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Ryan Lochte is making some massive changes in his life.
The 41-year-old ex-Olympian revealed this week that he went to rehab and shared the surprising — and positive results.
“I’m incredibly happy right now, and the main reason is that I’ve been sober for 54 days. Yes!” he expressed in an emotional video shared on his Instagram account.
Lochte, one of the most decorated US Olympians of all time with 12 medals, has lived through a very public downfall since coming into the spotlight.
He notoriously fabricated a gunpoint robbery incident during a drunken episode at the Rio Games in 2016, which severely damaged his reputation. Lochte nearly lost his life in a November 2023 accident when his truck collided with a garbage truck while he was en route to collect his three children from school.
“After the accident in 2023, I fell into a very dark place – dealing with depression, loneliness, and a sense of giving up on life, which led me down a path of substance abuse,” he admitted. “With everything happening in my life, I realized I needed to make a change, a significant change.”
In recent months, a high-profile divorce from Kayle Rae Reid, his wife of seven years, has put his name and party-boy reputation back in the headlines.
She claimed to have found “mostly empty baggies of cocaine” around their house — including in one of their children’s bedrooms — and that she caught Lochte “inhaling nitrous oxide” in front of one of their kids.
Lochte copped to using drugs in the home, but denied having done so “in front of or around my children.”
Eventually, he revealed, he checked himself into a Florida recovery center.
“The staff there … they helped me realize that substance abuse isn’t a solution, it’s just a distraction that makes things worse,” he said in the video. “I’m thinking clearly, I’m motivated, and I’m moving forward
“There’s a lot of stigma around substance abuse. In life, you’re going to get knocked out or hit a road block. There’s no ifs, ands, buts around it. It’s not how you get knocked out, it’s how you keep moving forward.”