(Photo : Getty Images: Donald Miralle / Stringer)
Klete Keller was involved in a previous capitol riot, Klete who was an Olympic gold medalist, was seen in the crowd storming the Capitol.
The last thing he expected was that he would break into tears for Klete Keller, the decorated swimmer whom he had known as a merry prankster.
"He apologized to me," Mark Schubert said, previous Klete Keller trainer he recounted their conversation after Keller's arrest last week as. "He kept repeating words, 'You have done so much for me, but I let you down", 'I did not mean for any of this to happen.'"
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Perhaps a few have attracted more attention than Klete Keller, a three-time Olympian who won two gold medals as Michael Phelps' relay teammate, out of the thousands of people currently facing charges and possible jail terms for invading the capitol riot.
Yet, within days of being spotted in pro-Trump crowds' videos attacking the Capitol, Keller's 38-year-old friends and former teammates turned him into the FBI. Strangers were demanding that he go to jail. And influential voices were calling for his Olympic medals to be taken from him.
It was nothing less than bizarre for those who know Klete Keller. It is best to see a man who had once stood on an Olympic medal podium with his hand over his heart while singing the national anthem, the personification of American grandeur and achievement at that moment, behaving as part of a mob bent on undermining the democracy of the United States. But they were unable to say that they were shocked.
Keller glided around the floor of life so effortlessly that few people had any knowledge of his private hardships away from the pool for a very long time. For example, months before the 2004 Athens Olympics, Keller experienced a period of sleeplessness and malaise that resulted in what was characterized as an 'emotional breakdown' by his coach at the time, Jon Urbanchek.
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Keller rebounded to deliver one of the many hallmark moments of these video games, holding off the Australian champion Ian Thorpe in the 4'200 freestyle relay over the final 100 meters of anchor legs to reach the gold for the US. It was his second Olympic medal, and he would eventually declare his fourth of five in his embellished worldwide profession.
They knew his professional failures and the slow personal unraveling that had accompanied his triumphs in addition to his achievements. They're aware of his struggles to settle a career, of divorce, of the fight over child custody that split him from his three young children; and of a dark time in which he lived inside his car for almost a year.
They heard about his politics, too. Keller, who lives in Colorado, had, for most of the past year, telegraphed his loyalty to US President Donald Trump on his now-deleted social media pages, they said. In November, he traveled to Washington to attend an election demonstration and called the Million MAGA March a pro-Trump rally. Keller marked the day with a Facebook post in which he posed in the streets of Washington, quoted Sebastian Gorka, a conservative firebrand, and railed against "this brazen assault on our republic and our way of life."
Still, many of those closest to Klete Keller decided to see a glimmer of hope in his simple recognition after his name started to pop up in newspaper reports and television news broadcasts. If he had gone to the Capitol riot with mayhem in his mind, he would indeed not have emerged unmasked and wearing a US Olympic team jacket, they said to themselves.
