Michael Phelps v Ryan Lochte: who is the fastest swimmer on the planet?
Between 2003 and 2010 Ryan Lochte lost to Michael Phelps 20 times in a row in major long-course medley races.
Photograph: Dennis M Sabangan/EPA
Michael Phelps v Ryan Lochte: who is the fastest swimmer on the planet?
Charismatic USA swimmer Ryan Lochte may win the popularity contest at London 2012, but will he be crowned greatest all-round swimmer?
Andy Bull, guardian.co.uk | Thursday 26 July 2012 10.03 EDT
"Sometimes there is a man, well, he is the man for his time and place, he fits right in there. And that's The Dude" - The Big Lebowski, Joel and Ethan Coen.
You can call Ryan Lochte "Reezy". Everybody else does. It's the name he goes by on his branded sunglasses, available in 17 styles, his branded T-shirts, his branded vests, hoodies, baseball caps, flip flops, coffee mugs, and trading cards. Or you can call him His Dudeness, or Duder, or El Duderino if, you know, you're not into the whole brevity thing. A little like Jeff Lebowski, Lochte has found his time and place. The dude, hardworking and talented, handsome and marketable, fits right in here at London 2012.
If you don't know Lochte already, you will do a week from now. He'll be swimming in at least five events in these Olympics, which means he is due to be in the pool every day bar one between this Saturday and next. Look for the guy striding around the poolside in a pair of custom-made stars-and-stripes high-tops with wing-tips coming off the ankles, and if you still can't spot him he'll be the one flashing a diamond-studded grill when he's standing, smiling, on top of the podium.
Lochte has already won six Olympic medals. He should almost double that in the next eight days. He swam at the Beijing and Athens Olympics too. But Michael Phelps casts a long shadow, and Lochte has spent a long time in its shade. Lochte has won three Olympic golds, one in the 200m backstroke, which Phelps wasn't competing in, and the other two alongside Phelps in the in the 4x200m freestyle relay. As for the rest, a silver and two bronzes, they were all in events - the 200m and 400m individual medleys - that were won by Phelps.
But that was then, and this, as Lochte has often said "is my time". In 2011 he beat Phelps in the 200m Individual Medley and the 200m freestyle at the World Championships, a competition in which he won five golds and a bronze. It was a performance that earned him the title of Fina Swimmer of the Year, World Swimmer of the Year, and USA Swimmer of the Year. Since then, the man has become the hottest property on the US Olympic team. In the last few months Lochte has appeared topless on the front cover of Vogue - snapped by Annie Leibovitz - topless on the cover of Men's Health, and on the cover of Men's Journal, you'll never guess, topless again.
Lochte has signed sponsorship deals with and shot advertising campaigns for Nissan, AT&T, Speedo, Gillette, and Gatorade. His fitness DVD comes out at Christmas. Phelps, meanwhile, retreated into hiding, submerging himself in his training, emerging again in the spring with a shaggy bushman's beard. In London they will compete against each other in both the 200m and 400m medleys. Phelps is the world record holder in the longer distance, Lochte in the shorter, but out of the pool it's no contest. Lochte makes Phelps look like a machine whose sole purpose in life is ploughing through the water. Lochte, has one natural gift that Phelps wasn't blessed with - kids think he is cool. Their parents, it has to be said, might disagree.
The two men, both 27, are good friends. They're sharing a suite in the athletes village. Each night, just as they have done at every major Championships they've been at together since Beijing, they'll sit down to play spades, the only hard and fast rule they have is that neither is allowed to talk about swimming. Lochte, always quick with a quip, even has a catchphrase - "Jeah" - which he stole from the rapper Young Jeezy. He uses it at every opportunity, to Phelps's endless amusement. "Young Jeezy always says 'chyea'," Lochte explains, in his deadpan slacker drawl, "but I wanted to take it and put my own spin on it, so I dropped the 'ch' and put a 'j' on the front." Right now it is a kind of rallying call for his legions of fans, most of them young girls who have been suckered in by his good looks and aggressively-marketed laid-back charm.
The rivalry between Phelps and Lochte helped sell 104,000 tickets for the 2012 US Olympic swimming trials in July, and brought in a daily TV audience of over 5 million viewers. There, the two went head-to-head in four events. Phelps won three - the 200m individual medley, the 200m freestyle and 100m butterfly, while Lochte took the 400m individual medley.
It wasn't always so close. Lochte used to swim in Phelps's wake. In seven years between 2003 and 2010 he lost to Phelps 20 times in a row in major long-course medley races. There's no wonder why. Phelps's physique could have been cut from a computer-designed template of the perfect swimmer, Lochte's body, his coach Gregg Troy admits, is the wrong shape and size, too short and squat, for his sport. And while Phelps is renowned as one of the hardest-working swimmers on the circuit, Lochte always had an infamously poor work ethic in training.
As a kid his first coach was his mum and his second was his dad. Both of them were forced to repeatedly kick him out of the training sessions they ran at the local pool because he was such a disruptive presence. What Lochte had going for him was that he was a born racer. At the peak of an average season, Lochte competes in up to 40 races a month.
His sister Megan says it has always been that way. "In Ryan's first race, it might have been the 25m or 50m free, he had no idea what he was doing, but once he dived in, he just took off and killed everyone," she told Sports Illustrated. "That's been the story of his swimming career. He doesn't question his ability, his training or what he ate for breakfast. He doesn't worry about whether the other guy is better than him. He just races. It's a game to him. He is like a kid playing tag. That's his gift."
It had always worked for Lochte before. But it was never going to be enough to beat Phelps. After Beijing, "deep down inside" Lochte was burning up with anger at losing. "I was not having fun with it. Outside the pool, I'm always having fun. But when I'm in the pool and get second place, I hate it. I knew I could have gone faster. I said, 'Enough. This sucks. I don't like losing.'" Something had to change. And something did.
Lochte had an epiphany in 2010, when he was forced to miss seven months of training because he tore a muscle in his knee while he was breakdancing at a house party. "You know how it is," he said at the time. "People go around in a circle and you start break-dancing. Someone comes in, someone comes out. So it's my turn, I start dancing, my knee went one way, my foot went the other and I heard a pop. I was like, 'You know what, I'm not going to let it ruin my night.' So I went out and had fun, went dancing on it even more. The next day, it swelled up like a grapefruit."
Bored rigid at being forced out of the pool, Lochte decided that he had to do something positive with his time. He decided to change his diet. In Beijing Lochte had managed to put on 15lbs in the space of two weeks. It's amazing that he could still float, never mind swim.
There is an interview with him from the time in which he recounts his daily diet during the Games. One sausage and egg McMuffin, one fruit salad, three hash browns. That was breakfast. Two portions of chicken McNuggets, one double cheeseburger, one Big Mac. That was lunch. Two more portions of chicken McNuggets, another Big Mac, and "two or three" more double cheeseburgers. And some fries. That was dinner. "Nutrition," Lochte said at the time, "is really not my forte." Soon after he began to work with strength coach Matt DeLancey, who used to compete in strongman competitions. He started Lochte on a workout routine that had him dragging 450-pound chains, flipping tractor tires, lifting metal logs and tossing beer kegs.
But Lochte still lives in a bachelor pad with his brother, Devon, his best friend, and his doberman, Carter, just off the University of Florida. One room of the house has been turned into a walk-in closet to house his collection of 130 pairs of shoes. Lochte graduated in 2007, but he still works with the same coach and trains in the same pool, alongside the undergraduates. He still skateboards around the campus and goes surfing at the weekends. Troy has had to talk him into postponing a sky-diving trip until after the Games are over.
Devon Lochte told ESPN a story about the time his brother tossed a firework into his bedroom, thinking it would fly out the opposite window. It hit the wall and fell on the floor, Devon ran out and shut the door behind him. "When we opened the door, you couldn't even see the other side of the room," he said. "My curtain caught fire. There were black spots all over the ceiling. It kinda sucked because it was my room, but it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen."
If Lochte is still a child at heart, he has finally learned what Phelps had always known - talent alone is not enough. Now he trains as hard as anyone, and eats things other than "fast food, candy, soda, and junk." At the US trials Phelps's combined margin of victory in the three events he won was a mere three-tenths of a second. Of the 16 50m splits the two swam in finals, Phelps was faster in eight of them, Lochte in seven, and there was one tie. Right now one of them is the greatest all-round swimmer on the planet. It's just that nobody is sure which. We're about to find out.
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