Ryan Lochte Opens Up About Rio and His Fiancee
Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte, 32, has an idea for a viral video.
"So, the Damn Daniel thing with the white Vans - I wanted to do something just making fun of it, but with Speedos, being like, ‘Damn, Ryan! Damn, Ryan!' And have all these different pictures of me in Speedos, and then at the very end, have a white Speedo, and be like, ‘Damn, Ryan! Back at it again with the white Speedo!’"
His fiancée, Kayla Rae Reid, 25, thinks Lochte has missed his chance. "The Damn Daniel thing is old now, right?"
I agree that in internet time, Damn Daniel is as fresh as a fossil. Then again, I ask Lochte, "What else are you doing?"
He grins and shrugs. "Nothing."
Lochte has been enjoying time in the cozy Charlotte, North Carolina, house he shares with Reid and his two dogs, Yeezy (yes, as in that Yeezy), a French bulldog puppy, and Carter, a 9-year-old Doberman Pinscher. Soon, the couple will move to Los Angeles, where they hope to pursue opportunities in reality television or film. Lochte plans to compete in the Tokyo Olympics in 2020, but he knows his swimming career won't last forever, and he wants to try to find something to do when it ends.
"I could go into acting, who knows?" he says. He tells me he recently shot a short scene for a movie, the title of which he hasn't been told, where he plays a random guy in a bar who hits on Sharon Stone and asks her to dance. She turns him down, which was a giant relief, actually, because then he didn't have to dance on camera. Just over a week before our interview, he was let go from Dancing With the Stars, where he learned that, despite being a world-class athlete, he can't just become Magic Mike tomorrow.
"Dancing is a lot harder than it seems," he says. "I spent my entire life in the water, not on land. And so being graceful and everything on land, and being in dance shoes - I was a fish out of water."
Establishing an on-screen career would be difficult for even the few Olympic athletes of our time who are more famous than Lochte. How many, outside of Caitlyn Jenner, can you name who have gone on to successful careers in entertainment, much less anything? Lochte faces the added, considerable challenge of remaking his image following his "over-exaggerated" claims that he and his teammates were robbed at gunpoint in Rio de Janeiro, one of the year's biggest celebrity scandals, and one that made Lochte a face of white male privilege in America.
Over the course of the latter half of the Rio Olympics, Lochte was one of the world's biggest news stories: First, he told his mom and NBC's then-correspondent Billy Bush that he was robbed at gunpoint during a night out with his teammates, validating many foreigners' greatest fears that Rio was a dangerous city unfit to host the games. The story took a sharp, fast turn when the media began unspooling Lochte's apparent tapestry of lies: After his interview with Bush, security camera footage emerged of Lochte and his teammates arriving back at the Olympic Village after their night out, in possession of their wallets and credentials, looking jovial and unshaken; reports then surfaced that the swimmers had voluntarily stopped at a gas station, urinated on the property, and damaged a sign and the bathroom before armed security guards stepped in, forcing the swimmers to pay for the damage. Brazilian authorities recommended pressing charges against Lochte, who left the country before the world learned his statements about that night weren't entirely truthful and before he could provide testimony to a judge. Overnight, Lochte went from being one of America's hottest, goofiest, most-loved athletes - that adorably foolish hottie who really should have known better about the effects of chlorine on bleached hair - to the object of his home nation's collective mortification and disgust.
What Americans and the world didn't know at the time was that he wasn't going through this alone. Reid, who met Lochte in January and moved in with him in March, had been by his side the entire time. She was in the stands for every one of his competitions and continued living with him in his Charlotte home after Rio. They didn't leave the house for a full week after returning to Charlotte, since news vans and paparazzi were "everywhere," Reid says. "People knocking on the door nonstop."
From "7 a.m. to, like, 10 at night," Lochte adds. "She saw my life pretty much going up in flames."
Though the press had noticed, thanks to Reid's and Lochte's social media posts about one another, that the two might be an item, the couple decided to keep their relationship officially private so any headlines about Lochte coming out of Rio would relate to his swimming, not his love life. But when Lochte and Reid got off the plane in L.A. coming back from Rio, paparazzi were there to greet them. She told reporters she stood by her man.
"If she posted anything on Instagram, she was getting hate comments," says Lochte, who admits he feared she would leave him. "But she was like, 'Fuck this, I don’t care. I’m with you no matter what.'"
Locked in the house for those six or seven days, Reid did everything she could to keep Lochte off the internet and away from the television. He'd pick up his phone and she'd take it away.
"You kind of felt violated, in a way," Reid says. "Yes, he did let down a lot of Americans, and Brazilians as well, but at the same time, it felt like it was a murder case or something. It was something just completely, I don’t know, catastrophic."
Reid doesn't feel disappointed in Lochte. "You train for four freaking years - four years! I don’t even know what I’m doing in a week," she says. "I’ll be like, 'OK, one month, no drinking,' or something like that. I’m like, shit, every day, this is so hard. So imagine just thinking, 'I want to go in front of millions of people' - it’s one of the most-watched things in the world - 'and put myself out there and compete.' And then you go out and celebrate one night, and one thing happens, and all the walls just come shattering down. You want to get on your knees and just cry and wonder why."
Lochte did just that. "I was like, 'What am I doing here? I should just die and end this.' I was getting death threats," he recalls. "It was just the darkest point in my life. I was like, 'I’m just never going to come out, never.'"
Lochte and Reid are aware of the argument that the consequences would have been far worse for Lochte if he weren't a white man - but Reid doesn't think that take is totally fair. “It’s just a hard topic,” she adds. "I truly hate racial tension. It really hurts my heart and it sucks."
Lochte is more evasive on the subject. "For me personally, it sucked," he says of the aggregate criticism he received after Rio. "Not only was it affecting me, it was affecting [Reid], my family - I mean, it was affecting everyone." He largely blames the media for leading the charge against him. “[They] made it 10 times worse than it really was,” he says, recalling one particularly stinging headline: “The Ugly American.”
"I do anything and everything for red, white, blue, and to be like, 'You’re a disgrace,’ like, ‘You don’t care' - it’s like, what?" Lochte, who has no desire to find himself squarely in the center of national controversy again, would not tell me who he supported in the presidential election, which took place two days before we meet. But he admitted he did not vote. (In a statement via his publicist after our interview, he added, "I didn’t vote in this year’s election not because I didn’t want to, but because I failed to get an absentee ballot on time from my home state. With everything that was happening between training for the Olympics, the drama, the change of living location, and my work, I simply missed the deadline.")
Reid also wouldn't discuss her political views with me in person, but she has been somewhat vocal about them on Twitter. "If Hilary [sic] couldn't handle Benghazi she wouldn't be able to handle America," she wrote Nov. 9. With frustration, she admitted she did not vote either since she was registered in California, and, due to a paperwork snafu, was not able to obtain an early voting ballot before flying to Charlotte.
Getting through the week after Rio with Reid by his side helped Lochte realize he wanted to propose. The two met in January in Los Angeles nightclub Bootsy Bellows after matching on Tinder (they followed each other on social media before that). The club was packed that night, but they recognized one another as his group of guys and her group of girls passed each other in the VIP section.
"We did that double-take like, 'Oh my gosh, it’s you,'" Lochte says, looking at Reid, seated next to him at his dining room table. "And then we reached out and grabbed each other’s hands."
They didn't hang out that night but got together the next day for drinks before continuing on to another nightclub, where they took in a Justin Bieber performance.
Lochte had to go back to Charlotte to continue training for the Rio Games, but he and Reid talked constantly over the phone, FaceTime, and text. "The biggest thing we connected on was our life morals and goals," Reid says.
Due to his training schedule, Lochte couldn't travel to see Reid in L.A. By March, she sold her stuff, leased her apartment, and hopped a flight to Charlotte, so she could move in with him while he was training. She describes the move as "the biggest risk" of her life. She told him she would take it under one condition: "I was like, 'You better find me a good trainer.'"
Lochte continued his 30- to 35-hour-a-week training regimen: He'd get up and train for two hours, come home for lunch, and then return to practice. "He was busy. Literally, I would just cook and clean, basically like a housewife," she says. (She did get out of the house to work out with her trainer though.)
Then came Rio and the ensuing chaos. Paparazzi knew Reid was in the house with Lochte. They would follow her to the gym just a short drive away.
"People were saying, ‘Oh, you know, a Playboy model’s with him," she says. "I don't like the term 'Playboy model.'"
I ask what bothers her about it.
"I'm not a Playboy model. I'm a centerfold," she explains. "Once you’re a centerfold, you’re a centerfold for life. I have a month designated for me. No one can take that away. I am Miss July 2015 - like, that’s it."
Lochte has chosen not to look at Reid's Playboy photos. "I don't want to see her as just that," he explains. "There’s more depth [to her]."
Reid is looking for work opportunities outside of modeling, which she describes as "such a rough, harsh industry," in no small part because of the constant pressure she felt to lose weight. "There’s only so much you can take," she says. "I can’t eat freaking celery every single day and go work out." She wants to live a life where she doesn't have to worry if she eats a slice of pizza. (Lochte says she "has to" eat pizza now, since, as part of a family tradition since he was 8 years old, he eats pizza and wings every Friday.) "I’m in that transitional phase where I’m having my quarter-life crisis," she says. "Like, what now?"
Well, there are a lot of possibilities. She's considering writing a cookbook. She and Lochte will continue pursuing a reality show about their relationship, possibly beginning it with a drive across the country to start their new lives in L.A. And Lochte wants to travel around the country in a bus together - the kind rock stars have - and teach swim clinics to kids.
And of course, they're working on planning their wedding. They haven't decided on much yet: They would like to do it in California on the beach next year, any time between August and December; they want a small ceremony and a giant party afterward; Reid wants "a few" dresses to wear throughout the day. Michael Phelps and his family will be invited though Lochte says they're "not that close … we're more teammates."
One thing Lochte does know is that he wants to be heavily involved in the planning process. Reid taught him how to use Pinterest, "but I’m not good at it," he says. He expresses excitement at choosing flowers.
"My favorite flower is that orange one," he says.
"Orange one?" Reid looks at him, confused.
"It's like a tangerine."
"Tangerine is a fruit."
"No, it starts with a 'T.'"
"Tulip?"
"No."
"Maybe it doesn’t start with a 'T,'" Lochte says as he Google Images orange flowers on his phone.
"This one," he says, showing me his search results. I inform him that his favorite flower does not start with a "T" at all but is, in fact, a lily.
"I just love it," he says wistfully, gazing at his phone. "I just think it looks so pretty."
Ryan Lochte and Kayla Rae Reid are part of Cosmopolitan.com’s list of 2016's most fascinating people on the internet. See the rest of the list:
2. Huda Kattan
3. Simone Biles
5. Joanne the Scammer: Branden Miller
9. #MrStealYourGrandma: Irvin Randle
10. Russian Leo: Roman Burtsev
11. Dicks Out For Harambe: Brandon Zaboklicki and Brandon Wardell
12. Chewbacca Mom: Candace Payne
13. The Damn Daniel Boys: Daniel Lara and Josh Holz
Related: 6 Things You Didn't Know About Ryan Locthe's Relationship With Kayla Rae Reid
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