Michael Phelps showed tremendous potential as a swimmer from a very young age. He started swimming at age 7, influenced in part by his sisters. Three years later, he held a national record for his age group in the 100-meter butterfly.

At 15 years old, he qualified for the national team competing at the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the youngest member in 68 years. While he didn’t come home with a medal, it marked the beginning of his prolific career.

Turning pro at a young age took a toll on Michael Phelps

In 2020, Michael Phelps did an interview with Allison Kugel to promote his HBO documentary Weight of Gold. Here, Phelps delved deep into his struggles of entering the tense and competitive environment of professional swimming. He explained how starting at a young age hampered his emotional growth.

“It’s difficult to start a journey at such a young age when you miss so much of your developmental stages. I was 15 and thrown into competing, a world where I was competing with 30-year-old men and expected not to be a 15-year-old kid, but a grownup,” he told Kugel.

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The only way for the young swimmer to cope with the tremendous pressure made him reticent about his feelings. “At some point, I just got numb by it all. You train yourself to not pay attention to how you feel, and before too long you are blindsided by it all,” he continued. Phelps had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder at age 9. 

The same year, his parents divorced, and his mother raised him and his sisters single-handedly. The absence of his father left Phelps feeling abandoned. Consequently, he developed issues that stayed with him for a long time. However, he couldn’t use an emotional outlet as he believed it would threaten his success as a swimmer.

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“If you do show emotions, you are showing your competitors weakness,” Phelps revealed. The swimming GOAT competed in 5 Olympics, his last competition being the 2016 Rio Olympics. But four years before that, he had already decided to quit swimming.

Phelps struggled with depression throughout his career

Despite his tremendous success in the sport, Michael Phelps went through bouts of depression after every Olympic Games he participated in. The London Olympics had proved to be disappointing for the swimmer, despite going home with six medals, four of them gold.

He returned to competition a couple of years later for another go at reclaiming his title in his signature race, the 200-meter butterfly. But in 2014, the police arrested Michael Phelps, his second DUI in a decade. In that particularly dark phase of his life, Phelps revealed his struggles with suicidal ideation.

The most decorated Olympian did a stint in rehab, which helped him start getting back in touch with his emotions. He started working through his issues with his father and became outspoken about his battles with mental health.

“I could not show that part of myself until the last two years of my career when I got to the point where I really didn’t care what people thought about me,” Phelps explained. “It was at that point where I opened up and decided to talk about the struggles I had been going through.”

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