It was one of the most-discussed interviews of the Olympic Games so far: Team USA swimmer Ryan Lochte telling NBC’s Billy Bush about being robbed at gunpoint in Rio early Sunday morning.
“The guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, he put it to my forehead and said ‘get down,'” the swimmer said in an interview that was shot on a cell phone after Bush ran into Locate hours after the incident. “I put my hands up. I was like ‘whatever.’ He took our money, he took my wallet.”
But Wednesday, reports surfaced calling the entire incident into question. In a video obtained by The Daily Mail, Lochte and fellow swimmers who were also described as victims of the robbery are seen returning to the Olympic Village, emptying their possessions into trays as they go through a metal detector at a security checkpoint:
A formal request for their passports to be seized reveals that the two men will now be investigated for the false communication of a crime, which carries a maximum sentence of three years in jail in Brazil.
Records retrieved by investigators from the X-ray machine through which the athletes passed in the Village also showed that the men were carrying all the belongings which they had claimed in sworn statements to police had been stolen.
A judge in Brazil ordered the athletes’ passports seized, but Lochte is reportedly already back in the U.S.