In the eight months that Caeleb Dressel didn’t swim, he was surprised by the things he was going to miss. Some were simple, like blowing bubbles in the water or feeling his toes on the grip tape of the starting blocks. But he also missed the chlorine—a swimmer’s nemesis—and the dry skin that comes with hours spent in the pool.
“I missed every part of it,” said Dressel, 26. “And that’s how I knew I was ready to go back. Because I didn’t have to – I wanted.
For years, Dressel, a seven-time Olympic gold medalist, reigned as the best sprinter in the world. But last June he abruptly withdrew from the world championships due to an undisclosed health problem and disappeared from the sport and the limelight. Aside from a social media post last September, he hadn’t publicly discussed his absence until this week, when he returned to elite swimming competition at the U.S. National Championships.
Dressel’s performance reflected his long hiatus from the pool. His preliminary swims in the 50-meter and 100-meter freestyle, events he won at the Tokyo Olympics and in which he holds the American record, were too slow to make it to the championship final. His best finish in four events was third in the 50-meter butterfly, not good enough to qualify for the upcoming world championships.
For the first time since Dressel emerged as a new young star in men’s swimming in 2016, as Michael Phelps prepares for retirement, he will not be part of the U.S. team for the biggest international competition of the year. But not too long ago, Dressel wasn’t even sure if he’d get back in the water, so this meeting had meaning beyond his results.
“I always had a smile on my face while racing,” he said. “There is a difference between racing scared because you don’t want to embarrass yourself and then actually enjoying racing. And I haven’t had that fun in a long time, so it was nice to have it back.
Dressel’s goal is to regain his form in time to qualify for the 2024 Paris Olympics. While this meeting underlined that physically he has a long way to go back, he said the mental part will be more important.
Dressel did not disclose why he pulled out of last year’s world championships in Budapest, but said it was a necessity to retire from the sport.
“Easiest way to put it, my body was keeping score,” he said. “There were a lot of things I shoved down and all came to a boil, so I didn’t really have a choice.”
Anthony Nesty, Dressel’s coach at Florida’s Gator Swim Club, called the added pressure on Dressel the face of American men’s swimming, saying the sprinter needed time to escape it and focus on himself. Nesty said Dressel’s therapist was part of Dressel’s decision that he was ready to return to the sport earlier this year.
“Mental health is a serious problem and everyone deals with it differently,” said Nesty. “Sometimes it takes time to heal from that.”
In recent years, elite athletes have become more open about the mental health challenges that can come with the pressures of their sport. Towards the end of his swimming career, Phelps began talking about the anxiety and depression he experienced as he became the most decorated Olympian of all time, while gymnast Simone Biles and tennis player Naomi Osaka have both taken time off from their sports to focus. on their well-being. Last week, swimmer Lydia Jacoby shared for the first time that she was depressed after winning the gold medal in the 100m breaststroke at the Tokyo Games.
Jacoby said she struggled with her sudden leap to stardom at age 17 and with seeing swimming as a career rather than a passion, but “hit the deny, deny, deny button” about her depression until she came to terms with it. did not qualify for the final of the world championships. year. She took a break from training last summer and worked with a therapist. After being part of the U.S. world team this year with a second-place finish in the 100 breaststroke, Jacoby said, she’s starting to feel like the swimmer she was in Tokyo.
The 52-member U.S. world team that took shape without Dressel included some familiar faces — Katie Ledecky swam her third-fastest time in the 800-meter freestyle en route to her sixth world championship — as well as several new ones.
Thomas Heilman, a 16-year-old from Virginia, became the youngest male swimmer to qualify for a US world team since Phelps after placing second in both the 100-meter and 200-meter butterfly. Heilman, who said he watched YouTube videos of Phelps and Dressel’s old races to pump himself up, first swam alongside Dressel in the 100-meter fly final. After Dressel finished behind him in a tie for fifth place, he put his arm around the youngster and congratulated him as they walked off the deck together.
Dressel resumed training at the end of February with three workouts per week and did not begin a full workload of eight workouts per week until early May. But while Dressel lost some of his strength and fitness during his layoff, he said he also got some rest. He said he can now sit on his porch with his wife Meghan and not have to think about a million things I need to do, or what I did wrong in practice, or why I thought I did poorly in Tokyo. or why I thought 2019 was terrible.”
He drew on that new mindset on the first night of game in Indianapolis. In the 100m freestyle, Dressel’s start time of 47.67 seconds came off his opening leg in a relay at the 2022 world championships before retiring – a direct measure of his competitive form before his break. His prelims swim during the nationals was nearly two seconds slower, qualifying only for the “C” final, a bonus round at the end of the primetime schedule in which he failed to medal or qualify for international competitions .
With nothing on the line, he could have just scrapped the race. But after starting that night with Meghan and his parents in the stands, he slipped downstairs to warm up. By the time he stepped onto the blocks, the crowd had thinned out. He took his seat and raced, then looked at the scoreboard to see a time that would put him 19th in the event.
Smiling, he heaved himself out of the pool and headed for the dive pit to cool off, no winner but still in the water.