Believe it or not, five-time Olympic gold medalist Ryan Lochte is still a thing. The swimmer, who took America by storm last year after winning five overall medals in the London Olympics despite barely being able to form complete sentences, is still hanging around the edges of pop culture before Dancing With the Stars or whatever inevitably comes calling. What does this month bring? Well, a magazine cover, of course.
The man who trademarked the word phrase "Jeah!" (shh, nobody tell him that's not a real word) will appear in ESPN the Magazine's upcoming music issue, which like Lochte himself, is a thing that exists for reasons no one can explain. Lochte will appropriately be playing the role of the baby in Nirvana's iconic cover for Nevermind, and as promotion for the issue, ESPN decided to make Lochte look dumber than one of the Subway sandwiches hawked by Michael Phelps.
Lochte's cover comes out this week, but ESPN has released a preview in which the gold-medal swimmer says the following things:
— "Iconic Nirc-vana"
— "The cover is definitely global, brah."
— "If you look at the baby, he's definitely happy in the water. And that's what I am."
— "He's chasing after a dollar bill. So he's always on the grind."
— "Trying to perfect the perfect the shot in the water was kinda easy for me. Just because I spend about four hours a day, every day of my life, in the water."
— "Usually when I go swimming, I have goggles on. So when I didn't have my goggles on for this shoot my eyes were definitely burning."
— [Blinks five times in two seconds] "Am I blinking a lot, cause I feel like it."
— "Hopefully everyone's reaction when they see it, they'll be like, daang, look at that guy. I honestly think I nailed the shot."
Whatever. Anyway, the most notable aspect of this entire ordeal is that Lochte was shot wearing a speedo, despite the Nirvana baby letting it all hang out. You could say that this robbed us of being able to find out if Ryan Lochte's penis is comparable to that of a toddler, except that we already know the answer to that one.
[via USA Today, image via ESPN]