Caeleb Dressel, the tattooed Olympic star who in 2022 became the biggest enigma of his sport, will have the opportunity to defend at least one of his individual gold medals at the 2024 Paris Games.
Dressel won the 50-meter freestyle at the U.S. Swimming Trials on Friday and qualified for the event at the Olympics later this summer.
It was Dressel’s second of three finishes this week at testing in Indianapolis. In all three, he is the current Olympic champion. In the first, the 100-meter freestyle, he finished third, earning a spot on the American 4×100 relay team in Paris, but narrowly missing out on a chance to defend his gold in the individual event.
However, in her second of three events, the splash and dash 50 freestyle, Dressel accelerated toward the wall and outpaced all competitors. He finished in 21.41 seconds, 0.28 (a relative eternity in this race) ahead of Chris Guiliano, who qualified in second place.
As his wife, Meghan, celebrated in the stands with their months-old baby in her arms, Dressel pumped his fist and waved to the crowd at Lucas Oil Stadium.
His ranking Wednesday seemed like an equivocal conclusion to his comeback story. This, on the other hand, seemed emphatic.
Dressel, now 27, won five gold medals in Tokyo. At the world championships the following summer, in his first two competitive swims, he won the 14th and 15th world gold medals of his decorated career. But then, with more medals on the table, he abruptly withdrew from the competition. And for months, at least in the public eye, he disappeared.
Dressel has since explained, albeit mildly, that he was “completely destroyed” mentally. His “inner critic,” as he called the harsh voice in his head, had dragged him into a dark place. For years, he had fought against his own perfectionism, which he now realizes is a double-edged sword, because it made him great but also miserable.
Almost every time he touched the wall, no matter how fast he was or what medal he won, he asked himself: What could I have done better?
Even in Tokyo, after one of his five golds, his first thought was: “I messed up both my turn and my arrival.”
During the 12-hour plane ride home, he thought about his head position and the last 15 meters of his 100 freestyle.
“I was actually disappointed and frustrated with how I did it.” Dressel would later say on the Unfiltered Waters podcast.
He knows it sounds ridiculous. But he had become “so programmed, day in and day out, to demand excellence (of himself),” he said on the podcast. “And when you don’t reach that, it’s very hard to let it go.” He pursued ambitious goals and specific timelines; When he didn’t catch up, he beat himself up even in his prime, in 2019, when he broke a world record, narrowly missed two others and didn’t make it. He didn’t lose a single race in the World Cup: he was “miserable.”
Criticism had pushed him towards greatness… but also towards unhappiness. “I created a monster in myself, so caught up in perfectionism,” he explained on the podcast. “And so caught up in, ‘If I don’t see these times, it means I’m a bad person, or it means I didn’t train hard enough. If I don’t break a world record, it means… I didn’t obsess enough.'”
“Eventually that broke me,” he continued, “to the point where I couldn’t keep up with my own demands.”
The only solution, in 2022, was to get away from the sport.
“I was lost,” Dressel said. He spent entire days at his home in Florida, doing practically nothing. “I pretty much just went to therapy to sort out the mess.”
With his therapist, he delved deeper into who he was and how he thought. He had to relearn how to talk to himself. He had to do it less for his swimming career and more for his life.
For months, he wanted nothing to do with the sport. She would avoid the University of Florida pool where she used to train and the smell of chlorine. She spun around on her lawnmower, letting her mind wander.
And it was there, on the lawnmower, in the yard of his big Gainesville farm, that he accepted the possibility of never swimming again, and so he knew he was ready to return.
He returned slowly, first with three practices a week, then four, under coach Anthony Nesty in Florida.
“He didn’t want to do that,” Nesty says of the ramp-up; Dressel, Nesty told Yahoo Sports, wanted to accelerate. But Nesty said, “No sir. Let’s do it my way.” It was 100 percent, week after week, eventually from four practices to five.
And Dressel was suffering. “Oh my gosh, that trip back was tough,” he said on the podcast. “Really tough.” But he loved it.
In the summer of 2023, he had competed again for the world championship, but failed to qualify. She returned to the pool in the fall and set her sights on a third Olympic Games in 2024. On December 1, after about 17 months without a win, she took first place in the 100-meter butterfly at a US Open meet. And it wasn’t just victory or time that she shouted, Now I’m back; It was the big, genuine smile.
For the next few months, he stuck to Nesty’s plan. There were obstacles along the way and pain along the way, but they came to the tests confident. “There are certain athletes who, when they decide to take over a game, they do it,” Nesty said in May, comparing Dressel to a basketball or football star. The idea was that Dressel could take over a career even if he hadn’t returned to the physical peak of it.
And sure enough, on the penultimate night of the trials, he did it.
His third and final event at the trials is the 100-meter butterfly, for which he will be the top seed after a strong swimming semifinal on Friday. If he finishes in the top two, he could still regain four of the five medals he won three years ago in Tokyo.
He has not yet returned to his 2019 or 2021 times; and it may never be. He hasn’t completely silenced his inner critic either; The ruthless thoughts still exist in his head.
But, apparently, he has learned to moderate them. Most importantly, she seems to enjoy swimming. And last but not least, she returns to the Olympics.