Question: Who is the greatest short-course swimmer to date?

Hint: It isn’t Michael Phelps or Mark Spitz or Johnny Weissmuller.

It’s Ryan Lochte, whose 21st gold medal came in the 800-meter free relay at the FINA World Short Course Championships Thursday in Doha. It was the event that launched him on the road to short-course history in 2004.

Lochte doesn’t always get the respect he deserves. For one thing, he has swum in the shadow of Michael Phelps – much as Novak Djokovic has played in the shadow of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And it’s never easy to be “merely” excellent in the face of immortality.

For another, Lochte did himself no favors at the London Olympics, at which he was supposed to emerge from Phelps’ shadow, by underperforming – if you can call five medals underperforming – and allowing himself to be packaged as a frat-boy airhead.

The real Ryan Lochte is a superb swimmer with a big heart who gives away medals to youngsters at meets, signs every autograph, opens his home to fellow swimmers when they need a place to stay and even drove hundreds of miles to attend the funeral of a swimmer he didn’t even know. And while he may not be intellectual, he’s smarter and more articulate in interviews than our TMZ culture would have you believe.

The clock is ticking down not only on 2013 but on an exhibit that caused a stir when it bowed in Paris this past fall. Indeed, it was the talk of the fashion shows there.

“Masculin/Masculin: Ouvrage Collectif,” at the Musée d’Orsay through Jan. 2, considers the male nude in various media from 1800 to the present. It was organized in collaboration with the Leopold Museum in Vienna, which presented its show, “Nude Men,” in the fall and winter of 2012-13.

While both exhibits contain overlapping works, they are different in tone as each has played to the strengths of its respective museum and country. The Leopold show, reflecting an institution rich in the works of Egon Schiele, was more expressive, almost neurotically so, in its depiction of male nudity; the Musée d’Orsay show, cooler, more formal in its ravishing neoclassical (turn-of the-19th-century) offerings. (Or so it seems to me after pouring over – no, devouring -- the catalogs only. I purchased “Nude Men,” published by Hirmer, at a Barnes & Noble. I’m grateful to Flammarion, publisher of “Masculin/Masculin,” for providing me with a copy of the catalog for that show.)

But both shows consider the same questions, not the least of which is, Why does the male nude unsettle us so? Indeed, both catalogs open with an amusing anecdote of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London commissioning a fig leaf for its replica of Michelangelo’s “David,” whose full monty apparently had a disturbing effect on Queen Victoria, bless her. Perhaps like Her Majesty, I prefer to keep my gaze above the Mason/Dixon line, so to speak, particularly for realistic, photographic male nudes. Read more

The swimmer

The wayward gaze