Caeleb Dressel will get the chance to defend at least one of his individual Olympic gold medals at the 2024 Games in Paris.
Dressel won the 50-meter freestyle at the U.S. Swimming Trials on Friday, qualifying for the event at the Olympics later this summer.
It was Dressel’s second of three finals this week during competitions in Indianapolis. He is the reigning Olympic champion in all three. In the first, the 100-meter free, he finished third to earn a spot on the U.S. 4×100 relay team in Paris, but narrowly missed the chance to defend his gold in the individual event.
But in his second of three events, the “splash and dash” 50 free, Dressel raced to the wall and outpaced all competitors. He finished in 21.41 seconds, 0.28 – a relative eternity in this race – ahead of Chris Giuliano, who qualified second.
As his wife Meghan celebrated with their month-old baby in her arms in the stands, Dressel pumped his fist and saluted the crowd at Lucas Oil Stadium.
His qualification on Wednesday in the 100 free felt like an ambiguous conclusion to his comeback story.
This, on the other hand, felt emphatic.
Dressel, now 27, won five gold medals in Tokyo. At world championships the following summer, he won the 14th and 15th world golds of his decorated career in his first two swims of the meet. But then, with even more medals on the table, he abruptly withdrew from the competition. And for months he disappeared, at least from the public eye.
Dressel has since explained, albeit sparingly, that he was “completely broken” mentally. His “inner critic,” as he called the loud voice in his head, had pulled him into a dark place. For years he had battled his own perfectionism, which he now realizes is a double-edged sword – because it made him great but also miserable.
Almost every time he hit the wall, no matter how fast he was or what medal he won, he wondered: What could I have done better?
Even in Tokyo, after one of his five gold medals, his first thought was: “I ruined both my turn and my finish.”
During the twelve-hour flight home, he thought about his main position and the last 15 meters of his 100 free meters.
“I was actually disappointed and frustrated with how I did,” 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 nothing but excellence from him [himself]he said on the podcast. “And if you can’t do that, it’s very difficult to let it slide.” He chased challenging goals and specific times; if he didn’t hit them all the way, he beat himself up for it. Even at his peak, in 2019 – when he broke a world record, narrowly missed two others and didn’t lose a single world record race – he was ‘miserable’.
The critic had pushed him towards greatness… but also towards unhappiness. “I created a monster within myself – so caught up in perfectionism,” he explained in 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 haven’t trained hard enough. If I don’t get a world record, that means… I wasn’t obsessed enough.’”
“Eventually it broke me,” he continued, “so that I could no longer live up to my own demands.”
The only solution, starting in 2022, was to step back from the sport.
“I was lost,” Dressel said. He spent entire days at his home in Florida doing virtually nothing. “I pretty much just went to therapy to figure out the mess.”
With his therapist, he delved deep into who he was and how he thought. He had to learn to talk to himself again. He needed to do it less for his swimming career, more for his life.
For months he wanted nothing to do with the sport. He would avoid the University of Florida pool where he trained and the smell of chlorine. He rode around on his lawnmower and let his thoughts wander.
And it was there, on the mower, in the yard of his enormous Gainesville farm, that he realized he might never be able to swim again — and that’s how he knew he was ready to come back.
He returned slowly, first with three practices a week and then four, under coach Anthony Nesty in Florida.
“He didn’t want to do that,” Nesty says of the gradual rise; Dressel, Nesty told Yahoo Sports, wanted to speed up. But Nesty told him, ‘No sir. Let’s do it my way.’ They went 100 by 100, week after week, eventually going from four to five workouts.
And Dressel was in pain. “Oh my god, that retreat was tough,” he said in the podcast. “Really rough.” But he loved it.
In the summer of 2023 he had worked his way back into contention for the world championships, but missed qualifying. He returned to the pool in the fall and set his sights on a third Olympics in 2024. On December 1, after about 17 months without a win, he placed first in the 100-meter butterfly at a US Open meet. And it wasn’t just victory or time that screamed, I am back again; it was the big, genuine smile.
For months afterward, he stuck to Nesty’s plan. There were bumps in the road and pain along the way, but they arrived at the trials with confidence. “There are certain athletes who decide to take over a game,” Nesty said in May, likening Dressel to a basketball or football star. The idea was that Dressel could take over a race even if he hadn’t climbed back to his physical peak.
And indeed, on the third and final night of the trials, he did just that.
His third and final test event this weekend is the 100-meter butterfly. If he finishes in the top two, he can still regain four of the five medals he won three years ago.
He is not yet back to his 2019 or 2021 times; and he may never be. Nor has he completely silenced his inner critic;
More importantly, his inner critic has not yet been completely silenced; the merciless thoughts still exist in his mind.
But it seems he has learned to moderate them. He seems to enjoy swimming. And, last but not least, he’s going back to the Olympics.
