Matt Lauer didn’t beat around the bush with Ryan Lochte, asking him straight out if he was a “victim” as he once said, or “vandal” as the police called it, along with his friends James Feigen, Jack Conger, and Gunnar Bentz. Rather, they alleged that the Olympians vandalized a bathroom at a gas station and were confronted by armed security guards. “And then the guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead and he said, ‘Get down, ‘ and I put my hands up, I was like ‘whatever.’ He took our money, he took my wallet – he left my cell phone, he left my credentials”. “You’re striking a deal to pay for what damage you caused, so he doesn’t call the police and this doesn’t become a bigger incident”. “We were held, I mean, there was a gun pointed in our direction”. “The only way we knew was this guy saying we have to give them money”.
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“That’s why I’m taking full responsibility for it is because I over-exaggerated that story”, Lochte said. “None of this would have happened, and it was my immature behavior”.
“There was a gun pointed in our direction and we were all frightened”.
“We just wanted to get out of there”, Ryan said.
The 32-year-old swimmer added one gold medal during his Rio games this year, and has 12 medals overall. And if I had never done that, we wouldn’t be in this mess. “And the version we’re hearing now is much more about a negotiated settlement to cover up some dumb behavior”.
An 11-time Olympic medalist, Lochte has said he hopes to compete at the Tokyo Olympics in 2020. “Because I over-exaggerated that story”.
Lochte first told TODAY’s Billy Bush on Sunday that he and three of his U.S. swimming teammates were robbed at gunpoint: Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger and Jimmy Feigen. Lauer pressed Lochte on whether he understood what the guards were proposing.
In the interview that aired Saturday night, Lauer pointed to those two interviews and how Lochte had not told “the whole truth”.
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But in statements released after they reached the states, both Bentz and Conger indicated parts of Lochte’s account were untrue and implied the incident stemmed from Lochte’s vandalism. Though Brazilian police mentioned one of the swimmers had been more confrontational than the others, they did not identify who that was. Feigen gave almost $11,000 to charity to avoid prosecution.
