Olympic swimmer, 40, hints at return in Summerlin appearance

At a Summerlin pool Saturday, swimmers sharpened their dives and practiced their flip turns under the supervision of their coach for the day, 12-time Olympic medalist Ryan Lochte.

Lochte, who has been offering swim clinics at Life Time Fitness locations around the country, made a splash Saturday, telling swimmers that he’s planning on getting back in the pool competitively in the near future.

“You guys can definitely see me back in swimming,” Lochte, 40, said. “I’m ready to rock and roll.”

After the Team USA men’s swimming team brought back just one individual gold medal from the Olympic Games in Paris, Lochte said that he’s had conversations with Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, about how they both felt disappointed in the outcome.

“They could have done better,” Lochte said. “The women did fantastic. The men I thought were a little weaker than we have been in the past.”

“I’m not saying me coming back to swimming will help that, I’m just saying it makes me have a little fire inside where I want to get back into swimming,” Lochte told the Review-Journal.

In November, Lochte got in a car accident and broke his femur. “It was like a life or death thing,” he said.

Right now, Lochte said he still walks with a limp sometimes. “Once my leg is fully 100 percent healed, I will go back into swimming,” he said. “I just want to get back in and just give it one more go.”

Swimmers of various ages and skill levels signed up to learn from an Olympian at a ticket price of $250 for Life Time members and $300 for non members. Spectators could watch the swim session for $100.

Lochte moved his students through dives, flip turns and transitions between strokes, watching them move from in the water.

“You want to gradually get faster,” Lochte told the group. “That’s the number one thing in swimming.”

While Lochte had been half an hour late to the session, Life Time staff said they were glad that participants decided to stick it out and wait for him.

Lochte said his phone didn’t charge and so he had slept in. “When I can, I will sleep all day, every day,” he joked.

Karin Wegner, 51, attended the session with her 15-year-old daughter. “We are both swimmers,” Wegner explained.

Wegner swims competitively for U.S. Masters Swimming, a national membership nonprofit and competitive swimming league for adults. She said her daughter has been excelling as a swimmer for the Sandpipers of Nevada.

“It’s always a good idea to get a little opportunity to learn from someone new,” Wegner said. “I like Ryan’s delivery. He’s got an interesting way of conveying the same messages that we may have heard before.”

Coey Biesbroeck, 13, also swims for the Sandpipers. She said she really likes to swim backstroke, and Lochte is “an amazing backstroker.”

“I feel like I learned a lot,” said Biesbroeck, who hopes to swim in college.

‘I’ve been through hell’

Lochte said that his experience both as a swimmer and in life prompted him to start teaching these clinics. “I’ve been through hell and back multiple times,” he said. “I can use that and help other people.”

After telling media that he had been robbed at gunpoint at a gas station in Rio de Janeiro during the 2016 Olympics, Lochte was charged with filing a false robbery report after conflicting reports surfaced.

While the charges were eventually dropped, Lochte and three other members of the U.S. men’s swimming team were investigated by the International Olympic Committee.

The committee ultimately decided not to add on to the punishments Lochte received from United States team officials, who banned him for 10 months, making him miss the 2017 world championships. He also lost out on major sponsorships.

“I don’t have any regrets,” Lochte said Saturday. “I feel that in life, you should never have a regret. You should learn from it.”

“I’m still here and I’m still moving forward because I don’t dwell on it, I learn from my past,” he continued.

He encouraged swimmers at the clinic to apply this philosophy to their own swimming careers. “If you guys had a bad race, you just had a bad race. It doesn’t ruin you,” Lochte said.

Lochte holds the world record in the 200-meter individual medley event, beating out Phelps by 16 hundredths of a second.

“My biggest goal is teaching swim clinics and having one of you guys break my world record,” Lochte said. “I guarantee if you do, I will personally come to your house and I’ll bring the largest cheese pizza, and we’ll eat it together.”

But in the meantime, Lochte still has world records on his mind. He’s just not sure if it’s going to be in U.S. Masters Swimming or at the Olympics.

“The more clinics I do with you guys, it makes me want to get back into swimming more and more,” Lochte said.

Contact Estelle Atkinson at eatkinson@reviewjournal.com. Follow @estellelilym on X and @estelleatkinsonreports on Instagram.