MESA, Ariz. —There were moments Thursday, as Ryan Lochte spoke about the swimming life, when the line between himself and Michael Phelps blurred, or disappeared completely. He would start talking about his own career — with its incessant and universal cycle of training, competing and going on hiatus, before starting it all over again – then suddenly it would become clear he meant his longtime rival. Other times, it was the other way around.
“It’s hard when you do something for so long, and you have that passion and it goes away — you miss it,” Lochte said, to a question theoretically about Phelps’s recent absence from the sport. “Even after the breaks we take — like after worlds, for two or three months — you miss it. You get that itch, like, ‘Man, I want to put my body through that pain again.’ We like that.”
Theirs is one of the greatest friendly rivalries the sport has ever seen – Phelps and Lochte, their careers having intersected now for more than a decade. And it is a rivalry that remains both essential and elite, even with Lochte turning 30 and Phelps closing in, and even with both men having gotten lost once or twice in the wilderness between competing and cashing in.
Their latest chapter was written Thursday night. Phelps, launching his latest comeback, beat Lochte with a time of 52.38 seconds in the final of the 100-meter butterfly at the Arena Pro Swim Series event. Phelps, racing for the first time since his DUI arrest last September, called the performance “a good starting point” but made clear he has much to work on.
“It was weird racing again, because it had been so long,” said Phelps, who is coming off a six-month suspension resulting from his September 2014 arrest on DUI charges. “I could say, ‘My stroke didn’t feel good. I probably needed one less strike. I needed to kick more. The breakout on my start was bad.’ I could pick apart the race a hundred different ways. But just getting in the water and racing was something I was looking forward to.”
Phelps and Lochte have been teammates on three U.S. Olympic squads – and on three gold-medal-winning 4×200-meter freestyle relay teams — and appear on their way to a fourth Olympics together, at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games. Lochte is one of the few men in the world who can say he has beaten Phelps at his best, and having his rival back in the water seems to give him a competitive lift.
“He’ll go toe to toe with you in any event, and I like that because it’s a challenge any time you go up on those blocks with him,” Lochte said. “Our ultimate goal is definitely Rio. That’s going to be the big show, and I’m just glad he’s back.”
Their paths to Rio over the next 16 months will be different, out of necessity. As part of Phelps’s suspension by USA Swimming, he is not eligible to be part of the U.S. delegation for the FINA World Championships in August in Kazan, Russia. And while FINA executive director Cornel Marculescu hinted to the Associated Press on Thursday that Phelps could receive special dispensation to compete as an unaffiliated swimmer, Phelps reiterated his plans to compete at the Phillips 66 Nationals meet in San Antonio the same week as worlds.
The plan, Phelps said, “was always to prepare myself for Nationals because I wasn’t eligible to swim worlds.”
On Thursday night, it took just shy of a minute for Phelps to show glimpses of his old form. In the 100 fly final, Phelps — looking lean and strong — was barely ahead at the turn but pulled away in the final 25 meters to beat Lochte and third-place finisher Tom Shields. Phelps’s time was right in line with the one he posted in the same event a year ago and, if nothing else, marked a promising start to his latest comeback attempt.
No one at the Skyline Aquatic Center, on the far eastern edge of the Valley of the Sun, was less surprised than Lochte at how Phelps swam. After all these years, he simply assumes Phelps will be a factor. Lochte said he made a bet with Phelps after the 2012 London Games – when Phelps declared he was retiring from the sport – that he wouldn’t stay retired. “I said, ‘You’re going to come back. I guarantee you,’” Lochte said.
[In return, Michael Phelps qualifies first in 100 butterfly: The deja vu edition]
Lochte, too, has felt the pull of real life, telling him it’s time to get out of the water. After the London Games, he signed on to star in a reality show, “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?” on E!, only to have it get canceled after just one season. He cashed in on his fame, rubbing elbows with celebrities and gaining a reputation as a playboy, the weeks and months drifting by until the thought of getting back to training seemed daunting. A freak knee injury in November 2013 set him back even further in 2014.
Getting back in the pool, Lochte said, “is probably one of hardest things, because you’re training every day, you’re beating your body up. And then when you get a break, you’re like, ‘Man, this is nice.’ You get to sleep in. You don’t have to report to a coach. You’re on your own. You meet all these famous people. It’s so much fun and you can easily get sucked into that lifestyle… It’s hard, but once you get back into it, you start thinking, ‘I don’t ever want to take a break again, because it’s hard to get back into shape.’”
Lochte was talking about himself, ostensibly. But when it comes to him and Phelps, it is sometimes hard to be sure.
Notes: Bethesda’s Katie Ledecky won the women’s 200 freestyle with a time of 1:56.79, the sixth-fastest in the world this year, but finished fifth in the 400 individual medley at 4:45.41, nearly nine seconds behind winner Katinka Hosszu (4:36.77) of Hungary. Ledecky, 18, had finished second in the latter race in morning qualifying, setting a new personal best of 4:42.82. Neither event are considered core events for Ledecky, a distance swimmer who holds the world records in the 400, 800 and 1,500 freestyles. . . . Reigning NCAA champion Kelsi Worrell of the University of Louisville took first place in the 100-meter butterfly (58.24), beating 2012 Olympian Claire Donahue (59.19).
dave.sheinin@washpost.com