August 14, 2016, Footsteps
What I share with Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is that I am a fabulously handsome thirty-two year old am an incredible athlete with a dozen Olympic swimming medals was mugged in Rio de Janeiro... in Lochte's case, at gunpoint.
Naturally, the Olympic organizers' reaction was... to deny it even happened.
Lots of good stuff going on at Rio-- such as first time gold medals for Fiji (rugby) and Puerto Rico (women's tennis), or Phelps and Ledecky and Biles and (f'ing eh!) Usain Bolt and Wayde van Niekerkand (the latter, a South African who just destroyed Michael Johnson's 400 meter world record, with his 74 year old female coach named Botha no less watching) and so many other notable moments (such as algae-laden swimming pools, polluted waterways for boating and other events, and, well... crime...)
Sadly, the Brazilian state is in financial distress, and paying for both the World Cup of Soccer in 2014 and the current Olympics... is a problem. Rio has always been crime ridden (as far as I know... I was mugged there in 1989... albeit not at gunpoint... and indeed. ,my youngish assailants abandoned their efforts when all I had was a brick of local currency, having already changed much of my yankee dollars into what were then cruzeiros.)
But I digress. An Olympics featuring a refugee team... quite a statement. Recognition of what is an increasing issue, to be sure. An American competing in hijab. Majority of the USA team is female. Times they are a changing.
Except that Rio is still a crime-ridden and troubled place.
Update (8-20-16): Of course, it's entirely possible that Ryan Lochte, pissed off that he and his comrades had to piss outside (a gast station that they stopped at to use the rest room) in some bushes, decided to vandalize a poster and then be arrogant and militant about it, resulting in a (perhaps) armed response from security guards at a gas station (say two of the four Americans involved). As usual... don't know... wasn't there. Of course, the saturation coverage of this story does make one wonder... just what other story out there hasn't been getting coverage, under... cover (as it were) of these swimmers behaving badly?