How Prince Harry's wild Las Vegas night with Ryan Lochte ended in scandal

Daily Mail​

16-06-2025

When Prince Harry and Ryan Lochte descended on the Las Vegas strip - with bikini-clad models and gallons of alcohol - scandal was sure to follow.
The star swimmer had taken a month out of the water after dominating the London Olympics with two gold medals.
He headed straight for Sin City that August for a belated birthday party, after turning 28 during the Games.
He once told Kelly Osborne: 'I went with my friends, I just wanted to relax and have some downtime.'
But what he wasn't counting on was bumping into Prince Harry, who'd also fled to the Strip for a recharge after representing the Royal Family as an Olympic ambassador.
The then 27-year-old had been showered in praise for his maturity during the huge event - but that quickly changed after his run-in with Lochte.
So when the Prince went largely unnoticed by revelers at a party hosted by Jennifer Lopez the night before meeting Ryan, he would have been forgiven for thinking the old saying of 'what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas' really was true.
As J-Lo walked the red carpet at the afternoon event, hours before playing a show, Harry threw a beachball around in a pool with friends without anyone looking twice at him, even in his baggy red Bermuda shorts.
The following night, they were at the luxurious Wynn Hotel and had been drinking since waking up.
At around 2am, the Prince spotted Lochte, either recognizing him from his London heroics or noticing all the women that had surrounded his table.
'I curled into the corner of a leather banquette and watched a procession of young women come and go,' Harry recalled of the night in his autobiography Spare, which didn't mention Lochte.
Soon enough, the swimmer and his friends were interrupted, approached by a man none of them knew. 'Prince Harry is here,' he told Lochte. 'You want to meet him?'
The following night, they were at the luxurious Wynn hotel and had been drinking since waking up.
Ryan said: 'Let's go!' accepting immediately. For a man whose life revolved around being number one, he was left thrilled to be in demand from royalty.
He would later tell the Daily Mail: 'It was a huge honor to meet him. He's a great guy.' But after a little bit of mingling, Harry stopped Lochte from leaving.
'I was like, "Alright, I'm going to head back to my table with my friends, it was nice meeting you," and he was like, "Wait,"' Lochte said. 'He was like, "You want to get in the pool and race me? Right now?"'
Lochte couldn't say no. He had just beaten the great Michael Phelps to win gold in the 400-meter individual medley in London. Why not add Prince Harry to the list?
With music blasting, Harry whipped his top off and jumped in before Lochte followed, joining the groups of guys and girls who had also taken the party into the early hours.
The crowds split either side of the duo to form a faint 10-meter racetrack. A girl in a bikini waited at the end to mark the finish line.
Ryan admitted: 'Watching him swim, he does have good form. I was surprised. But of course, I won.'
Ryan also previously told the Daily Mail of the race: 'He was a great competitor but in the end it was Team USA all the way!
'I was surprised that he challenged me. I didn't know if he had any skills in the pool but I definitely wasn't going to take it easy on him.'
Surrounded by admirers, the pair stayed in the water to soak up the attention - Harry never did find his shirt again.
They left the venue at around 4:30am, splitting the party in two and taking it back to their respective hotel rooms.
But after a long day of drinking, only one of them was smart enough to keep the following antics behind closed doors.
While Ryan confiscated the phones of those who joined him back at his hotel, Prince Harry was covertly pictured in his VIP suite by a guest, playing strip pool, naked with a scantily-clad woman next to him.
Harry wrote of that day in Spare: 'We ordered breakfast, Bloody Marys. It was pool-party season in Vegas, so a big blowout was raging.
'My mates invited four or five women who worked at the hotel to join us (at the end of the night), along with two women they'd met at the blackjack tables... They looked dodgy.'
After playing pool with his bodyguards, Harry admits he 'suggested we up the stakes' with strip pool.
He continued: 'I was the big loser, reduced to my skivvies. Then I lost my skivvies. It was harmless, silly, or so I thought. Until the next day.
'Standing outside the hotel in the blinding desert sun I turned and saw one of my mates staring at his phone, his mouth falling open.
'I was naked before the eyes of the world. I berated myself. How had I been so stupid? Why had I trusted other people?
'I'd counted on those dodgy girls to show some basic decency and now I was going to pay the price forever. Those photos would never go away.
'My sense of guilt and shame made it hard at moments to draw a clean breath.'
Ryan told Inside Edition: 'It could happen to anyone. I just tried my best to make sure that no cameras came in (to my party).'
It sparked major humiliation for Harry and the Royal Family, just weeks after starring at the Olympics alongside his brother, William, and sister-in-law Kate.
The late Robin Leach, a veteran entertainment columnist for the Las Vegas Sun, wrote at the time: 'That's why people come to Vegas. To let their hair down and behave badly.'
Ryan said he didn't get an invite from the Prince to his suite: 'He never said anything like that. After our race, we went our separate ways.'
A year later, the athlete would describe his encounter with Harry as 'a one-time thing.' It is thought that the pair haven't met again.
Weeks after the shock pictures of Harry emerged, he was back serving with the army in Afghanistan as part of a 20-week deployment that ended in 2013.
Certainly for Harry in the following years, the optics of being pictured with Ryan would have served as a reminder of a night where he ended up tarnishing his family's reputation.
The swimmer eventually got back in the pool - he joked in one interview that racing Harry reignited a competitive streak inside of him - and headed to the Rio Olympics in 2016, where he was embroiled in his own needless controversy.
Ryan, along with fellow USA swimmers Gunnar Bents, Jack Conger, and Jimmy Feigen, fabricated a story about being robbed at gunpoint by thugs posing as cops in Rio. The story unraveled spectacularly in front of a global audience.
The scandal did major damage to Ryan's credibility and he lost sponsorship deals with Speedo and Ralph Lauren. He was also charged in Brazil with falsely reporting a crime but a judge threw the case out in July 2017. Whether he broke a law or not, for Harry it would have been another stark reason not to rekindle the friendship.