The five-time gold medalist says he battled depression amid Olympic pressure in a new interview.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — This story was originally reported by Clayton Freeman in the Florida Times-Union.
The video attached to this story is from a previous related report.
For Olympic swimming champion Caeleb Dressel, last year’s quest for gold before the Tokyo Olympics took a mental toll.
The five-time Olympic champion detailed his battles with depression and panic attacks amid the stress of international competition during an interview for the series. In depth with Graham Bensinger.
The Green Cove Springs native, who broke state and national records swimming at Clay High School and the Bolles Sharks club, was interviewed at his home near Gainesville in early April.
Dressel won five gold medals in Tokyo in 2021, but as he commented during interviews, he already posted in sections on YouTube: the pressure built to suffocating intensity.
“I think that’s what makes me great, but I think that can also be detrimental if I want to have longevity in the sport,” he said.
The swimming champion revisited the struggles that stopped his swimming career during a stretch of his senior year of high school and opened samples of his self-deprecating and sometimes profanity-filled pre-Olympic record books, with entries from May 2021 bearing messages like “My body is done”.
Even after his gold medals in Japan, he expressed disappointment with his times.
“There’s a totally different side to the sport that a lot of people don’t see… I try to be as honest with myself as I can,” he said.
His mother, Christina Dressel, also described seeing a giant mural of Caeleb Dressel at last year’s US Olympic trials in Omaha, and seeing the spotlight on her son up close.
“The entire wall is Caeleb. And it’s like, ‘Oh, there’s no pressure here, Caeleb.’ I think he wouldn’t be as dominant as he was if Phelps was still on the platform. But because there’s no Phelps, they literally throw him at him,” he said.
The 25-year-old won seven gold medals at the 2017 FINA World Championships in Hungary and eight more, six gold, at the 2019 South Korean championships, events in which he established himself as the world’s leading sprinter and the face of American swimming. Michael Phelps’s retirement.
Dressel, however, expressed more optimism about his current mental outlook. This week, she has returned to the pool at the Phillips 66 International Team Trials in Greensboro, North Carolina, the qualifying match for Team USA at this summer’s FINA World Championships. She has already won the 100m freestyle, 50m butterfly and 100m fly.
The episode is scheduled to air in its entirety this weekend. You can watch it Sunday at 11pm online at grahambensinger.com/2022/04/27/caeleb-dressel/.
This story was originally reported by the Florida Times-Union.
