Compared To Past, Rio May Seem Like Day At The Beach For Both Lochte, Franklin

RIO DE JANEIRO – This is a city whose global renown owes to a feeling that life is a beach – a virtual mandate to let the good times roll on Ipanema and Copacabana. So maybe it’s fitting that the 2016 Olympic Games will seem like lazy days on the strand for Missy Franklin and Ryan Lochte compared to their past experiences in the summer Games.

The irony is neither is likely to have days in the sun the way Franklin did in 2012, and Lochte did in both 2012 and 2008. 

This time around, they are Olympians, not stars, each swimming far fewer events than in the past, each likely to consider an individual event medal of any color as good as the golds they won four years ago in London.

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For Phelps & Lochte, another matchless episode of long-running hit

    Gonna take a sentimental journey
 
    Gonna set my heart at ease
 
    Gonna make a sentimental journey
 
    To renew old memories
 
           -- From the classic 1945 No. 1 hit song, “Sentimental Journey”

OMAHA, Neb. – They should have cleared everyone else out of the pool, leaving Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte in a match race, because that is what Friday night’s final of the 200-meter individual medley at the U.S. Olympic Team Trials for Swimming turned out to be.

Again.

No one expected anything else from the two men who have battled each other for global supremacy in the event over 13 years, creating the greatest rivalry in the history of their sport.

And the two 31-year-olds now have a chance to do it one more time at the 2016 Olympics next month in Rio.

“It isn’t over,” Lochte said. “We’ve still got another month to put everything together and really give the world a show.”

There never has been a longer-running hit in the sport.

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