TOKYO — The reporter chased Ryan Murphy down a sidewalk outside the Aquatics Center and rather than ask a question, he issued an accusation.
“You've completely ruined Evgeny's moment,” he said. He was referencing Evgeny Rylov, the Russian swimmer who’d just won his second gold medal of the Olympics.
Hours later, nobody was talking about that medal, because Murphy, after losing to Rylov for the second time in four days, had questioned whether the 200-meter backstroke final was clean. “I do believe there is doping in swimming,” Murphy said. He never specifically accused Rylov of cheating, but he steered the conversation here, on the seventh full day of the Games, toward a relitigation of Russia's infamous state-sponsored doping scheme, and away from the fuzzy topics the Olympics think they’re supposed to be about.