Michael Phelps: Where are they now?

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Each summer Illustrated sports revisits, remembers and rethinks some of the biggest names and most important stories from our sporting past. This year, WHERE ARE THEY NOW? crop includes a flying fish and a captain, jet packs and NFTs, the Commerce Comet and the Say Hey Kid. Check back all week for more.

Boomer Phelps wore an NBC media accreditation around his neck, which certainly made him the youngest accredited person to appear at the US Olympic Swimming Trials in Omaha last month. His work was “Michael Phelps’s Son” and the 5 year old performed it with adorable poise. Everyone passed out at their cascading golden hair and sparkling brown eyes, but Boomer really just wanted to hang out with daddy.

“He’s not going to see anyone else all week,” Phelps says, and he’s not complaining. With younger sons Beckett and Maverick not making this trip, it’s a great one-on-one bonding moment.

Sitting on his famous father’s lap, Boomer learned about starts, turns, underwater kicks and other intricacies of the sport that Phelps has defined and raised like no one else in history. They were in The House MP Built; the grandiose idea of a swimming competition in a 17,000-seat basketball arena with eight consecutive nights of NBC prime-time coverage would have been laughable without Phelps’ transformational work. But now, at 36, Phelps is on the other side, watching from the stands, dry, roaming a kingdom that seems to swim well on its own.

Illustration by Tim McDonagh

For the first time since 1996 – when Bill Clinton was in his first term, Michael Jordan still had a few NBA titles in him and the Internet was still new – there will be an Olympics without Michael Phelps. “It’s weird,” he said. “But I hope relaxing. I think it will be good to watch it with the whole family. At a big competition, I always feel like I’m on high alert, super tense, and that should be more relaxing.

Maybe Phelps can relax when he’s in his living room and the competition takes place on the other side of the globe. But if you bring him by the pool for a major competition, all of his sharp swimming instincts kick in. The Olympic trials, with all the energy that comes from it and all the memories of domination they had there, were moving.

“For me, just walking on the pool deck, I felt chills run through my body,” he says. “I almost had to stop and let it all in. It was half overwhelming, but in a very positive way. I felt the tears start to rise.

There’s chlorine in Phelps’ soul. It was his path in life since his pre-teens, covering five Olympics, winning a record 28 medals, including a record 23 gold. He’s had the longest streak of success in the toughest sport to keep him going, and he appears to be in good enough shape to consistently stand on the podium in an Olympic event or two. “That’s all I know and all I’ve ever understood,” he says, a statement based on truth but also a dramatic understatement of his development over time.

By his own proud admission, Phelps has always been a swimming nerd-geek. It begins with a photographic memory of his own races. Bob Bowman, his lifelong trainer and de facto father figure, remembers watching races with his tallest student recently and being struck by the detail of his memories. Reviewing Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 200-meter individual medley, Phelps pointed out: “In about five meters I’m going to blow to my left to see where Thiago [Pereira of Brazil] is. “Sure enough, that’s what he did.

Phelps participated in the trials with Nicole and Boomer.

Al Bello / Getty Images

But Phelps’ immersion extended beyond himself. Despite a series of unprecedented performances over 16 years, he remains intensely interested in what is happening around him. Even at the peak of his prowess, he watched all the races and digested them, checking the times, strokes and tempos. If any random swimmer had an outstanding performance in a competition where Phelps was competing, the GOAT almost certainly noticed.

It hasn’t changed. He says he wrote down all of his predictions for the Olympic trials – times and places – and there was even a rumor that Phelps would be in a super exclusive selection contest with a few other former swimmers. He looked at what happened in Omaha, and he had some thoughts.

“I’m surprised they weren’t faster in some events,” he said. “The next few weeks for these Olympians will be a real test. We are going to have our hands full with swimmers from many countries. … The one thing that frustrates me the most is seeing a swimmer almost collapsing at the end of a race, having that piano sort of on his back. Those last 10 meters are so important, it’s racing.

Phelps was specifically referring to 22-year-old rising star Michael Andrew, the apparent US heir to Phelps in the 200 IM while also making the US Olympic team in two other events. 6’6 “Andrew is immensely talented and has been on the radar since turning pro at the age of 14, but his training has always been unconventional and left him open to criticism. man who won all 200 Olympic IM from 2004 to ’16: Phelps called Andrew “someone who has an incredible 75% of a run” but can’t finish well enough to seriously threaten the world record of 10 years of Ryan Lochte in this event.

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Phelps made similar comments about Andrew on the air as he sat between playmaker Mike Tirico and longtime analyst Rowdy Gaines during testing. That analysis raised a few eyebrows in an extremely diplomatic sport, but also highlighted a potential future role for Phelps: the Johnny Miller of swimming commentary, with much more material to back up his candid assessments. “I think he would be a great analyst,” Bowman says. “He just sees it with different eyes.”

For now, Phelps has plenty of other things to occupy him. He says he has more sponsors now than at any point in his life, which dovetails with his increasingly articulate and passionate views on things other than turns and closing speed. “We’re still hammering on that sanity,” he says.

Phelps’ voice – his vulnerability and honesty following serious public mistakes – has done as much as anyone in the world to pave the way for athletes to recognize their mental health issues. The dialogue in which he had been playing for six years has widened, thanks to his encouragement and his involvement. “I’m so proud of him for that,” Bowman says. “He’s struggled a lot of his career with these things. I’m sad to say that I couldn’t help him. I was not equipped. Everyone thought of him as a machine, and physically he was a machine, but machines have guts.

Phelps was moved by tennis star Naomi Osaka’s recent comments about her mental health, and he made himself available as a resource for many in the swimming community to discuss their struggles. There’s more to come: Phelps is working on a book with Karen Crouse from The New York Times he says goes into more detail about his struggles outside the pool.

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