As the full extent of Ryan Lochte’s misdemeanours unravelled last weekend it became clear that his antics had not merely been objectionable but were representative of a culture.

The swimmer was by no means the first sportsman to get drunk, commit a crime or even to a lie about it afterwards to his mum, but it was not just that incident which began when criminal damage was done to a bathroom as his night out with fellow Olympic swimmers Gunnar Bentz, Jack Conger and Jimmy Feigen got out of hand that Sally Jenkins, a columnist with one of the world’s most esteemed newspapers, The Washington Post, homed in on when she offered her view on his behaviour.

“There is a special category of obnoxious American ‘bro’ that Lochte represents, in his T-shirt and jeans and expensive suede footwear, which he showed off on social media that night at the party along with the price tag. ‘We’re 6k deep here,’ he captioned it. Is there anything worse, in any country, than a bunch of entitled young drunks who break the furniture and pee on a wall? There is no translator needed for that one, no cultural norm that excuses it,” she wrote.

Setting aside the observation that as misbehaving young men from a racial minority they should perhaps be counting themselves lucky that the individual who pulled his gun on them was not an American policeman, it is that abuse of a privileged position that has really stuck in the craw, not least in a country where so many live in desperate poverty.

A grovelling apology proved too little, too late to save him his sponsorship deals as one after another turned their backs on this over-indulged brat.

It may, then, have been his mother who, inadvertently it seems, exposed his lies by repeating what he had claimed to her in attempting to explain the trouble he had landed in, but Lochte is the one who gave the game away in terms of allowing the wider world to see just how casual he was about the benefits he has received as a result of his sporting success and, more importantly, any sense of responsibility that goes with them.

Nor has he been alone recently as an individual involved in high profile sport who has talked his way into bother and in doing so has shone a light on a dubious culture.

When a rugby loving friend, a journalist who spent the best part of 40 years covering the sport, turned to Facebook a couple of weeks ago to express his revulsion at an account of Scotland’s pre-World Cup tour last year and the maltreatment of animals that had been outlined, it was telling that he smelt a rat amidst rabbit entrails when observing: “If true, utterly reprehensible. If exaggerated why make such stuff up for laughs?”

While the motivation was evidently self-aggrandisement he was right to be wary in assessing whether the evidence offered was an accurate account of players being forced, by way of somehow proving themselves, to kill animals with their bare hands without the proper tools and training.

The Scottish Rugby Union initially refused to comment but its chief executive ultimately issued an abject apology, admitting it should not have happened and promising it would not again, while partly attributing the embarrassment to the telling of ‘tall tales’ by Jim Hamilton, the former lock who had apparently back-tracked and claimed to have exaggerated his account.

It is, however, in the attempts of the less self-aware inhabitants of these little bubbles to portray themselves as ‘cool’ that the more unsavoury or even sinister aspects of how these groups conduct themselves most frequently emerge.

As one of those who commented on my friend’s Facebook posts observed, the impression given was that one way or another Hamilton had let the wider world in on the sort of behaviour that takes place at such gatherings when he observed: “Has the total ring of authenticity that story. Smacks to me of rugby player talking to rugby podcast and not realising their chat was open to non-rugby types.”

In short he was suggesting that it speaks to a culture of people who fail to understand how their in-jokey, lad-mag attitudes are out of synch with what Sally Jenkins referred to as ‘the cultural norm,’ something which, in the case of Scottish rugby, dates back at least as far as the 2003 World Cup when the national team became a laughing stock in Australia.

Since then the Scottish Rugby Union has built a much more effective public relations machine designed to guard against such reputational damage, however Hamilton has, like Lochte, given the game away in demonstrating that there are still attitudes in Scottish rugby that remain unacceptable, which is something for all concerned to be aware of as the man in charge of that ugly little expedition prepares to depart Murrayfield at the end of this season.