Multiple sources have now confirmed that Ryan Lochte may go Dancing with the Stars.
He may be one of the many D-Listers chosen to compete for the Mirror Ball Trophy on Season 23.
This casting decision has not been finalized, so we may be jumping the gun a bit.
But we can’t help it. We need to state the following, even if its premature:
Ryan Lochte should absolutely NOT go Dancing with the Stars.
Over the past two weeks, Lochte has been exposed as a liar.
But not even just a liar. He’s been exposed as the worst kind of liar; someone who blames other people for his own actions and who clearly thinks he’s above it all.
Lochte’s BS story about having been robbed at gunpoint in Rio was the epitome of privileged white behavior.
He had no problem throwing another country under the bus (or the taxi, in this case, we suppose), assuming the world would simply believe that corrupt Brazilian police would have tried to take advantage of a foreigner.
In reality, it was that foreigner who was the one who was corrupt.
As is so often the case, the cover-up has been nearly worse than the (non) crime.
Lochte couldn’t even apologize properly to Matt Lauer over the weekend, hemming and hawing and watching his words and never even admitting in these interviews that he lied.
That was it. He straight up, totally and completely lied.
He also left his teammates hanging, jetting back home to the United States the day after his drunken act of idiocy took place.
Those teammates had their passports confiscated and were taken into custody, grilled over what the heck happened early one morning in a Rio gas station.
(The answer: Lochte tore down a sign and vandalized a gas station for no apparent reason.)
So Lochte got drunk… got violent… lied about his behavior… and then failed to take full responsibility for his actions.
Now he wants to rehabilitate his image. And ABC is really going to act like a conduit in this overt PR play?
We know, we know: we’re talking about Dancing with the Stars here. It’s a reality TV competition. It hasn’t exactly acted like a symbol of morality in the past.
This is a program that has promoted an endless array of former Playboy centerfolds as contestants, from Pamela Anderson to Kendra Wilkinson to Elisabetta Canalis.
We mean, Kim Kardashian was once a contestant. There’s clearly not any real standard of decency here.
And yet. Still.
This feels different somehow.
It’s one thing for a washed-up actress to desperately cling to her last chance to make a headline. We get that. And we don’t care if Dancing with the Stars wants to help her with that.
It’s helping itself, too, of course, as viewers love the sort of nostalgia that someone such as Shannen Doherty brings.
But Ryan Lochte isn’t washed up. He doesn’t need publicity. He just needs POSITIVE publicity because he acted like a total doofus.
And, as evidenced below, not for the first time.
So producers want to help revitalize Lochte’s image? Give us a break.
He created this mess.
He can be the one to try and get out of it by maybe doing some community service… by issuing a real apology… by taking stock of his life and how thinks he can still act this way at age 32.
There are many options at his disposal.
Doing the Foxtrot in front of millions of viewers should not be one of them.