The tough talking sheriff in Columbia, S.C. said Monday that he won’t charge swimming sensation Michael Phelps after all. Add escape artist to the Olympian’s already impressive resume.
“We had a photo and him saying he was sorry for inappropriate behavior,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said during a televised press conference. “He never said, ‘I smoked marijuana.’ We didn’t have physical evidence.”
Lott said he hoped children would learn that no matter who you are, you can’t break the law.
“Michael Phelps is truly an American hero,” Lott said. “But even with his star status, he is obligated to obey the laws of our state.”
Case closed. Can everyone just take a hit and relax now? (Make sure no one has a camera, please.)
Matt Hennie blogs on Atlanta’s gay sports scene (and other stuff) at Project Q Atlanta.
on Feb 17th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
So Michael Phelps is a guy who drinks at parties smokes a little gambles on high stakes games of beer pong and is the all time greatest Olympic medal winner he sounds like a pretty cool guy to me. Michael Phelps is an American Hero. He stood tall and made America proud at the Beijing Olympics. This is how he is treated. Michael Phelps did a tremendous amount of work to achive what he did. Who can forget the pride we felt with the each gold medal Phelps won in China, how can we as Americans forget all of those things and hang a man for smoking a glass water pipe at a college party. It is time that we as a country stand up for the rights of the individual, it’s time we stand together with our neighbors and take collective control of our destinies. Write any congressman or a senator; imagine the weight of millions of emails calling for a change in policy. Lets stop them from arresting college kids at parties in America.
SunflowerPipes.com
on Feb 17th, 2009 at 3:36 pm
this is good news for phelps and his family.
now, he can refocus on his training and continue to further solidify his position as the greatest olympic athlete of all time.
on Feb 17th, 2009 at 6:29 pm
The thing that no one is pointing out is that in that photo of Phelps taking a hit off the bong there is NO smoke in the chamber. For all we know he ‘could’ have been joking around. No wonder the world looks at us and laughs their asses off.
Existential Punk
on Feb 18th, 2009 at 8:24 am
No physical evidence and yet somehow the sheriff managed to arrest 8 others from that party based on the pictures? I’m not saying ANYONE should have been arrested but how does Phelps get off if the others don’t?
on Feb 18th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Oh, so now he is to be admired for escaping any responsibility for his actions?
on Feb 19th, 2009 at 3:00 am
“Escape artist” conveys an indisputable innuendo of guilt at getting away with something reprehensible. Why do you wish, as an alternative outlet for gay guys who’ve probably “broken the almighty law” sometime in their past just for acting on their God-given sexual drive towards another guy, to support even inadvertently the inane prohibition of pot while the deleteriously inherent nature of alcohol & alcoholism is taxed & subsidized by a duplicitous government?
on Feb 19th, 2009 at 6:47 am
Why does it seem that the Michael Phelps Fan Club and the pothead legalization lobby group are made up of the same people?
on Feb 20th, 2009 at 8:48 am
From the news accounts I’ve read, both in writing the Phelps post and after, the sheriff won’t be filing charges against anyone in the case, despite their over-the-top raid of the apartment where the incident happened.
And don’t read too much into the “escape artist” headline. It’s nothing more than an attempt at a catchy way to pull readers into the post and a subtle, maybe not so successful, way of poking fun at the ridiculousness of the entire matter.