Rio olympics
Swimmers safe after robbery
Cab with Lochte, others held up by fake police, USOC says
Lochte and his teammates, Gunnar Bentz, Jimmy Feigen and Rockville's Jack Conger, were unharmed, USOC spokesman Patrick Sandusky said in a statement.
The swimmers had left France House, a hospitality venue for the French Olympic delegation, in a taxi headed for the athletes' Olympic Village, the statement said. The gunmen stopped the taxi and demanded the athletes' money and personal belongings.
The swimmers were cooperating with local authorities, Sandusky said.
“We got pulled over, in the taxi, and these guys came out with a badge, a police badge, no lights, no nothing, just a police badge, and they pulled us over,” Lochte told NBC. “They pulled out their guns, they told the other swimmers to get down on the ground — they got down on the ground. I refused. I was like, ‘We didn't do anything wrong, so I'm not getting down on the ground.'
“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 cellphone, he left my credentials.”
Lochte's friend and teammate, Michael Phelps, said his reaction when he heard about the robbery was: “Excuse me?”
“I couldn't believe it,” he said.
Phelps said he's traveled with a personal security team and never has felt unsafe in Rio.
“For me, I've been to Brazil multiple times, and I felt safe every time I've come here,” he said. “I've never felt an issue. I wasn't there last night. I was with my family all night long. That was the most important thing to me.”
The news of the robbery followed a morning of conflicting reports about what did or did not happen to Lochte, a 12-time Olympic medalist.
Lochte's mother, Ileana, told several news outlets that he had been robbed at gunpoint early Sunday morning.
But a spokesman for the International Olympic Committee initially said the story was not true.
The robbery is the latest in a string of troubles — from armed thefts, to wayward buses carrying athletes, to the green water in the diving pool — that have plagued the 2016 Games.
Street crime was a major concern of Olympic organizers going into the games. Brazil deployed 85,000 soldiers and police to secure them, twice as many as Britain used during the London Olympics.
Last week, a Brazilian security officer was fatally shot after taking a wrong turn into a dangerous favela, or slum. Two Australian rowing coaches were attacked and robbed by two assailants in Ipanema, and Portugal's education minister was held up at knifepoint on a busy street.
Stray bullets have twice landed in the equestrian venue, and two windows were shattered on a bus carrying journalists in an attack that Rio organizers blamed on rocks and others claimed was gunfire.
Brazil's sports minister, Leonardo Picciani, said the swimmers were “outside their places of competition and outside the appropriate time.” He said no athlete had run into problems at the venues or in the athletes' village.
Several of Lochte's teammates said Sunday that they've felt secure in Rio.
“Rio's an amazing city, and there's going to be problems anywhere you go,” U.S. swimming captain Nathan Adrian said. “We have been briefed on how to mitigate those risks as well as possible.”
“I think we all trust our security guys, and they've done a great job throughout this trip,” added three-time gold medalist Ryan Murphy.
A USA Swimming spokesman, asked about the IOC's initial statement that the Lochte story was untrue, said: “You'd have to direct that to the IOC.”
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