Olympic swimmer faces seven charges over Capitol riots

Klete Keller, a swimmer with two Olympic gold medals, has been indicted on seven charges surrounding his involvement in the Capitol riot on 6 January.

Video footage from inside the Capitol shows the 6-foot-6 Mr Keller standing out from the crowd in the building, wearing a jacket that looked to be from his time as an Olympian with "USA" printed on the sleeves and on the back, KDVR reported.

The seven-count grand jury indictment states that the 38-year-old Mr Keller "committed and attempted to commit an act to obstruct, impede, and interfere with a law enforcement officer," that he obstructed "an official proceeding," that he unlawfully entered "a restricted building," that he engaged in "disorderly" conduct, that he disrupted "a session of Congress," that he "impeded passage" through the Capitol, and that he "paraded, demonstrated, and picketed" in the US Capitol building.

The New York Times reported that former coaches and teammates recognized Mr Keller in footage and images from the riot as he towered over the crowd. Few said they were surprised to see him there, as Mr Keller's now-deleted social media accounts have previously been filled with messages in support of former President Trump.

While no video has emerged of Mr Keller being violent, he was seen in a video in which other Trump supporters fight back against police as they try to retake the rotunda in the Capitol building.

Mr Keller was registered as a member of USA Swimming in 2008. The organisation put out a statement in January, saying "Mr Keller’s actions in no way represent the values or mission of USA Swimming. And while once a swimmer at the highest levels of our sport – representing the country and democracy he so willfully attacked – Mr Keller has not been a member of this organization since 2008".

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Having expressed frustration in a 2014 interview about putting so much time and effort into the sport without thinking about what he would do afterwards, Mr Keller resigned last month from his role as an independent contractor at real estate agency Hoff & Leigh in Colorado Springs, NBC News reports.

In the 2014 interview with NBC Sports, Mr Keller said: "Being good at an Olympic sport is almost as much a curse as it is a blessing because I kind of got a skewed sense of reality. If I was as good at basketball or football as I was at swimming, I wouldn’t have had to worry about that stuff because I would have had lots of money. You make just enough swimming to be comfortable, and then you have to get real after [your swimming career ends]. In that way you have to have your head on straight."

Going from job to job and struggling with drinking and depression after his swimming days, Mr Keller said on a podcast with the Olympic Channel in 2018:

“I found the real-world pressure much more intimidating and much more difficult to deal with because I went from swimming to having three kids and a wife within a year.

“So the consequences of not succeeding were very, very real, and if I didn’t make a sale or if my manager was ticked off at me or I got fired, aw shoot, you have no health insurance, it’s very concrete and there are other people that are blood-related that are counting on you.

“So I felt, when I failed, a much more acute sense of pain and frustration and failure than I did with swimming. With swimming, it was just me. All those years of success I had with swimming really gave me an inaccurate expectation of the world, so it was all the much harder to cope with the little mini-failures I would face any given day.”