The personal is always political: The politics of swimming in 2016 – Salon

When I go swimming — every day, for whatever part of an hour best suits my mood and muscles — I slip into another zone, a blue bubble of silence that restores my soul while it expands my horizons. Nothing intrudes: no conversations, no waterproof earphones pumping music into my head, no TV shout fests labeling something that happened 24 hours ago as “breaking news.” During laps in the pool, my grandchildren know to avoid my lane, as does the family of frogs that took up residence this summer. In the sea I swim alone, gliding past creatures with their own agendas, who can’t be bothered by something that has to surface to breathe. This watery cocoon is my safe space, my thinking place, my escape from the world at large to a buoyant room of my own.

But not this summer, when a cascade of swimming-related fiascos turned my personal refuge into a political whirlpool.

The sea of stories began with the liquid itself. At the Rio Olympics, raw sewage in the bays and off the beaches threatened swimmers and sailors, requiring helicopter runs to head off the debris. Then the water in the diving pool morphed from robin’s-egg-blue to Shrek green, a disturbing chemical reaction that generated all those dumb jokes about bodily fluids mixing with chlorine. (“What do you get when you combine blue and yellow?”) I realized that my news-free water zone was totally doomed when I saw the explanation posted by Wired magazine: “Many people are saying that Donald Trump’s pool cleaning service is not everything the ads promise.”

The tidal wave rolled on with the frat-boy behavior and CYA lies concocted by U.S. Olympic swimmer Ryan Lochte. Like everyone else cheering all those magnificent human torpedoes in Rio, I was riveted by their speed, in awe of the decades of focus and dedication that led to the medal stand. It takes both to be a champion, as the ancient Romans knew — Mens sana in corpore sano: Sound mind, sound body. But Lochte, 32, and the decade-younger posse he left behind, absorbed only half the lesson. “The guy pulled out his gun, he cocked it, put it to my forehead,” Lochte said on the air, a dramatically detailed fiction that cruelly mocked a host nation struggling with crime and poverty. Lochte trashed not only Brazil but his own career, inevitably dragging the rest of us underwater with him. With the inevitable bathroom humor.

According to NBC’s late-night comedian Jimmy Fallon, Lochte “claimed he got robbed in Rio just to cover up the fact that he actually vandalized a gas station bathroom. Then, the other swimmers said, ‘What were you doing in a bathroom? Just hold it and do it in the pool like we do. We’re swimmers!’” Ba-da-boom.

Conan O’Brien told his TBS audience, “The Olympics closing ceremony was held in Rio last night. There was an emotional moment at the end when they extinguished the Olympic torch by having Ryan Lochte urinate on it.”

I was almost grateful when the punchline turned political. “The whole world thinks of Ryan Lochte as that crazy American with the weird hair who keeps making stuff up and causing an international incident,” said CBS’ Stephen Colbert, “which is not how an Olympian acts. That is how a presidential candidate acts.”

Strange lanemates, indeed. Ryan Lochte and Donald Trump are body opposites: one swam majestically to his fame before diving to the bottom, while the other threatens to drown us all with his blinkered nativism and vile rhetoric. Still, the confabulating swimmer and the politicking confabulator (“Believe me!”) share the arrogance and ignorance of the deeply self-absorbed. In the face of offensive acts, neither knows how to apologize, to understand the effect of their words and deeds. They have fouled the atmosphere far worse than the floating garbage in Rio’s bays and beaches.

But perhaps the most treacherous undercurrent came from some politicians (who sounded as if they were channeling Trump) in France, where the historic devotion to “laïcité” (“secularism”) in all government affairs briefly cancelled out that other “L” in their heritage: liberté. Citing recent ISIS-related terrorist attacks, notably the July assault that murdered 80 along a beach in Nice, local authorities in several communities banned the burkini — a head-to-toe swimsuit worn by some Muslim women. One local court called it “a straightforward symbol of religiosity.” The French ambassador to the United States tweeted that burkinis were part of “a patriarchal, regressive and mysoginistic [sic] clothing code.”

Moving to read so many supporters of the submission to a patriarchal, regressive and mysoginistic clothing code. That’s what is at stake.

— Gérard Araud (@GerardAraud) August 24, 2016

Such self-styled, if orthographically challenged, liberalism aside — the French prime minister claimed they were fighting “the enslavement of women” — an international wave of dissent roared ashore, especially when Riviera police ticketed women wearing the offending outfits, and in one case appeared to force them to strip off parts of their headscarf, tunic or leggings. “Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one,” wrote novelist Arundhati Roy about an earlier ban on Muslim street dress. “It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion.”