They were two of the world’s most eligible bachelors with throngs of women throwing themselves at them wherever they went.

So when Prince Harry and Ryan Lochte descended on the Las Vegas strip – with bikini-clad models and gallons of alcohol – scandal was sure to follow.

The star swimmer had taken a month out of the water after dominating the London 2012 Olympics with two gold medals.

He headed straight for Sin City that August for a belated birthday party, after turning 28 during the Games.

‘I went with my friends; I just wanted to unwind and enjoy some leisure time,’ he once mentioned to Kelly Osborne—somewhat unaware of the irony of seeking relaxation in one of the most hectic places on Earth.

However, he hadn’t anticipated running into Prince Harry, who was also in Las Vegas seeking a break after his duties as an Olympic ambassador for the Royal Family.

The then 27-year-old had been showered in praise for his maturity during the huge event – but that quickly changed after his run in with Lochte.

Prince Harry (left) and Ryan Lochte seconds before their infamous boozy race in Las Vegas

The moment occured hours before Harry’s notorious ‘strip pool’ pictures were taken

Harry whipped his top off for the race with Lochte, while the Olympian kept his white shirt on

When the Prince remained mostly unnoticed by partygoers at a gathering hosted by Jennifer Lopez the night before meeting Lochte, he might have believed the familiar phrase ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ was indeed applicable.

As J-Lo walked the red carpet at the afternoon event, hours before playing a show, Harry threw a beachball around in a pool with friends without anyone looking twice at him, even in his baggy red Bermuda shorts.

The following night, they were at the luxurious Wynn hotel and had been drinking since waking up.

At around 2am, the Prince spotted Lochte, either recognizing him from his London heroics or noticing all the women that had surrounded his table.

‘I curled into the corner of a leather banquette and watched a procession of young women come and go,’ Harry recalled of the night in his autobiography Spare, which didn’t mention Lochte.

Soon enough, the swimmer and his friends were interrupted, approached by a man none of them knew. ‘Prince Harry is here,’ he told Lochte. ‘You want to meet him?’

‘Let’s go!’ Lochte said, accepting immediately. For a man whose life revolved around being number one, he was left thrilled to be in-demand from royalty.

Lochte would later tell the Daily Mail: ‘It was a huge honor to meet him. He’s a great guy.’ But after a little bit of mingling, Harry stopped Lochte from leaving.

The incident took place at the luxurious Wynn hotel in Vegas, during the pool-party season

Lochte celebrates beating Harry but said he was impressed by the Prince’s technique

Lochte lost his shirt in the aftermath and Harry also failed to find his after getting beat

Lochte mingles with friends after adding Harry to his long list of beaten opponents in the pool

Harry and Lochte seen chatting to admirers at the party in the height of the Vegas summer

‘I was like, “Alright, I’m going to head back to my table with my friends, it was nice meeting you,” and he was like, “Wait,”‘ Lochte said. ‘He was like, “You want to get in the pool and race me? Right now?”‘

Lochte couldn’t say no. He had just beaten the great Michael Phelps to win gold in the 400-meter individual medley in London. Why not add Prince Harry to the list? 

With music blasting, Harry whipped his top off and jumped in before Lochte followed, joining the groups of guys and girls who had also taken the party into the early hours.

The crowds split either side of the duo to form a faint 10-meter racetrack. A girl in a bikini waited at the end to mark the finish line.

‘Watching him swim, he does have good form,’ Lochte said. ‘I was surprised. But of course, I won.’

Lochte also previously told the Daily Mail of the race: ‘He was a great competitor but in the end it was Team USA all the way!

‘I was surprised that he challenged me. I didn’t know if he had any skills in the pool but I definitely wasn’t going to take it easy on him.’

Surrounded by admirers, Lochte and Harry stayed in the water to soak up the attention – Harry never did find his shirt again.

They left the venue at around 4:30am, splitting the party in two and taking it back to their respective hotel rooms. 

But after a long day of drinking, only one of them was smart enough to keep the following antics behind closed doors.

While Lochte confiscated the phones of those who joined him back at his hotel, Prince Harry was covertly pictured in his VIP suite by a guest, playing strip pool, naked with a scantily-clad woman next to him.

After the race, Lochte and Harry stayed in the pool to talk to the partyers they interrupted

Lochte was in Vegas to celebrate his birthday – he turned 28 during the London Olympics

Girls in bikinis were dancing by the pool when Harry and Lochte jumped in for a race

Harry wrote of that day in Spare: ‘We ordered breakfast, Bloody Marys. It was pool-party season in Vegas, so a big blowout was raging. 

‘My mates invited four or five women who worked at the hotel to join us (at the end of the night), along with two women they’d met at the blackjack tables… They looked dodgy.’

After playing pool with his bodyguards, Harry admits he ‘suggested we up the stakes’ with strip pool.

He continued: ‘I was the big loser, reduced to my skivvies. Then I lost my skivvies. It was harmless, silly, or so I thought. Until the next day.

‘Standing outside the hotel in the blinding desert sun I turned and saw one of my mates staring at his phone, his mouth falling open.

‘I was naked before the eyes of the world. I berated myself. How had I been so stupid? Why had I trusted other people?

‘I’d counted on those dodgy girls to show some basic decency and now I was going to pay the price forever. Those photos would never go away.

‘My sense of guilt and shame made it hard at moments to draw a clean breath.’ 

It sparked major humiliation for Harry and the Royal Family, just weeks after starring at the Olympics alongside his brother, William, and sister-in-law Kate.

‘That’s why people come to Vegas,’ the late Robin Leach, a veteran entertainment columnist for the Las Vegas Sun, wrote at the time. ‘To let their hair down and behave badly.’ 

‘It could happen to anyone,’ Lochte told Inside Edition. ‘I just tried my best to make sure that no cameras came in (to my party).’

Locte and Harry (left) mingle with stunned Vegas revelers after their dramatic race

The prince looked thrilled at having had the chance to take on Lochte on his big night

Lochte (right) eventually made it back to his friends and went a separate way to Harry’s group

Lochte said he didn’t get an invite from the Prince to his suite: ‘He never said anything like that. After our race, we went our separate ways.’

A year later, Lochte would describe his encounter with Harry as ‘a one-time thing.’ It is thought that the pair haven’t met again.

Weeks after the shock pictures of Harry emerged, he was back serving with the army in Afghanistan as part of a 20-week deployment that ended in 2013.

Certainly for Harry in the following years, the optics of being pictured with Lochte would have served as a reminder of a night where he ended up tarnishing his family’s reputation.

Lochte eventually got back in the pool – he joked in one interview that racing Harry reignited a competitive streak inside of him – and headed to the Rio Olympics in 2016, where he was embroiled in his own needless controversy.

Lochte, along with fellow USA swimmers Gunnar Bents, Jack Conger and Jimmy Feigen, fabricated a story about being robbed at gunpoint by thugs posing as cops in Rio. The story unraveled spectacularly in front of a global audience.

The scandal did major damage to Lochte’s credibility and he lost sponsorship deals with Speedo and Ralph Lauren. He was also charged in Brazil with falsely reporting a crime but a judge threw the case out in July 2017. Whether he broke a law or not, for Harry it would have been another stark reason not to rekindle the friendship.

Perhaps now though, cut adrift from his family in California with Meghan, Harry might have recently thought to reach out to Lochte.

Harry pictured with his wife Meghan – the couple are now raising a family in California

Lochte recently announced his divorce from wife Kayla Reid after seven years of marriage 

The 12-time Olympic medalist announced last week that he was getting divorced from his Playboy model wife Kayla Reid after seven years of marriage and three children together.

And the Daily Mail exclusively reported off the back of the news that, amid some financial difficulties, Lochte wants to reinvent his image in time for the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles. 

Maybe that is where the two will meet once again. Lochte, now 40, was a media darling after London in 2012, even landing acting cameos in 30 Rock and 90210. There will likely be a route back for him.

Harry, meanwhile, loves attending sporting events in LA. He’s seen Lionel Messi play for Inter Miami there and taken in a Lakers game with Meghan. A photo op for the polarizing couple at the biggest sporting event of them all would surely be irresistible.

Perhaps for Harry and Lochte, the time could be right. Older and wiser than that fateful night in Vegas, they can enjoy the downtime Lochte strangely thought he was going to have before a prince intervened.