Two of the four athletes, Ryan Lochte and Jimmy Feigen, on Sunday, claimed the group was robbed of $400 at the gas station after their taxi was stopped by armed gunmen posing as a policemen.
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In the swimmers’ original version of events, Lochte and three fellow swimmers said their taxi was pulled over and they were robbed at gunpoint early in the morning of August 14.
Bentz said the swimmers had been ordered out of a cab and were sitting on a curb as the security guards held their guns when Lochte stood up and got into a heated argument with the guards.
The three other swimmers in the auto tried to leave as quickly as possible because they feared Lochte would cause more damage, G1 said, quoting from the revised testimony.
Lochte said it was “traumatic” to “be out late with your friends in a foreign country – with a language barrier – and have a stranger point a gun at you and demand money to let you leave”.
He accepted responsibility for his role in “taking the focus away from the many athletes fulfilling their dreams of participating in the Olympics”.
On Thursday, Brazilian media began airing security footage showing the athletes at the petrol station.
“I was never a suspect in the case from the beginning (Brazilian law enforcement officials saw me only as a witness)”, Bentz said, apologizing to the United States Olympic Committee, the US swimming team and the University of Georgia.
“It’s relatively hard for any swimmer to break out and to attract sponsors, but if you couple it with how they all corroborated a fabricated story, it’s a black eye”, Delzell said.
Lochte returned to the U.S. Wednesday.
But Rio’s Civil Police Chief Fernando Veloso said the four US swimmers were not robbed.
He apologised to his teammates, fans and fellow competitors and said the incident had helped him learn “valuable lessons”.
The four sportsmen initially said they had been robbed as they travelled back to the athletes’ village after a party on Sunday.
ABC News reported early on Friday that Feigen had agreed to pay $11 000 to a Brazilian charity to avoid prosecution in the case, citing his attorney Breno Melaragno Costa.
Police later said a video showed a security official pulling his weapon to restrain a drunk and angry Lochte and his team-mates because they tried to leave after vandalising a petrol station bathroom.
After questioning, as of Thursday evening, Conger and Bentz were allowed to leave Rio and had arrived back in Miami on Friday morning, USA Today is reporting. USA Swimming and the International Olympic Committee could issue sanctions.
People magazine reports that Bentz has asserted he has never lied about the event, and was only interviewed about it by Rio police one time. Brazilian newspaper Estadao said the beneficiary will be Instituto Reacao, the NGO that trained Brazilian judo gold medallist Rafaela Silva and has projects in several Rio favelas. I yelled to [Jimmy and Jack] to come back toward us and they complied.
“I was like ‘whatever, ‘” Lochte said in his initial account.
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When asked whether the swimmers’ bonuses were at risk, a USOC spokesman responded by pointing to a paragraph from an USOC statement that said the swimmers’ behavior was unacceptable and any “potential consequences” for them would be reviewed.
