THE bad news for Ryan Lochte is he’s been suspended 10 months and is banned from the 2017 world championships for that whole Rio fiasco, according to multiple reports.

    The good news is he can focus on his dancing.

    The banishment was handed down jointly by the International Olympic Committee, the United States Olympic Committee and USA Swimming, according to USA Today, so clearly the governing bodies were wanting to issue a statement that no one with even a minor association with Lochte condoned anything that happened in Rio.

    In case you need a refresher course, Lochte, along with three other members of the U.S. swimming team, were involved in an incident at a Rio Shell station. Lochte originally claimed he and the other three swimmers (Jimmy Feigen, Gunnar Bentz and Jack Conger) were robbed at gunpoint. The kicker in the story was Lochte contending that, with a gun pointed at his head and the alleged robber telling him to get on the ground, he responded, “Whatever.”

    In reality, Lochte and Co. were coming back from a night of partying, stopped to use a restroom at a gas station, may or may not have vandalized a bathroom, ripped down a poster off a wall, were asked to pay for said damages and eventually held, maybe at gunpoint, by security as a translator tried to resolve the issue.

    This turned into an international incident, with local police questioning the veracity of the story, pulling Bentz and Conger off a plane and holding Feigen in the country until he paid an US$11,000 fine. Lochte, meanwhile, was back in the United States attempting some damage control via interviews with Matt Lauer.

    Rio police have said they will pursue a case against Lochte for filing a false police report.

    And now Lochte has been suspended 10 months, or four months longer than Michael Phelps got after a DUI arrest in 2014.

    In the immediate future, however, Lochte has more pressing issues: “Dancing With the Stars,” which started Monday.

    (SD-Agencies)