In Hot Water

Ryan Lochte Will Explain Himself in a Matt Lauer Interview Tonight

Maybe we’ll get some answers about why and how his supposed Rio robbery went down.
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By Matt Hazlett/Getty Images.

Ryan Lochte is setting the record straight. A week after he first claimed that he and a couple other teammates had been robbed at gunpoint in Rio, he sat down with Today’s Matt Lauer for an interview that will air Saturday on NBC to explain everything that’s going on.

The International Olympic Committee at first denied Lochte’s claims, but he insisted that they were true—and we were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But now that everything’s finally out in the open, we know that instead of being robbed by people dressed as cops, Lochte and his fellow swimmers actually vandalized a gas station, then were asked by an armed security guard to pay for the damage they had caused. This whole thing could have been avoided if Lochte hadn’t lied to his mom about it in the first place: Ileana Lochte was the first person to tell the press about the alleged robbery. When the truth finally did come out, Brazilian law enforcement was, understandably, not pleased.

There’s no telling what exactly will happen in this interview tonight, but we’re sure that some apologies will probably need to be made. Lochte has already apologized publicly on his Instagram, where he said he should have been “more careful and candid” when he described the events of that morning. No kidding. Hopefully this interview will go a little better than Lochte’s have in the past.