Rome 2024: it's about time

Maybe corruption is everywhere within and around the Olympic movement. Or maybe not. Maybe an Olympic Games is a financial boondoggle. Or maybe not.

The International Olympic Committee needs to better understand — and then confront — the perception, widely held around the world and particularly in its longstanding base in Europe, that the movement stands not for inspiration but distress. This is a huge problem. This problem is now playing out in the campaign for the 2024 Summer Games. Real life has revealed Agenda 2020, the IOC’s 2014 would-be reform program, for what it always was, mostly lip service. The institution needs big changes in the way in which it selects cities to stage the Games, in particular its franchise, the Summer Olympics.

The ugly implosion over the past few days of the Rome bid for 2024 underscores the seismic fractures.

Virginia Raggi, a 38-year-old lawyer, is Rome’s first female mayor. She was elected in June. Part of what carried her to office was no to the Olympics. So it can hardly be a surprise that this week she made that position formal.

The dig is that she wouldn’t even meet with sports officials before the news conference at which she described the bid as irresponsible. She kept them waiting for 35 minutes. They left. Then she showed up a half-hour late to that news conference, declaring, "In light of the data we have, these Olympics are not sustainable. They will bring only debt.”

In response, those officials, in a lengthy and bitter statement, couldn’t even bring themselves to utter her name.

The statement goes on at length in explaining why the bid team was “disappointed”:

That “prejudice and superficiality have won.” That “this same political force has transformed an extraordinary opportunity for youth and the city into an ideologically, politically and demagogically based decision, and that rather than taking action they have opted to do nothing.” That this “new political force” did “not want to take advantage of the opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment, as was the result of the 1960 Games in Rome.”

That “the rhetoric around wastefulness has won out over the new, important IOC regulations, created specifically to address waste and projects that are not beneficial for citizens and to involve other cities in the hosting of the Games.”

Italian Olympic Committee president Giovanni Malago further told reporters that Italy — Rome has now dropped out of two races in four years, for 2020 and 2024 — isn’t likely to bid for perhaps the next 20 years.

He also said during the week, “We’ve lost all credibility if we pull out. Because they’ll think people in Italy are not serious.”

Well, no. At least not about staging the Olympics. The Torino 2006 Winter Games were pretty much a logistical train wreck.

But that’s not the point.

The point is that Italy has long been an IOC member stronghold. And yet the “new, important regulations,” meaning Agenda 2020, couldn’t convince the mayor of Rome that an Olympic bid might be worth it.

And she is far from alone.

The underlying cause of the mayor’s concern amounts to the same thing that, to varying degrees, caused no fewer than five European cities to drop out of the 2022 Winter Games campaign, leaving only Beijing and Almaty, Kazakhstan. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, dropped out because of war.

It’s all about money and the perception that an Olympics costs way, way, way too much and amounts to way, way, way too much trouble.

The cost figure commonly associated with the 2014 Games in Sochi is $51 billion.

Rio 2016 ran way over budget. London 2012 ran way over budget. Tokyo in 2020 had to start over from scratch with the stadium because it started costing way too much.

Beijing in 2008 ran to a reported $40 billion.

In China, perhaps $40 billion against the national budget amounts to a rounding error. Maybe that’s why last summer the IOC opted for Beijing for 2022.

If money isn’t a problem in China, there’s this: snow. Like, there isn’t really any in the far-off mountains where the 2022 snow events are due to be held.

A system that produces this sort of process and result is irrational if not worse.

Agenda 2020 was supposed to be the answer, at least according to the IOC. And the 2024 race was due to mark the test of the 40-point reform plan.

In the bid context, Agenda 2020 was supposed to turn the tables. Instead of the IOC setting forth a list of demands, cities were supposed to come to the IOC with competing visions for what a Games could and should be.

The evidence clearly shows that politicians and voters understand that Agenda 2020 is not any sort of fix.

Boston opted out -- which at least paved the way for Los Angeles, what should have been the U.S. choice all along.

Hamburg, Germany? Out in a voter referendum.

Now Rome.

That’s three total, and two of the five formal candidates. Left standing, for now: LA, Paris and Budapest, and only the first two are widely viewed as serious contenders. Budapest may yet face a referendum.

And read again that Rome 2024 exit statement — with a focus, at least in significant part, on the idea of an Olympics as an “opportunity to launch a significant project of urban redevelopment.”

No.

The era of the Games as urban catalyst, launched in Barcelona in 1992, is done.

Again: done, finished, no mas.

The day after rejecting the 2024 Olympic bid, meanwhile, Raggi said Rome would be “honored” to help stage the Euro 2020 soccer tournament at Stadio Olimpico — which, it should be obvious, is on the ground. It was extensively rebuilt for the 1990 World Cup and was the site of that tournament’s final.

It’s curious that the lengthy bid committee's exit statement did not address two essential facts noted in the Associated Press report about the mayor’s decision: the Rome 2024 candidacy had been allotted a budget of $27 million and much of that had already been spent.

The IOC won’t make its 2024 decision until next September 13, and yet a bid has already blown through, say, $25 million?

That just highlights, again, the serious disconnect at issue.

To reiterate the premise launched in this space a few days back: the IOC needs to buy itself time to study the bid process from start to finish, with help from leading experts and the aim of making it workable and, more, appealing. This is, at the core, both a governance and PR problem.

The IOC still won’t let its members visit cities bidding for the Games, a result of the late 1990s Salt Lake City corruption scandal. It’s little wonder officials and voters in so many cities don’t trust the IOC when the IOC won’t even trust its own members.

Plus, there’s the FIFA scandal. The allegations of state-sponsored doping in Russia. And more.

The IOC needs time to address these challenges.

The logical way to buy that time is for the IOC to award the Games to Los Angeles in 2024 and Paris in 2028, and in that order.

Budapest is a lovely, lovely city. But it’s not what the IOC, and the Olympics, need right now.

What the Olympics need is a place where 95 percent or more of everything needed for a Games already exists. (Los Angeles, the bid committee this week announcing the intended use of more venues that are already on the ground.) Where the mayor, governor and federal authorities are on board. (Los Angeles.) Where polls show public support at nearly 90 percent. (Los Angeles, and it would be curious indeed to see the results of an independent survey of residents of the city of Paris — not a France poll and not an online survey.)

Where, moreover, the national Olympic committee and bid team have forged a real partnership. (The U.S. Olympic Committee and LA 2024 announced Friday they have come to agreement on the key issue of what’s called a joint marketing agreement. Fights over this agreement produced bid-threatening friction for the Chicago 2016 and New York 2012 efforts. “We talk repeatedly about a high-quality partnership this is, and this is a demonstration of the quality of the partnership,” USOC board chair Larry Probst said.)

California has 12 percent of the American population but accounts for 20 percent of the public companies on the major American markets, including Google, Facebook and Apple, a column in the New York Times reported this week. It’s zero wonder why the IOC president, Thomas Bach, made a visit earlier this year to Silicon Valley.

Because all these conditions are real, a Los Angeles organizing committee would be free to use the Games not as a catalyst for urban renewal. Appropriately, it could reimagine the Games for the 21st century.

There’s this, too, even if few want to acknowledge it in the public space. The IOC has over the past several cycles dismissed the first- and third-largest cities in the United States. LA is the second-biggest. You want to say no thanks to numbers 1, 2 and 3 and somehow expect the United States would come back for another try in 2028? The chances of that are — slim.

Paris is a lovely city as well, rich with Olympic history, and a 2024 Games there would mark the 100th anniversary of the 2024 Games.

But the IOC is not in the anniversary business.

It’s in the relevancy business. And it needs to go where conditions are ripe to sustain — better, advance — that relevance with young people.

LA for 2024, Paris for 2028. It’s about time.

What IOC should do: LA for 2024, Paris for 2028

The Rio 2016 Paralympic Games end Sunday. That’s the 18th of September.

Let’s see if by October 1 the Rome candidacy for the 2024 Summer Games is still alive.

It’s just now under a year — next September 13, at a general assembly in Lima, Peru — until the International Olympic Committee picks the 2024 winner. This can, and should, be a turning point for the Olympic movement.

The question is whether the IOC has the creativity, courage and conviction — basically, the cojones — to do what must be done.

The IOC ought to declare that the next two Games, 2024 and 2028, are going to Los Angeles and to Paris, and in that order, and then spend the next few years figuring out how to make this process work in and for the 21st century.

As it is now, the bid process needs fixing, and in significant ways.

The IOC is by nature traditional if not conservative. Even so, now — now — is the time for the IOC to be bold and brave, to be pro-active. The IOC needs to take back way more control over the thing that is at the core of what it does before events conspire, as they always do, to force institutions into panic and reaction mode.

Better, way better, to take that pressure out of the equation. And confront this:

A Games is supposed to be a celebration. The world has changed around the IOC and the IOC needs to figure out how to better offer its value proposition — one that focuses on celebration, inspiration and innovation.

Three candidates, and maybe two

Next Sept. 13, Los Angeles will be a viable candidate.

Paris, too.

Rome increasingly looks like it’s out. The mayor is on record, many times over, as saying the Games are not her priority.

The feeling is that the Italians are waiting to make an exit announcement simply out of respect for the Paralympics.

If Rome leaves, that would leave three cities.

Or maybe just two.

Budapest may now be facing a voter referendum.

Such ballot measures in Europe have consistently in recent years led to the abrupt end of bids.

A consistent sense is that the Rio Games made for an escape from disaster — as the president Thomas Bach put it in a speech delivered at the opening of the IOC session immediately before the Games, a “long and testing journey.” That is not a good sell to voters.

Nor is it a way to run a franchise — which is, make no mistake, what the Summer Games are to the IOC.

To be clear, this is not a knock on the Budapest bid team. They are a with-it bunch of people. Nor is it a knock on Budapest. It is a very cool city. The 2017 world judo championships will be there. The 2017 swim championships, too.

But the lesson of Athens and 2004 is that the Games make for a major test for a small country, and Hungary is a small country. The lesson of Rio, loud and clear, is that the Games have to stop being the impetus for a massive urban development project. A city has to be ready, with everything, or almost everything, set. From Day One.

Like, for instance, LA. Where 98 percent of stuff is already on the ground and polls consistently show ridiculously high support for the Games.

That way the IOC, and local organizers, can spend the seven years building not buildings but the Olympic spirit.

That spirit — the promotion of friendship, excellence and respect — is what the Olympic Games and the Olympic movement are supposed to be about. It’s the power of one-to-one change for the better in our fragile world, and how that spirit can amplify that very change in a city and country and, by extension, around the world.

That is what is missing when you spend seven years leading up to a Games worrying about construction deadlines and infrastructure budgets.

The real Rio 'legacy'

For emphasis, the Rio experience is likely to have long-lasting import within and on the IOC.

You can see how over and done the IOC is with Brazil, and the headaches that have attended 2016.

Consider things from the IOC perspective:

There essentially was no money; the IOC helped. It helped, too, by sending its top expert, the former Games director Gilbert Felli, to basically live in Brazil for two years to get the project across the finish line. So how do the Brazilians express their appreciation? By seeking to make Bach a witness in a ticket case involving a senior IOC member, Patrick Hickey of Ireland. Hickey says he’s innocent. Maybe he is. Or not. Whatever. Until he was detained in Rio, Hickey served on the IOC’s policy-making executive board. The Brazilian authorities, for whatever reason, have sought to make an example out of Hickey. He was dispatched, like the worst sort of criminal, to a maximum-security prison (without being convicted of a thing), then released to a version of home arrest. He can’t leave Brazil while the wheels of justice grind along.

To summarize:

After everything the IOC afforded Brazil just to get through this "long and testing journey" — time, money, expertise, patience — the payback is an IOC board member up against it and the locals making it such a big deal they want the IOC president himself to answer questions?

This in a county where politics and justice are, to be kind, a little wobbly? The former president of Brazil was just impeached. The president before her, the charismatic guy who cried with passion the day Brazil won the Games in 2009, is now facing criminal charges himself.

You wonder why — despite what he has said about being anywhere else for whatever reason — Bach didn’t attend the opening ceremony of the Paralympics? Don’t wonder.

Which leads to the easy question: looking ahead to 2024 and 2028, who in their right mind wouldn’t want something a whole lot easier?

The signals have been there since the 2022 race

The race for the 2022 Winter Games made it abundantly clear that the bid process is flawed if not irretrievably broken.

Six cities in Europe dropped out, five put off to varying degrees by the $51 billion figure associated with the 2014 Sochi Winter Games: Oslo, Munich, Stockholm, Davos/St. Moritz and Krakow, Poland. A sixth, Lviv, Ukraine, fell out because of war.

By the end, IOC had only two left: Beijing, where there’s virtually no snow in the far-off mountains, and Almaty, Kazakhstan. The members, in a vote last summer, went for Beijing.

Once more: a Games cannot be primarily a catalyst for urban improvements. That’s the notion the 1992 Barcelona Games ushered in, and when mayors, governors and prime ministers saw how the Games transformed Barcelona, they all wanted a piece for themselves of that 1992 magic.

That model, as the 2022 and 2024 races underscore, is no longer attractive. For sure, Rio has better transport now than before. But nobody goes into a seventh-grade classroom and says, do you want to know why the Olympics are so great? Because you can ride the bus!

So:

Los Angeles and Paris, and in that order.

Doubtlessly there would be sentiment to award 2024 to Paris because it would be the 100th anniversary of the 1924 Paris Games.

Appropriately, however, anniversaries count for little to nothing. See Atlanta in 1996 (Athens 1896, tried for 1996). And not that security isn’t a real issue everywhere but going to France for the nearer future would only invite screaming headlines for seven years about terrorism instead of, again, inspiration and celebration.

LA and Budapest are the only two cities that over the past several months have been telling a legitimate story. Here’s one way you know: LA’s tagline is “follow the sun.” On Twitter, a Paris consultant has been posting pictures of sunrises and sunsets from around the world accompanied by the hashtag #CelebratetheSun. One even shows the sun in Brazil and observes “it’s everywhere!”

Wow! Really?! Imitation, flattery, all that. But not exactly original.

And the Olympic movement, right now, needs original thinking.

Just to get this out of the way: Yes, live in Los Angeles. No, I am not working for the bid committee. I have covered every single IOC election since 1999. Maybe I have observed and even learned a few things along the way.

Big changes, literally and figuratively

Once 2024 and 2028 were settled, that would give the gift of time. Then the IOC and, as well, governance experts can think about how to reform the process to get good if not great options for the rest of this 21st century.

Again, the time is now. The IOC is staring at three successive Games in Asia — Pyeongchang in 2018, Tokyo 2020, Beijing 2022.  And as NBC’s depressed Rio ratings make clear, big changes in the way people view the Olympics — literally and figuratively — are emerging.

It’s not, by the way, that viewers don’t want live sports. NFL and college football ratings in the United States are still insane. Just to take one example: the overnight number for the New York Giants-Dallas Cowboys game this past Sunday on Fox, a game shown to 90 percent of the country, hit a 16.9. Compare that to the 2015 Giants-Cowboys game, shown to 100 percent of the United States on NBC: 16.7.

Summary: shown to fewer viewers and yet more people tuned in.

The Olympics are not, however, football. And the Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps years are just now, at least purportedly, coming to a close.

This is why, for instance, the Olympic Channel is now up and running online.

That’s an excellent first step. Still, the IOC needs to do more.

The IOC needs to get in way better touch with the technology that is an intuitive part of the youth audience it is trying to reach. That’s why Bach made a tour last year of Silicon Valley’s leading companies.

In that same speech to the members on the opening of the IOC session in Rio, Bach confessed that on that Silicon Valley trip, he was introduced to Vine, the six-second video-sharing app. Before that moment, he had no idea what it was. “Skeptical” at first, he said, he was “converted in about six and a half seconds” after seeing the “fantastic images and emotions,” adding that Vine “completely captures the magic of the digital world.”

Bach is only 62 years old. It’s cool that he doesn’t do skateboarding tricks himself for his squad on Vine. But it’s inexcusable that, as the chief executive of an entity whose mission is connecting with the world’s young people, he had to be virtually smacked upside the head to get to know an app that is central to mainstream youth culture.

Same goes for the bid process. Rio is that smack upside the head. Let’s focus on those “fantastic images and emotions,” and on putting the “magic of the digital world” front and center — that is, inspiration and celebration.

LA for ’24, Paris for ’28. In combo, that would make for a big, and appropriate, first step.

The 'Fancy Bear' bid to stir up chaos

Within hours after the release by Russian hackers of U.S. athletes’ doping results, Victor Conte, the Bay-Area based figure at the center of the BALCO scandal, a guy who knows what’s what when it comes to the doping scene, sent out a note Tuesday to a wide email circle. It said, in part, “This is gonna get ugly.” Gonna get ugly?! This is ugly from the get-go. And it’s likely to stay ugly for the foreseeable future.

This hack operates on a staggering number of levels. There are so many threads to pull: here, there, seemingly everywhere. The whole thing is designed not just to stir public opinion but to stir up nothing less than chaos in world sport and, perhaps, more — to agitate and antagonize governments in public as well as private diplomacy.

The basics:

Following World Anti-Doping Agency reports over the past several months that asserted widespread and state-sponsored doping in Russia, about a third of the Russian Olympic delegation, including virtually the entire track and field team, and the entire Russian Paralympic squad ended up banned from Rio 2016. The Paralympics are still ongoing.

On Tuesday, WADA confirmed that its database had been breached. At issue: confidential medical records of athletes who took part in last month’s Rio Olympics.

WADA further said that hackers gained access via an International Olympic Committee-created account.

The perpetrators, accordng to WADA: Fancy Bear, a Russian entity suspected as well of breaching the Democratic National Committee’s computers.

On Monday, Fancy Bear released information on four American athletes: the gymnast Simone Biles, basketball standout Elena Delle Donne and the tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams.

The documents show that each of the four had permission to take prescription drugs. In some cases, those drugs were used during the Games.

Some of the drugs contained banned substances.

But nobody is facing a doping case.

The reason: the anti-doping rules specifically say that there can be exceptions for certain medicines. Athletes can use a variety of stuff that might otherwise lead to a positive test if, one, they get a doctor’s note and, two, they file the appropriate paperwork.

That paperwork is called, in the jargon, a “therapeutic use exemption.”

To emphasize: there is no suggestion that any of the four have done anything wrong.

U.S. officials have linked Fancy Bear to GRU, the Russian military intelligence agency. For what it’s worth, the Russian government said Tuesday it had no connection to Fancy Bear.

This is the backdrop. From there, the super-obvious starting place:

Within Russia if not elsewhere, many will be tempted to draw the conclusion that the Americans, who won the Olympic medals count in Rio going away, are doping.

It is already widely believed that considerable numbers of U.S. athletes take advantage of TUE exemptions.

To stress: obtaining a TUE is within the rules.

It is also the case that, as in many things, perception is as important than reality, if not more so. Indeed, a Fancy Bear statement declares that U.S. athletes “got their licenses for doping.”

Next:

Tension is high between the IOC and WADA over the Russians. This is sure to add to that. To reiterate: the hack came through an IOC-created account. If you want to appreciate the delicious irony there, or maybe the hackers’ knowing instigation, go right ahead — a WADA hack through an IOC account. Who to blame, and for what?

There’s this:

Legally, do any of the four athletes, American citizens all, have recourse in the U.S. or Canadian court systems (WADA is based in Montreal) for money damages now that private medical records have been breached? Who is responsible for not safeguarding the sort of records that everyone knows — if you have ever been to even one American doctor’s office — is supposed to be private? For this sort of breach, what might be an appropriate remedy?

Then there another super-obvious follow-on:

Every single sports federation and national Olympic committee anywhere and everywhere in the world ought to be wondering: is my data safe?

Then there is the timing:

In mid-August, details emerged about the hack of Russian athlete and whistleblower Yulia Stepanova.

Next week WADA plans a post-Rio “think tank” to explore how it is the anti-doping campaign got into this crack, as well as others. Fancy Bear: “We will also disclose exclusive information about other national Olympic teams later.”

But, to start, there’s the central fact: these are Americans.

So why these four? Could it have anything to do with the fact that three are African-American while Delle Donne earlier this month disclosed she is gay and engaged to be married? Maybe these facts mean nothing. Or maybe it's naive to pretend otherwise.

Biles, moreover, carried the U.S. flag in the Rio Olympic closing ceremony.

The Williams sisters? When Maria Sharapova, the Russian tennis star, who carried the Russian flag into the London 2012 opening ceremony, is in the midst of a two-year ban for meldonium?

Sharapova’s appeal is due to be decided in early October. And WADA has walked back the rules in a number of other meldonium cases because of uncertainty over how long the stuff, which is made in Latvia and is designed to help patients with certain heart-related issues, stays in the body.

Biles acknowledged after the leak that she takes Ritalin or its equivalent for ADHD. It is "nothing to be ashamed of,” she said in a tweet.

https://twitter.com/Simone_Biles/status/775785767855611905

At the same time, it would be a huge surprise if hackers didn’t intend for a parallel to be drawn — and, importantly, distinctions, too — between her and U.S. sprinter Justin Gatlin.

Gatlin has — unfairly — been made into the poster guy for U.S. Olympic scene doping. Truth: he is far more a victim of circumstance.

So: Biles takes Ritalin (or, again, its equivalent). Gatlin took Adderall for ADD. It’s naive once more to pretend someone looking for connection would not see something there.

At the same time:

She gets nothing. He got a year. Why the difference? How can any sort of “fair” system allow such discrepancies? Returning to the Sharapova matter and meldonium: same question.

This is not just about American athletes, meanwhile. It’s about the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, too.

USADA chief executive Tygart, who is a very smart guy, has arguably made himself over the course of this year into the loudest and longest voice for an outright Russian ban.

This would thus seem to be as much about an attempt to embarrass Tygart as it is the four athletes.

In a statement, Tygart said, “It’s unthinkable that in the Olympic movement, hackers would illegally obtain confidential medical information in an attempt to smear athletes to make it look as if they have done something wrong.”

Please. It’s not unthinkable. If revenge is a thing, it’s totally rational if not foreseeable.

Finally, this, and this is where you have to really wonder how this is going to end up.

If none of this had come to pass, if WADA had been left alone, WADA — this is the dead-bang truth — can help the Russians.

In the context of getting back onto the track, for instance: what do the Russians want if not need? Answer: to get complaint again with all the rules so that Russian athletes can compete normally.

For its part, WADA wants, maybe even needs, to get the Russians compliant. And as soon as possible.

The tough sell is getting the rest of the world to believe the Russians are compliant.

That just got a lot, lot tougher.

Lochte gets 10 months: big whoop

Ryan Lochte gets a 10-month suspension. To share the insight offered by a teen observer: big whoop.

You know who the big winner here is? Ryan Lochte.

That conclusion is as undeniable as it is undesirable. It is also, despite the best intentions of Olympic and swim officials, the most profoundly disappointing part of this entire episode — all of it, from start to finish.

From Ryan Lochte’s perspective, it was all about Ryan Lochte on that boozy night in Rio. For the next week, it was all about Ryan Lochte instead of the scores of other athletes, American and otherwise, chasing their own Olympic dreams in Brazil.

Even since then, too. Since being back in the States from Rio, there have been only two main questions — one, how was it and, two, what about Ryan Lochte?

On Wednesday night, in the hours after TMZ broke the story of the 10-month suspension, it was still all about Lochte — instead of the athletes on U.S. Paralympic team or the Paralympic opening ceremony back in Rio.

And it was all about Lochte on Thursday, when the U.S. Olympic Committee and USA Swimming formally announced the sanction. The USA Today headline: “Lochte’s Brazil gas station pals also suspended.”

Dude seriously could not have scripted this any better in advance of being on “Dancing with the Stars.”

Think about this:

In Rio, Lochte put the USOC and USA Swimming between a rock and a hard place. Then he did the exact same thing this week — those sports officials caught between wanting to impose sanction and the deadline of wanting to make that sanction public before next Monday’s season premiere of DWTS.

For that matter, the USOC and USA Swimming were in the same sort of rock-and-hard place dilemma in making it plain Lochte and the three others — Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger — had to be expecting a formal response. In embarrassing themselves, they also embarrassed the USOC and USA Swimming. So something had to be done. But what should that something be, and to what purpose?

Lochte also loses $100,000 in medal bonus money. That’s inconsequential in comparison to the four sponsors who have dropped him. But another has already said it intends to pick him up so he is clearly the farthest thing from radioactive.

The other three got four months away from the U.S. national team. Big whoop.

Bentz is back in college at Georgia. Conger is at Texas. They still can swim for their college teams.

Lochte has to do 20 hours of community service, Bentz 10 for violating the Olympic Village curfew rules for athletes under 21. As swimming’s world governing body, FINA, pointed out, the International Olympic Committee insisted on a community service element.

Bottom line:

It’s all profoundly disturbing.

Lochte is not a bad guy. Indeed, he can be a very good guy — always willing to sign autographs, especially for kids. He is personable. He can be very likable.

On the theory that everyone has to navigate his or her own path in this life, let’s be honest: there have to be moments when it can’t be easy being Ryan Lochte, with 12 Olympic medals, when Michael Phelps has 28.

Even so, there is so much that remains so troubling.

In late June, GQ magazine published a feature entitled “The De-Broing of Ryan Lochte,” in which he avowed that the 2016 version of himself that would be on display in Rio would be “more mature.”

After Rio, this from Lochte in People magazine:

“I made things up. I didn’t tell the truth.  And that’s on me. I messed up and made a big mistake, and I’m sorry.”

Even if you want to believe him — and there is, again, a lot of good in Lochte — it’s wholly unclear that he gets it.

To be clear: that is not a referendum on Lochte’s intelligence. He is not dumb. Really, he is not.

“I’ve been thinking about it a lot, because I have a big heart, and I feel like [I] let down a lot of people,” he also told the magazine. “I feel bad that I have let people down.”

All good. Except for what he said next:

“It sucks that it was one of the main focuses of the Olympics. That’s what stinks. The media blew it up and talked about it. It got out of control, and this was all anyone could talk about.”

The media blew it up? Hello?

“Everyone started watching it and they didn’t watch the athletes. That’s another reason why I’m so hurt by it, because it took away from the Games.”

Ryan Lochte is hurting?

Where is the responsibility and accountability?

That whole actions-matter-more-than-words thing, you know.

The straight line from peeing on a gas station wall to lying about it to abandoning your teammates to deal for themselves with the consequences to being featured on one of America’s most popular television shows makes for a discordant message — a bad, very bad disconnect — when it comes to the values the Olympic movement, the USOC and USA Swimming purport to stand for.

Here was Lochte, in Rio, before the partying but after his last race, fifth in the 200-meter IM, off the podium:

“In life, in swimming, in sports, there are always ups and downs. It is what you do when you have those downs who make you what you are.”

Actions, words, etc.

It’s not that Lochte is going on DWTS. It’s that he’s going now — without taking a hard look at who he is and, in particular, the role alcohol plays in his decision-making.

At 32, he knows the bro thing comes with a sell-by date. But talking about it is one thing and acting like the mature role model he should be apparently another. The question he has yet to examine, and far away from the spotlight: why is he saying one thing and doing another?

For the sake of discussion, which requires in this context putting aside for a moment the peeing and the lying — it’s also a fair question to ask whether Lochte should have stuck around Rio. That is, should he have left Brazil when he did?

Should he, in essence, have kept to his regularly scheduled programming?

Or is the idea of “justice” in Brazil so fundamentally different that he did the right thing by getting out of dodge?

Here’s what Lochte should have done:

The moment Conger and Bentz were dragged off a plane, that is the instant Lochte should have called the USOC and USA Swimming and asked, what can or should I do?

Did he?

Looking at this from another angle:

Lochte didn’t hurt anyone. When Phelps was arrested for driving under the influence, it was because he was deemed a menace to the public health. So: why is Lochte getting more?

Because this is apples and oranges. Luckily, Phelps didn’t hurt anyone. And what’s at issue here is reputation and credibility — for Lochte, the USOC and USA Swimming.

In a statement sent to USA Today, Lochte’s lawyer, Jeff Ostrow, said, “We accept the decision as [we] believe it is in everyone’s best interest to move forward, adding in the next paragraph, “That said, in my oinion, while the collective sanctions appear to be harsh when considering what actually happened that day — Ryan did not commit a crime, he did not put the public safety at risk and he did not cheat in his sport — we will leave it to others to evaluate the appropriateness of the penalties.”

That sort of thing is called advocating for your client.

Back to reality: Phelps got six months. U.S. soccer goalie Hope Solo got six months, too. So six was a starting place for Lochte.

And yet — 10 months away from competition won’t achieve anything, practically speaking.

Frankly, it’s laughable.

Yes, it’s 10 months, ending in June 2017, with a plus — just the way Phelps had to stay away from the 2015 world championships in Kazan, Russia, Lochte will now be ineligible for the 2017 worlds in Budapest next July.

So what?

The 10 months is time Lochte would have taken off, anyway.

He was never going to be serious about 2017. In Rio, after that 200 IM, he said:

“It has been a long journey. I think now it is time for me to take a break, mentally and physically, to just get myself back to when I was a little kid having fun again. i can’t say this is my last time swimming. So we will see what happens.”

For two, as the Wall Street Journal reported in a story midway through the Rio Games, Phelps’ lengthy post-London break may now well serve as a template for others, especially older athletes such as Lochte, who is now 32. Why grind away for four solid years when, as Phelps proved conclusively, you can train less — push for maybe 18 months — and still win bunches of medals? For his part, Phelps turned 31 in late June.

For three, in keeping Phelps away from the 2015 Kazan worlds, USA Swimming could not have been any more clear about how it views what is purportedly the marquee event on the FINA calendar in odd-numbered years. Same for Lochte and 2017 in Budapest.

A note: Lochte will now lose out on the chance to win a fifth straight 200 IM worlds gold. Same theme: so what? He already has four, and fifth at the 2016 Olympics hardly makes him the odds-on 2017 favorite.

For four, and this is a nugget that swim geeks would understand immediately but takes just a few words of explanation for a wider audience:

Leaving U.S. college racing aside, because it is measured in yards, there are two kinds of racing at the world-class level, both in meters: long-course events, such as the Olympics or the (2017 Budapest) worlds, which take part in a 50-meter pool, and short-course, over a 25-meter set-up.

Lochte has for years been one of the few U.S. swimmers to excel at both, a mainstay of the U.S. short-course team.

Anytime Lochte wants, he can start racing short-course to get himself back up to speed. So it’s way off the mark, as some might suggest, that Lochte’s career is at a dead-end for two or maybe even three years, until the 2019 long-course worlds, now set for Gwangju, South Korea.

At the DWTS “cast reveal” party this week in New York, Lochte also told People, “I’m excited for, not only myself, but everyone else to forget about what happened and to move forward. I think that’s what the biggest thing is — what we’re gonna do is just move forward and show off my dancing skills.”

Just — so troubling. All around.