Why US Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte is the most entertaining trainwreck ever

HE’S a 12-time Olympic medallist, an awful artist, a reality TV star — oh, and a big, fat liar. Ryan Lochte is a spectacular trainwreck we hope never ends.

Ryan Lochte was the butt of jokes long before he made up a story about getting robbed at gunpoint

THE most remarkable thing about Ryan Lochte’s Rio robbery story is that anyone took him seriously in the first place.

The American 12-time Olympic medallist swimmer was a national laughing stock long before Brazilian authorities revealed he made the whole thing up to cover up a night of debauchery that culminated in a service station brawl.

Lochte and teammate James Feigan have been charged with making a false report after police uncovered incriminating CCTV footage of the run-in.

Despite the evidence stacking up against him, the swimmer has yet to come clean.

That’s good news because the longer he strings out the lie, the longer we get to watch this most entertaining of trainwrecks.

So while we enjoy the show, let’s take a closer look at some of the personality quirks that have helped define the 32-year-old as “America’s sexiest douchebag”.

HE FANCIES HIMSELF AS AN ARTIST BUT IS EXTRAORDINARILY BAD AT IT

To make matters worse, his chosen genre is “surrealist nature art”. Jezebel once likened his work to something a pothead would draw in a psych ward. Which is a pretty good call.

Lochte tweeted this drawing of a weeping illuminati eye volcano mushroom thing along with the caption: ‘My new picture I’m drawing, still in progress but its gonna be sick!!! Jeah!!!’

HE TRIED TO TRADEMARK HIS CATCHPHRASE: ‘JEAH!’

This odd utterance pops up a lot in Lochte interviews and on his social media accounts in hashtag form but nobody is really sure whether he made it up himself, as he claims, or stole it from a US rapper.

“It means, like, almost, like, everything,” Lochte explained in a 2009 YouTube video.

“Like happy. Like, if you have a good swim, you say, ‘Jeah.’ Like, it’s good. So, I guess … it means good.”

Another attempt to explain the word went like this: “It’s spelled J-E-A-H. If you say it like how it’s spelled it’s ‘jee-ah’. But, that’s boring; no one wants to hear that. So you have to really put that emphatis [sic] on that ‘J’. And then the ‘A-H’ kinda just flows.”

Lochte’s attempts to trademark the word for use in merchandising and clothing lines have been thwarted by US rapper MC Eiht, who claimed he coined it way back in 1988.

That hasn’t stopped him from plastering the word all over his products, though.

Lochte has plastered his bizarre catchphrase all over his merchandise.

HE HAD HIS OWN REALITY SHOW

Canned after just one season, 2013’s What Would Ryan Lochte Do? cemented the swimmer’s reputation as a “douchebag” of Olympic proportions and highlighted his Trump-like propensity to refer to himself in the third person.

Things got so bad that it was rare to see a Lochte headline in the US media that didn’t also feature the word “douchebag”.

“What’s being talked about a lot is ‘Ryan Lochte the American douchebag’,” the swimmer lamented at the time.

“Douchebag? I don’t even know what is a douchebag, like what is it? Like what is the definition? ... Like I really don’t know what it means, do you know?”

Viewers could only stomach Lochte for one season

HE OWNS MORE THAN 100 PAIRS OF SHOES

Oddly for a swimmer, Lochte has an Imelda Marcos-like passion for footwear. He owns in excess of 130 pairs of shoes, many of them customised to reflect his greatness.

During an interview with John McEnroe that aired early in NBC’s London Olympics coverage, Lochte proudly showed off his favourite pair (pictured below).

He also has a pair of America-themed shoes with wings stitched into the sides but was banned from wearing them in London because they clashed with the team uniform.

Lochte’s dream is to eventually become a clothing designer.

“I want to be different, and fashion gives me that outlet to do that,” he has said.

Lochte’s dream is to start his own fashion line. He owns more than 130 pairs of shoes

HIS DUMB QUOTES ARE A THING

Lochte gives George W Bush a run for his money when it comes to inexplicable and sometimes indecipherable utterances.

Many of these have been immortalised in meme form.

Huh?

This is on the nose.

Freudian slip on a banana skin.

That explains it.