasonable throughout) observed in a Twitter post:

https://twitter.com/OllieHolt22/status/764523895777009664

Consider the 90-minute HBO “Real Sports” evisceration of the IOC.

Here was the opening sentence of an early July opinion piece in the New York Times:

“It’s official: The Olympic Games in Rio are an unnatural disaster.”

Here was, as the promo blurb for his new book about the Olympics called him, “the renowned sportswriter” David Goldblatt, on July 26 in the Guardian:

“In the face of such multiple disasters and injustices, history seems to offer Rio wriggle room. It can claim that Athens was more last minute and produced more white elephants, Sochi was as least as corrupt and wasteful, Beijing was more repressive, Seoul’s displacements were more widespread and viscous and Atlanta’s social cleansing more thorough. However, Rio is giving all of them a run for their money and adding its own unique injustices and shameful dissembling.”

Here was a history professor in the July 19 issue of Time magazine:

“The Rio Games will be a failure, no matter how successful they might be in terms of athletic accomplishment and spectator enjoyment, because our global sense of an international order has failed. It is a divided, distracted and even defeated international community that is slouching towards Rio.”

Do the Olympics deserve scrutiny? For sure. And for emphasis: journalistic responsibility and holding accountable those in positions of authority is wholly appropriate.

But — what’s also appropriate in the big picture is a more appropriate measure, please, of balance and perspective.

The New York Times' Chris Clarey, in a column published last Friday, summed up aptly:

"Rio deserved a more balanced, less hysterical prologue, just as it deserves a more balanced, less triumphal epilogue."

Is it realistic to expect an Olympic Games to solve every social problem in successive cities? Not in the slightest. The better question: why is that the question in the first instance?

A fair judgment on any Olympics takes 20 years. Look at Barcelona before 1992, and now. The place is totally transformed.

Athens has a ways to go before history can be in any way fair in rendering a verdict on those 2004 Games. Are there sports facilities that are just sitting now in the sun? For sure. At the same time, did the Games bring a new airport and new metro lines — and have they enhanced life, generally speaking?

Same in Rio. New transport lines. New waterfront park makeover. As the New York Times observed in a story published last Sunday, Rio "is altered if not reborn."

In the meantime, it's a real question why the ladies and gentlemen of the press, who are free with criticism when it's someone else,  don’t do the one thing they ask of the people they cover — that is, to be consistent.

Examples:

How many stories were produced before the Sochi 2014 Games about Russia’s anti-gay propaganda law? And after?

How many reports were published before the Beijing 2008 Games about China’s human rights record? And after?

The good news about Rio is not just that disaster was, in fact, averted. It’s not even that a whole bunch of people wrote “gee, I guess that was OK” stories upon their Rio departures.

It’s that Rio has confirmed for increasing numbers within the IOC the realization, after 30 years of the Games as catalyst for wholesale public-policy makeovers, that it really is in a different game. It’s not in the infrastructure business. It’s in the inspiration business.

The consequence: the IOC needs — not should, but needs — to go for the 2024 Games to a city where the sports venues, the transport, the overall logistic package already exist. Essentially, this means either Paris or Los Angeles. Rome and Budapest are also in the race. The IOC will pick next September.

The IOC is recalibrating.

Time for the press to do the same.

Lochtegate: what is wrong with this picture?

Something is seriously amiss in our cultural — indeed, our moral and ethical — landscape if Ryan Lochte’s next move turns out to be a starring turn on “Dancing with the Stars.”

The producers of DWTS must be themselves dancing with glee over this publicity coup. Everyone loves a train wreck. Who wouldn’t tune in?

Reports emerged Wednesday that Lochte would appear on the show. He was said to have struck a deal to appear on DWTS before Lochtegate — that is, his purported robbery tale and its twists and turns at the just-concluded Rio Games.

Everybody has a right to make a living and, goodness knows, Lochte may be in need of cash flow after four sponsors ditched him on Monday.

But that’s not the only interest that is crying out here to be served.

Indeed, here is the one that seems way more important than ratings. Heresy, some will say, but here goes:

How is it that a guy who “over-exaggerates,” to use his phrasing, gets to revel in a network-TV spotlight when he, whether intentionally or not, cut and run in the aftermath of whatever it is that happened at that Rio gas station, leaving his three much-younger teammates to fend for themselves with the Brazilian authorities while he, details of the story changing with different tellings, was already back in the States?

Lochte would hardly be the first to try the DWTS approach to redemption, as the Atlantic magazine underscored in a piece published Wednesday. The difference is that he is an Olympic athlete -- not a politician, or a politician's kid, or a celebrity chef.

Being an Olympic athlete -- in Lochte's case, a multiple Olympic champion -- brings with it a different set of responsibilities and sensibilities. Bristol Palin as role model? Be serious. Paula Deen? Get real. But Ryan Lochte, until Lochtegate, was role model to a lot of people.

That's why the likes of Apolo Ohno, Shawn Johnson, Nastia Liukin and Natalie Coughlin have been on the show. Those appearances showcased Olympic gold-medalist role models.

As a USA Today report makes clear, there are lots of sides to Lochtegate.

Even so, as anyone in middle or high school would reasonably ask:

How come Ryan Lochte gets to lie and he ran away and now he’s going to be on "Dancing with the Stars"?

Don’t we teach our kids that there are consequences to behavior? That the important thing is to tell the truth? That lying about it afterward is worse than whatever it is that actually happened?

Perception is as important, if not more, than reality. The USA Today report makes plain that elements of what Lochte has said are, in fact, true. But that pales in comparison to the big picture — the impact on impressionable young people, especially with school starting up again, because that first reasonable school-kid question leads directly to the next, which is the core issue.

What kind of message does it send to America’s young people when Olympic athletes misbehave and then seemingly get rewarded for it?

In response to that rhetorical question, a rhetorical question:

Doesn’t that cut against every single nugget of accountability and responsibility we as adults say is important?

For all the he-said, he-said and the back-and-forth about what happened that night, some pieces are indisputable:

Lochte “over-exaggerated.”

He is 32 years old. He was out with three college kids. Way after midnight, when grown-ups know nothing good happens. If you are in your early or mid-20s, and a guy — supposedly a team leader — who is 32 says, let’s do x, and this is a guy who you grew up idolizing on YouTube and now you’re out partying with him, you’re going to say no?

By his own account, Lochte had been drinking. A lot. So much that when he gave his first account to Billy Bush, he says, he was still feeling it.

What’s especially disquieting about all this is that USA Swimming has long had a distinct culture of accountability and responsibility. Over the years, at any number of world championships and Olympic Games, the stand-up nature of America’s best swimmers has readily come to the fore when someone, say, makes a mistake on a relay — it’s one for all and all for one.

But that’s not in any sense what happened here. Where is Lochte’s accountability? Where was his responsibility to his younger teammates and, indeed, to the team itself?

Before any edition of a Games, every single U.S. athlete on an Olympic team, since the days of ski racer Bode Miller’s declaration at the 2006 Torino Winter Games that he got to “party and socialize at an Olympic level,” goes through what’s called an “ambassador” program.

The thrust is to remind American athletes that being on the Olympic team is a privilege but one that, because they are Americans, carries special responsibilities. Be humble, the U.S. Olympians are told. Most of all, be respectful in every regard when it comes to the host country.

Lochte has been through that program at least three times — 2008, 2012 and 2016. Or at least he should have been through it three times. What, did everything sound to him like Miss Othmar in the Charlie Brown cartoons? Wah wah wah? What?

A point of intrigue here is that Lochte had said in Rio, after he was done racing but before the whole thing erupted, that he was mentally, physically and emotionally worn out.  Maybe he would try to come back in four years to try for the Tokyo Olympics, he said, but for now he needed some time off.

One of his fundamental miscalculations is that he got going on that time off too soon.

Or is that really what he was thinking? In a June interview with Time, he said this:

“You can’t have girls in a guy’s room or guys in a girl’s room,” referring to U.S. rules in the athletes’ village. “No alcohol. You’re there to compete, you’re not there to party. So once swimming is all said and done, if you want to do those kind of things, you have to leave the village and go on your own.”

USA Swimming officials would be 100 percent right to assert that the best parts of their culture run deep.

At the same time, something is clearly amiss when this Lochte situation is directly traceable to alcohol; Michael Phelps was arrested twice on suspicion of DUI before getting himself to rehab; and the Brock Turner sexual assault case at Stanford was tied to alcohol consumption.

Alcohol and a party culture have for years been part of the big-time swim scene, too. Lochte has long been a fixture. A quick Google search will prove the point — just try “Ryan Lochte” and “Las Vegas” and see what turns up.

The alcohol thing is by no means any sort of excuse for anyone’s behavior. It may be offered as explanation. But that absolutely does not elevate it to excuse.

A disclaimer here:

None of this is fun to write. I have known Ryan Lochte for many years. He has always been kind, gracious and courteous to everyone he has met at and around USA Swimming affairs.

He is not anywhere near as dumb as most people believe. That’s his public persona.

Moreover, he has for years been the face of USA Swimming in any number of promotional campaigns. That is because — in addition to being ripped and good looking, obvious positives when you’re doing an ad campaign — he can be, genuinely, a really good guy.

But what Lochte did in Rio was the opposite of what really good guys do.

For one, he robbed any number of worthy athletes of their Olympic spotlight. That’s inexcusable, moments lost forever in time. As Scott Blackmun, the USOC chief executive put it in a news conference as the Games were winding down, referring to Lochte and the three other swimmers, “They let down our athletes. They let down Americans.

“And they really let down our hosts in Rio who did such a wonderful job, and we feel very badly about that.”

Lochte’s conduct has also set in motion any number of inquiries.

One, by the International Olympic Committee, seems entirely out of line. This is not an IOC problem. If Ryan Lochte is their problem, then so are the two Mongolian wrestling coaches who stripped out of their clothes, one to his underwear, in protest of a controversial scoring decision. So, just to be even more obvious, is Patrick Hickey, the Irish member of the IOC’s policy-making executive board, arrested in Rio amid allegations of misconduct with Games tickets; he is being held in a maximum-security Rio prison while his case slowly moves along.

As far as eligibility goes, what to do with Lochte is appropriately a matter for the U.S. Olympic Committee; USA Swimming; and the world swimming body, which goes by the acronym FINA.

The starting baseline, clearly, is six months off. At the least.

Last year, USA Swimming suspended Phelps for six months and kept him away from that summer’s world championships.

US Soccer on Wednesday announced a six-month suspension from the women’s national team for Hope Solo — for being disrespectful in calling the Swedish team a “bunch of cowards” after a Rio loss, or as the federation put it, “conduct that is counter to the organization’s principles.” (So here apparently is something that Lochte and Solo could have in common besides being the leading contenders for the title of America's biggest jerk in Rio -- she was on DWTS, too.)

In Lochte’s case, how meaningful, really, would six months off be? Like zero. Next year’s world championships are almost a full year away.

Whatever the terms of the suspension, in addition Lochte needs to be ordered to do some sort of community service. Say, teaching kids to swim. Or picking up garbage on the side of the highway — which might help make clear to him the elements of privilege that he indisputably has put on display.

If he were smart, Lochte ought to get ahead of this story and get himself to rehab. Like Phelps was, he is at a crossroads: trying to figure out who he really is, and what his identity is, or ought to be, when he’s not swimming for Olympic medals.

If he does rehab and can stay clean and sober for a while, then maybe Lochte deserves a shot at something like "Dancing with the Stars."

Then the narrative changes. Then he becomes a redemption story.

Everyone — again, everyone — makes mistakes. And everyone — this includes Ryan Lochte — deserves a second chance.

What he doesn’t deserve, right now, is the chance to capitalize on bad behavior. That’s just wrong.

'Iconic' or not, Rio sighs to close

RIO de JANEIRO — Imperfect for sure, like life itself, the Rio 2016 Summer Games sighed Sunday to a close, an Olympics likely to go down in history for first-rate sport that offered a break from a welter of financial, logistical and political challenges or perhaps served merely to underscore just how difficult it is, now, to put on an Olympic Games.

For every Michael Phelps, there was the story of green water in the diving pool. For every Usain Bolt, there was the stray bullet that pierced the tent at the equestrian center. For every Simone Biles, there were the winds that ripped an overhead television camera from its cable at Olympic Park, injuring seven people, two of them children.

To draw an analogy from golf, which made its Olympic debut here with many of the world’s top male professionals opting out: these Games were a grind, hazards everywhere, the kind of round where any reasonable player would, upon sinking that last putt on 18 to complete a round pocked with bogeys,  pause to look around and go — whew.

Made it. Somehow.

“I am the happiest man alive,” the president of the Rio 2016 organizing committee, Carlos Nuzman, said at Sunday’s closing ceremony, a moment later calling these Games “a great challenge but a great success.”

The Rio Games may not have been the biggest, or the smoothest, or the most significant or, hardly, the best. But they were the first-ever in South America. And considering the political and economic upheaval buffeting Brazil, the assessment rendered Saturday at a news conference by the International Olympic Committee president, Thomas Bach, seems worth reviewing:

“An iconic Games but it is also a Games in the middle of reality,” he said, adding, “It has not been organized in a bubble but in a city where there are social problems and social divides, where real life continued.

“This was very good for everybody — to be close to reality and not in a bubble for 16 days and isolated from society.”

In 2009, when the IOC awarded these Games to Rio, over Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo, Brazil’s economy was booming. Party! Like the percussive dance jam that pumped through Sunday night’s closing ceremony at the famed Maracanã Stadium, accented by the return of the shirtless, oiled-up, buff opening ceremony flag bearer from Tonga, the taekwondo athlete Pita Taufatofua.

Problem is, between 2009 and Sunday night, the Brazilian economy crashed.

This made plain the No. 1 issue that bedeviled these 2016 Games. It was not lack of planning or late planning or attention to detail, though those were concerns. Instead, when issues stemming from planning or detail would arise, there simply was not sufficient money to make it 100 percent right. This reality, when the Paralympics open in just a couple weeks amid deep budget cuts, will be even more manifest.

Meanwhile, Brazil has been buffeted by political corruption and turmoil. The country is, even now, in the midst of a presidential impeachment drama.

Then, in the weeks before the Games, the headlines elsewhere frequently trumpeted fears of Zika, of scary water, of the street crime and way, way more, including outrage — from all sides — over reports of state-sanctioned doping in Russia.

It is worth noting that, before Brazil, the only nation to have put on both the soccer World Cup and the Olympics in a two-year span is the United States, soccer in 1994 and the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta. Those 1996 Games are not remembered fondly — with transit, technology and security woes.

The 2014 World Cup happened. And the many predictions of colossal disaster for Rio 2016: averted.

Zika: swarms of mosquitoes did not appear. Water: rowers, sailors, swimmers did their thing. Security: a lot of armed soldiers but, to be honest, that is now reality everywhere post-9/11.

Indeed, as soon as the sport itself got underway, the spotlight shifted to the athletes of the world, and their struggles and accomplishments.

To quote the American Sam Kendricks, bronze medalist in the men’s pole vault: "The Olympics is like high tide, it raises all boats and brings the best out of all of us."

The Russian ban meant its usually-strong track and field team — with the exception of one long jumper, Darya Klishina — didn’t travel. She finished ninth in the women’s long jump.

That helped open the door for the United States, in particular, to record its best medal count since the boycott-marked 1984 Los Angeles Games — 121 overall, 46 gold. Second depends how you count, by gold or overall. The American way prioritizes the overall count. China had 70, 26 gold. The rest of the world goes by the gold standard. Great Britain finished with 27 gold, 67 overall.

The Russian team finished with 56 and 19.

In 1984, the Americans won 174 total. In London four years ago, 103.

The U.S. swim team won 33 of the 121 medals. The track team, 32, Galen Rupp running Sunday morning to bronze in the men’s marathon.

Some stalwarts produced as expected.

Katie Ledecky won four gold medals (and a silver), setting two world records.

Phelps, five gold medals (and a silver). He now has 28 career Olympic medals, 23 gold.

Biles, the world’s best gymnast: four gold medals (and a bronze). She carried the U.S. flag into the  closing ceremony.

Usain Bolt completed the triple-triple, winning the 100m, 200m and taking part in the victorious 4x100m relay for a third straight Games — after London in 2012 and Beijing in 2008.

The U.S. women’s basketball team cruised to a sixth straight gold.

On Sunday, in one of the final contests of the Games, the U.S. men’s basketball team completed a three-peat under coach Mike Krzyzewski, defeating Serbia, 96-66, for gold. The NBA star and USA Basketball stalwart Carmelo Anthony won his third gold medal— the only male basketball player in Olympic history with three golds.

Before the game, Krzyzewski was asked about the 2016 Games. He said, “We’ve been treated in just amazing fashion and the care, the security, the friendliness, just the hospitality of the Brazilian people, have been spectacular. I hope we win but I’ll tell you what — we’ll go away with a great feeling about Rio. We’ve loved being here. We could not have been treated better.”

“This is still a magic city and a magic place,” Nuzman insisted Sunday night.

Some performances, even if unexpected, proved thrilling — the magic, perhaps, of the Olympic experience.

Brazil gained a measure of revenge for the 7-1 2014 German World Cup semifinal beatdown by defeating Germany to win gold in men’s soccer, 5-4 on penalties after tying 1-1 in regulation.

South Africa’s Wayde van Niekerk not only won gold in the men’s 400m, he set a new world record, 43.03 seconds — obliterating Michael Johnson’s 1999 mark, 43.18. Britain’s Mo Farah completed the distance double-double, winning the men’s 5000m and 10000m runs, just as he had in London. Matthew Centrowitz of the United States won the men’s 1500m at the track, the first gold for the United States in that event since 1908 — a signal of karma, perhaps, for Chicago Cubs fans everywhere.

The American swimmer Anthony Ervin, 35 years old, won the men’s 50m free a full 16 years after he had done the very same thing in Sydney. The U.S. track standout Allyson Felix won three medals, two gold in the relays, and now has six golds overall — most of any female track athlete in Olympic history.

If the essence of that Olympic experience, meantime, is the gathering of the world’s young people, there was more, way more, in the unexpected category.

The Fiji men’s rugby sevens team won that island nation’s first-ever Olympic medal. It was gold. 

Kosovo judoka Majlinda Kelmendi won that eastern Europe nation’s first-ever Olympic medal. It was gold. 

Singapore swimmer Joe Schooling won that small Southeast Asian nation’s first-ever Olympic gold. He won the men’s 100m butterfly, with Phelps, South Africa’s Chad le Clos and Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh forging a three-way tie for silver.

The 10 members of the refugee Olympic team didn’t win any medals - not hardly. 

No matter.

“I hope,” swimmer Yusra Mardini, who escaped the war in Syria, said after the heats of the women’s 100m freestyle, “refugees are not refugees any more and they have their hope to continue their dreams after they see us."

At the beach volleyball venue, in an early-round women’s match, Egypt played Germany, Egyptian Doaa Elghobashy fully clothed and her head covered in a hijab, the German duo in bikinis.

Before the Brazil-Argentina men’s basketball game last weekend, a thrilling affair that went to double overtime, Argentina prevailing, 111-107, Brazil’s Marcelo Huertas and Argentina’s Luis Scola addressed the crowd to make a plea for the key Olympic values: friendship, excellence and, most of all, respect.

“We’re Latin American brothers,” Huertas said, “and we are counting on you to have a celebration."

Scola said, “On behalf of my team, I want to ask you to cheer for your team, to have fun in a civilized manner and with a lot of respect."

This, in the end, is the enduring lesson of the Olympics — one the American swimmer Ryan Lochte is sure to have considerable time to mull over in the aftermath of his purported robbery story, a tale that hijacked considerable focus the second week of the Games away from the hopes and dreams of the many athletes still here.

The IOC has opened a review of the matter. The U.S. Olympic Committee, in a news conference Sunday, said disciplinary action of some sort is forthcoming, chief executive Scott Blackmun saying of Lochte and three other swimmers, “They let down our athletes. They let down Americans.”

Meanwhile, Ireland’s Patrick Hickey, a member of the IOC’s policy-making executive board, was arrested on suspicion of involvement in a ticket scam. If Monday is travel day for most who were here, the 71-year-old Hickey’s immediate future remains entirely unclear. He reportedly was locked up in the maximum security Bangu Prison here while the wheels of Brazilian justice start to spin.

Because of the way the Olympic cycle works, it’s now roughly 17 months until the next edition of a Games — the 2018 Winter Olympics, in the hamlet of Pyeongchang, South Korea. This past Tuesday, Taylor Fletcher won his first U.S. national title in Nordic combined; in warm weather, they substitute roller skis for the waxed winter kind. 

In between Rio and Pyeongchang, at an assembly in September, 2017, in Lima, Peru, the IOC will make its 2024 pick. Los Angeles, Paris, Rome and Budapest are in the hunt.

Tokyo will put on the 2020 Games. The IOC here affirmed the introduction of new sports at those 2020 Olympics, among them surfing, skateboarding and rock climbing. Late Sunday, as Rio came to a close, the Olympic Channel went online — the Olympic movement’s digital effort to make the Games more relevant than a thing every two weeks every two years, to highlight the stories of the athletes who, despite everything, can and do provide inspiration to the little kids they used to be and, as well, the grown-ups trying to make sense of our imperfect world.

As Bach said in opening these Rio Olympics, “We are living in a world of crises, mistrust and uncertainty. Here is our Olympic answer."

Further crises and uncertainties assuredly await. The next editions of the Olympics, too, “iconic” or not.

31 medals (at least), all with class and character

RIO de JANEIRO — For a generation, USA Track & Field has been chasing an elusive goal: 30 Olympic medals.

Here in Rio, in a run at Olympic Stadium that underscores the major up-pointing trend in the American track and field scene, the Americans have — through Saturday night — won 31. The men’s marathon is yet to come Sunday. Those due to run include Meg Keflezighi, silver medalist at Athens 2004 and winner of the 2014 Boston Marathon.

On Saturday night, Matthew Centrowitz Jr. won the men’s 1500m in a front-running, tactically savvy 3:50 flat — the first gold for the United States in that race since 1908. In the men’s 5000, Britain’s Mo Farah won, completing the 2012 and 2016 5000m and 10,000m distance double, the American Paul Chelimo crossing the line second. Moments later, Chelimo was disqualified for a lane infringement; then, later, in the evening, he was reinstated, the first U.S. men’s 5k medal since Tokyo 1964.

Those were medals 28 and 29.

Then came the women’s and men’s 4x400 relays. Both American teams won, medals 30 and 31, Allyson Felix anchoring to a sixth straight Olympic victory for the U.S. women, all four thereafter carrying around the stadium a banner that said, “Thank you, Rio.”

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://bit.ly/2bcINiF

Semenya: center of dilemma with no easy answers

RIO de JANEIRO — The Olympics seek to promote three key values: excellence, friendship and respect. It thus follows logically that the Olympic ideal seeks to realize the best in each of us on the grounds that doing so makes all of us, together, better.

Sport has rules. These rules mean that a soccer game in Brussels is the same as a soccer game in Seoul is the same as a soccer game in Wichita.

In the person of Caster Semenya, the runner from South Africa who on Saturday night at Olympic Stadium dominated the women’s 800m, winning in 1:55.28, these two big ideas clash.

It is entirely unclear how these tensions could — or should — be resolved.

It is in the person of Semenya that sport stands at one of its new frontiers — at the intersection of science, cultural norms and evolving standards of gender fluidity.

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://bit.ly/2bujL1S

Bolt wraps up the three-pack three-peat

RIO de JANEIRO — After winning the eighth race of his Olympic career, Usain Bolt offered this trenchant observation:

“I don’t need to prove anything else,” he said after Thursday’s men’s 200-meter dash. “What else can I do to prove to the world I am the greatest?”

Nothing. Absolutely zero.

As Ashton Eaton, the decathlon champion said, and this goes for all who have had the privilege to bear witness to Bolt’s collection of astonishing turns on the track, said, “It has been an absolute pleasure to compete in the same era as Usain Bolt.”

Even the gods, of some sort, seemed to agree Friday night. A golden full moon lit up the sky over Olympic Stadium as Bolt, in what he has vowed will be his last Olympic competition, led the Jamaican men’s 4x100-meter relay team to victory, in 37.27 seconds.

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://bit.ly/2bDSA0X

Simply, all around, the best

RIO de JANEIRO — Ashton Eaton is, again, the world's greatest all-around athlete.

And so, so much more.

To fully appreciate the gold medal that Ashton won Thursday night after 10 events in the decathlon means to wholly appreciate as well the bronze medal that his wife, Brianne Theisen-Eaton, who competes for Canada, won last Saturday in the heptathlon.

Ashton and Brianne are husband and wife. And way more.

They are a team. One’s success is the other’s.

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics: http://bit.ly/2b2ZP6v

Weird, easy, fun: a one-off relay run-off

RIO de JANEIRO — Some people love, in their lives, to create drama. Allyson Felix is not one of these people. She is calm, steady, composed, even-keeled. Pretty much all the time.

Some mysterious karma, however, seemingly delights in connecting the Olympic experience and Allyson Felix with weird mega-drama.

“Why me?” Felix said Thursday evening with a smile.

Referring to her brother and manager, Wes, she said, “I was laughing with my brother about it. Sometimes you just have to laugh. Yeah … it’s just very, very strange.”

In what is widely believed to be an unprecedented Olympic relay do-over, the U.S. women’s 4x100m team — with Felix pulling the second leg — ran Thursday morning in a tangled mess, then got the chance Thursday evening to run again, in a time trial, to try to qualify for the relay final back here Friday night at Olympic Stadium.

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://bit.ly/2bMU9xs

First time ever: U.S. women 1-2-3 at Olympic track event

RIO de JANEIRO — In tribute to everyone’s favorite guessing game Wednesday at the 2016 Olympics, herewith this twist on the Where’s Waldo game:

Where’s Ryan Lochte? Back in the United States! After first making a stop at Olympic Village!

Where are the gold, silver and bronze medals in the women’s 100m hurdles? Just like Ryan Lochte — same!

In the final event on a busy track and field calendar Wednesday at Olympic Stadium, Americans Brianna Rollins, Nia Ali and Kristi Castlin swept the women’s 100m hurdles, Rollins winning in 12.48 seconds.

The sweep by the U.S. women marked a significant first in Olympic history.

To read the rest of this column, please click through to NBCOlympics.com: http://bit.ly/2bojZrh