During the 2016 Rio Olympics that occurred within the past two weeks, four U.S. Olympic swimmers consumed international news headlines for the entirety of the last week of the Olympics. Ryan Lochte, Jimmy Feigen, Jack Conger, and Gunnar Bentz during their last week in Rio, got tangled up in a mess involving being held at gunpoint, a potential robbery, and possible damages done at the hands of the swimmers. Lochte managed to leave Brazil even though his teammates were held back for questioning, and ever since returning to the states, has consistently gone back on his story.
The original story was that Lochte and fellow teammates were stopped by man who pointed a gun at Lochte's head, asking for money. A couple of days later, in an interview with NBC's Billy Bush, Lochte took back the claim of being held at gunpoint. He also admitted to "over-exaggerating the story." News then came out that Lochte and his fellow teammates, in a drunken spat, destroyed Brazilian property. To summarize the outcome of all of this: Lochte paid for the damage he made, and him and his fellow teammates got to go back to the states. Lochte then issued an apology on both his Twitter and Instagram pages.
Personally, reading Lochte's apology was like reading a frat guy's mumbled apology for being a destructive distraction to the party last night. Lochte's drunken spat, and then his proceeding to continue to lie about what he did during it is not only pure childishness, but an awful way to portray America and its values. Ryan Lochte is not a perfect human being, and no one expects him to be. However, for just two weeks, Lochte and his friends, like every other Olympian in their designated country, are representing their nation. People around the world look at another country's athletes and judge that country's core values based on how their top-trained athletes act like in the spotlight. Ryan Lochte had the audacity to go to a country that hosted him and leave an awful mark on it. He made a convenient media attention vehicle out of a country that is already tortured with crime and poverty on a daily basis.
Lochte's mistake is only meant to be re-examined because this must set a precedent, and the precedent this incident is for the Brock Turner rape case. No matter how decorated of an athlete, wealthy, and well-known a white male may be, it is imperative that he is held to the same standard as any other criminal. The day that American society begins to identify white male celebrities is the day in which justice will be a little more equal. A country in which one's economic status, talents, and/or race gives them a forcefield or hurts them in the eyes of the law, is a country that simply does not treat its citizens equally at all.
