When a newspaper published a photo of him smoking a bong, Michael Phelps experienced his darkest day.

OK, maybe his second-darkest day. It all depends on how dark you imagine the day that Michael Phelps realised that his face was going to dramatically outgrow his head was. But, nevertheless, the bong thing was pretty dark.

And although he’s escaped serious punishment for it, Michael Phelps’ Olympian spirit has spurred him on to apologise on TV. OK, not apologise as such – it was more of an inarticulate rant about how crappy his friends are – but it’s a start.

The world of faddy internet outrages moves pretty fast, so there’s a chance that you’ve forgotten that Michael Phelps ever got in trouble. But he did – before Chris Brown and Rihanna, before Christian Bale, before Octomom thought about a career in porn, there was Michael Phelps and his bong.

There he was, the world’s greatest Olympian, getting hammered on performance-enhancing drugs in an evil drug den. OK, maybe they weren’t performance-ehnacing drugs – at best it was marijuana, a drug about as performance-enhancing to a swimmer as chainmail flippers and a pool full of treacle, and even that’s not known for sure. And it wasn’t a drug den, either – if we’re honest it looked like Michael Phelps was at the home of one of his friend’s parents. Let’s redo this paragraph.

There he was, the world’s greatest Olympian, possibly taking some mostly-useless drugs in a tatty living room that looked as if it hadn’t been decorated since 1974. Yes, that’s better.

Anyway, the outrage over Michael Phelps’ alleged drug-taking was hard and immediate, in the sense that the IOC couldn’t be bothered to punish him, the US Swimming team suspended him – giving him a nice sit down when there weren’t any real competitions on anyway – and the worst thing that really happened was that Michael Phelps wasn’t allowed to advertise breakfast cereal any more.

But despite that lack of any real interest or outcry, Michael Phelps has still gone on the Today show to apologise. Well, we say apologise, but when he was actually asked if he smoked pot, the best Michael Phelps could do was this:

“I mean, we were just celebrating, honestly. There was probably two or three people there I didn’t know. It was a very small group. Like nothing major. You know, not like a giant college house party. It was nothing like that… I’ll say that there are a lot of people out there who want to take advantage of any situation they have. I trusted my friends who were there about who they were. And clearly they weren’t trusted people… Sometimes you learn the hard way.”

So there we have it. Michael Phelps went on TV to not aplogise for something that nobody cares if he actually did or not. And with that, you may get on with your day.

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