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Ryan Lochte And Jimmy Fallon Shot Darts At Each Other’s Groins, And Other Lochte Family Business

Well, it’s been an eventful weekend in Lochte-land – both Ryan and family – and we at SportsGrid fancy ourselves faithful Lochte chroniclers, so here goes. We’ll start with Ryan’s appearance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon Friday night, and we’ll start that by showing you Fallon and Lochte engaging in a game of darts. In this game, Fallon and Lochte shot (Nerf) darts at one another, with different point values awarded for hitting different (plastic shields covering) body parts. Needless to say, the groin was an especially valuable area, point-wise:

The power of Lochte: even when you beat him, you still feel like you lost. And worry not, there was also an interview portion, in which the Prince Harry and Olympics grill stories were re-hashed, but in which Lochte also gave some new details about his backstory, and dropped the bombshell that he’s releasing a workout DVD. And Lochte’s overall performance in this interview: pretty competent, actually! Maybe Fallon made him feel comfortable, maybe he’s getting better at interviews after doing a million of them (which would be a sad development for all of us), but judge for yourself and decide if you see improvement.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Our Ryan – he’s growing. The darts even gave him a chance to talk and do some movement at the same time. And now, the next phase of the Weekend of Lochte…

Megan Lochte.

Ugh. Ryan Lochte’s sister Megan made headlines late last week when a video of her saying horrible thing after horrible thing about Chinese people on some sort of local “comedy” program surfaced. We were reluctant to talk about this for a couple reasons: 1) it was Lochte’s sister, not Lochte himself, so it felt like an especially big stretch for us – a sports website, after all – to talk about it; 2) it was old (filmed in the wake of the 2008 Olympics, to be exact, hence all the talk about China).

But yesterday the story of that video was kept alive, by Megan Lochte’s own apology for said video. In Lochte’s words, the whole thing was just a joke satirizing people who say horribly racist things:

I would like to apologize for the video that is circulating… This was not a real interview, and it in no way reflects my true feelings or persona whatsoever. [Closing Time] was a show with different comedy skits, fake news skits and staged interviews. The video in question reflects a skit from the show in which I acted as an ignorant guest on a talk show that made ignorant comments.

Could that be? Perhaps. Tough to say, considering the program’s Youtube channel, where one might have gone to compare Lochte’s appearance to other clips from the show, doesn’t seem to exist anymore. The lesson here, best we can tell: saying racist things is bad, so don’t say them. Satire of racist things can work for illumination-of-darker-human-truths-through-comedy purposes, but – big, big “but” here – only when done well. Whatever Megan Lochte was going for, it fell way short of the mark.

LLoD!

Let’s close on a less ugly note and bring back a feature we introduced following Ryan Lochte’s Today appearance: the Lochte Line of the Day , or LLoD for short. Sadly, though, as noted earlier, Lochte seemed to have a clue what he was doing during his Fallon appearance, so there was nothing as good as “pleased and unpleased.” Lochte’s best line on Fallon came at the 2:20 mark of the “Part 1″ clip above, when he talked about almost losing his gold medal for grill-wearing. The way he put it, though, was:

“…We’re gonna strip you from your medal.”

Of course, he meant “strip you of your medal,” so this was really a minor screwup. Still, though it provides a mental image of Lochte, wearing the medal around his neck, being yanked away, and having the medal sit there, suspended in midair. Still, it’s only significant enough a mistake to be awarded 2 “Do Movements” out of 5, as it failed the move the needle on SportsGrid’s patent-pending Ryan Lochte Secret Genius Potential Measurement Mechanism. Rather, it made him look like… well, just a normal guy who slightly misspoke. Considering some of the interviews he’s done, that’s progress.