This was late one night — actually, early one morning — in the summer of 2004, at a bustling tavern in Plaka, the social heart of Athens during the Olympics. We could see the Parthenon from our table, where six of us, from six different countries, had just wound up another 16-hour day covering boating, boxing and badminton, convincing our readers in five different languages that we were experts in all of them.

It was the reporter from Naftemporiki, a financial newspaper based in Greece, who said, joking, “I think we all know who wrote the best story today,” and he pointed at me.

I was enjoying both my Heineken and the international compliment when the reporter from The Australian newspaper explained the joke to me, which had gone sailing over my head.

“Of course you did, mate,” he said. “You wrote it in American!”

This was my colleagues’ subtle explanation for what we commonly refer to as the “Ugly American” abroad: a sense of entitlement, however subtle; a feeling of superiority, however unintended. My Aussie friend added, “You aren’t really all that ugly. Just slightly disfigured.”

Sometimes, as I’ve traveled overseas, I’ve been troubled by that notion, of the assumption of the Ugly American. I’ve thought it a cartoon, a caricature, whose time was surely over.

And then, sometimes, you see someone like Ryan Lochte open his mouth.

And when you hear what comes tumbling out, it all makes perfect sense.

That’s the worst part of what Lochte and his stable of stumble-bumbling swimmer pals have done the past few days, now that it’s apparent that whatever might have happened to them late one night — actually, early one morning — in Rio, it wasn’t exactly the way Lochte described it the first time around. In fact, it seems apparent that Lochte and his cohorts in chaos — Jack Conger, Gunnar Bentz and Jimmy Feigen, all swimmers representing the US in a decidedly different way than Katie Ledecky and Michael Phelps did — were using the old “robbed-at-gunpoint” chestnut as cover for what was apparently a gas station encounter with a security guard and, quite hilariously, a bathroom door.

Maybe panicky athletes from Kazakhstan or Kenya or Kuala Lampur might have reacted similarly and seized on the easy (though rooted-in-reality) narrative presented for months, that Rio was a cross between the Wild West of yore and the Fort Apache Bronx of the 1970s. Maybe it would have occurred to a rower from Rwanda or a decathlete from Denmark or a sprinter from Spain to go that way. Maybe. But that’s not who did this.

Ryan Lochte — Ugly American with a truly ugly hairstyle — did it.

So we have him, and his kind, to thank for the suspicious stares we get on the streets of Prague, or the rolled eyes we get standing in line for gelato in Florence, or the curious questions we get from cab drivers in County Clare.

It hasn’t been easy being Lochte, who has had to spend his athletic prime competing in Phelps’ considerable shadow, who always has been The Other Guy, who always has had to resort to his inherent goofiness to stand out because even his impressive haul of 12 Olympic medals — six of them gold, including one in the 4×200 freestyle relay last week — looks like a pauper’s pile next to Phelps’. But it hasn’t exactly been hard; he’s dabbled in show business and reality TV, he dates a Playboy model, he’s made millions outside of the pool.

And if what the authorities say happened actually happened: a brawl with a rent-a-cop, a busted door, a little drunk-and-disorderly — did he really think that was going to hurt his reputation? That’s Whitey Bulger fretting over a jaywalking ticket. It’s ridiculous.

No, instead he cried wolf and was called on it, and that will be his burden to bear for a good long while — but not his alone. The Ugly American is alive and well in 2016 thanks to this dope. Thanks for that, Ryan. Now don’t let the bathroom door hit you on the ass on your way to Palookaville.