U.S. Olympic swimmers open up about their mental health: 'So much pressure in one moment'
As the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics beckon, now just a year away, the medal-rich sport of swimming, with all its passion and pain, returns to the summer stage this weekend. Most of the top swimmers in the world have gathered in Fukuoka, Japan, for the 2023 world championships. Most, but not all.
Caeleb Dressel, the seven-time Olympic gold medalist who replaced the retired Michael Phelps as the nation’s best male swimmer, is not there after abruptly withdrawing from last year’s world championships because of an undisclosed health issue and taking a months-long break, then failing to make the U.S. team after returning for June’s world trials.
Nor is Simone Manuel, the five-time Olympic medalist who announced on Instagram last month that she wouldn’t be at the trials as she continues to recover from the overtraining syndrome that she disclosed two years ago while acknowledging the need “to feel mentally and physically good” about her plans and schedule.
Swimming being the sport that it is, it certainly has seen its share of watershed moments, but perhaps none is more important than this: The American awakening to the mental health struggles in a sport dominated by young athletes in which the difference between winning or losing, between making or missing an Olympic team, can amount to a sliver of a second.
“I used to be afraid to talk about it, because I was afraid of being perceived as weak or washed up because women are really attacked I think in sports, like people are quick to judge us,” said 21-year-old Regan Smith, a member of the 2023 U.S. world championship team who won two silver medals and a bronze at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
“The second that you vocalize what you’re going through, I think it makes it a lot easier, because you realize that you’re not alone, you realize that it’s so normal to experience these feelings and then it makes it a lot easier to overcome them, at least in my instance, I’m really thankful for that. But it’s always a work in progress, I’m always going to feel pressure before I race but it’s just keeping reminding myself that it’s not that serious, it’s fun, it’s okay.”
Post-Olympic depression
The story of swimmers finding their voices on this vital issue actually begins where many swimming stories have begun over the past two decades — with Phelps.
Despite all his historic successes, including his record 23 Olympic gold medals, Phelps was struggling. He revealed late in his competitive career that he was battling depression and anxiety and had contemplated suicide.
“Really, after every Olympics, I think I fell into a major state of depression,” Phelps said at a mental health conference in 2018. He said the “hardest fall” was after the 2012 London Games. “I didn’t want to be in the sport anymore. … I didn’t want to be alive anymore.”
Phelps said he would sit alone for “three to five days” in his bedroom, barely sleeping, not eating and “just not wanting to be alive.”
After seeking help and going to rehab, Phelps made it his mission to help other athletes who were struggling as he had been. His documentary, "The Weight of Gold,” premiered in 2020. In it, he explores the mental health challenges of Olympic athletes, including himself, especially when the Olympics are over and athletes try to figure out what’s next.
“You basically get in that part where you’re either like, am I going to put myself through this for four more years, or am I going to find something else to do,” he said. “And we’re lost. I think that’s where a lot of it really comes from is we’re just so lost because we spent four years grinding for that one moment and now we don’t know what the hell to do. I think it’s probably safe to say that a good 80 percent, maybe more, goes through some kind of post-Olympic depression.”
That’s exactly what happened to then-17-year-old Alaskan Lydia Jacoby after she won a surprising gold medal in the 100 breaststroke at the 2021 Olympics in Tokyo. She recently revealed that she struggled for months, “(hitting) the deny, deny, deny button” about her depression, including some days when she couldn’t get out of bed.
“Obviously my Olympics happened during Covid,” she said at the world trials, "so coming from living in a small town in Alaska means you’re isolated and then all of a sudden being an Olympic champion, like, it goes to your head. I didn’t know what to do with that. I was 17. I just won an Olympic medal so of course I was like, I know everything about everything so I wanted to do everything by myself, and that’s just not how the world works.”
She took a break from swimming last summer, started working with a therapist, began her college career at the University of Texas and is back to swimming like her old self, if you can even have an old self at 19.
“Coming into the Olympics, I didn’t even really know what depression was essentially,” she said. “It was something that I heard people talk about, but it’s like something on another planet, it had nothing to do with me. Throughout the whole Olympic cycle, obviously Simone Biles dropped out of the Olympics and there were a lot of discussions going on about mental health, and a lot of people were talking about post-Olympic depression.
“But even then, I was like, I have a medal. I have two medals. That doesn’t apply to me. So just to kind of realize that it does apply to everyone or can apply to everyone, and just being proactive about it, I think that it really helps to hear people talking about it, so you can realize those signs in yourself before it gets out of hand.”
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'Oh my God, what do I do now with my life?'
There have been many teenage wonders on U.S. swimming teams before Jacoby. One of them was 12-time Olympic medalist Dara Torres, who made her first Olympic team at 17 in 1984 in Los Angeles and then kept going, with a few stops and starts, all the way to 2008 in Beijing, where she became the oldest U.S. Olympic swimmer ever at 41.
“Back in my day, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, you didn’t really speak about mental health issues, it was kind of a taboo thing, or if you were dealing with depression or something like that, we didn’t really recognize it because it wasn’t talked about,” she said in a phone interview earlier this week. “I think it’s great that athletes are talking about it now. How you heal and deal with things is getting them out there and talking about them.”
In 2000 at the Sydney Olympics, Torres won five medals, including two relay golds. During an interview in the press tent after her events had ended, tears flooded her eyes as she spoke with me. “It’s just so sad that it’s over,” she said.
She also knew what was coming.
“The hardest thing for an athlete is to be doing something your whole entire life, day in and day out, having those endorphins, having that goal, and then you’re done and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, what do I do now with my life?’” she said this week. “It’s grieving a loss because you’re done with something you loved, and knowing that you’re going to have to find that adrenaline rush that you get from competing somewhere else in your life. You have to be okay with knowing that you may not have that feeling again.”
Torres, now 56, moved onto a successful career as a motivational speaker, television commentator and the mother of a now-17-year-old daughter.
“You have to tell yourself: That was one chapter in your life and now you launch the next chapter. That’s how I’ve tried to do it.”
Caeleb Dressel: 'My body kept score'
For Dressel, the pressure was building as he was soaring at the Tokyo Olympics two years ago. The most decorated U.S. male swimmer in the wake of Phelps’ retirement, he went on a magical five-gold medal run, but then revealed how much that journey took out of him.
“There’s so much pressure in one moment, your whole life boils down to a moment that can take 20, 40 seconds,” he said. “How crazy is that? For an event that happens every four years. I wouldn’t tell myself this during the meet, but after the meet, looking back, I mean, it’s terrifying.”
Dressel came back for the 2022 world championships in Budapest, but then surprisingly left during the event. There were lots of questions and few answers.
“Obviously last summer didn’t end well,” said his coach, Anthony Nesty. “An athlete like that going through some issues, it’s a big deal not only for him, for his family, for the program, for USA Swimming. An athlete like that has lots on his shoulders and I wanted him to have everything removed from his shoulders. He needed to focus on him.”
Said Dressel: “The easiest way to put it, my body kept score. There’s a lot of things I shoved down and all came boiling up, so I didn’t really have a choice. I used to pride myself on being able to shove things down and push it aside and plow through it. It worked for a very long time in my career. I got results from 17, 19, 21, until I couldn’t do that anymore. So it was a very strange feeling. … It wasn’t just one thing where I was like I need to step away, it was a bunch of things that kind of came crumbling down at once and I knew that was my red flag right there, multiple red flags, there was a giant red flag.”
Dressel, who turns 27 next month, said those words at the world trials, where, after taking an eight-month break, he wasn’t fast enough to qualify for the U.S. world championship team in the events he once dominated. But he was most definitely back.
USA Swimming, USOPC are offering help
You hear these stories from some of the best athletes this nation has produced and you wonder: What are officials doing to help?
In February, USA Swimming added Emily Klueh, a licensed mental health clinician, to its national team division staff as manager of mental health and emotional wellness. She is believed to be the first on-staff mental health professional at a national governing body. USA Swimming also is bringing a mental health professional to its four international events this summer and fall, including this week’s world championships, a spokeswoman said.
The U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee said that since 2020, it has hired a director of mental health services and eight new licensed mental health care providers, created a mental health registry with more than 200 providers nationwide and offered its athletes the services of mental health officers in both Tokyo and Beijing for the 2021 and 2022 Olympic and Paralympic Games. It said that its mental health services team has logged 1,700 unique encounters with U.S. athletes over the past three years.
As the conversation and the work continues, it’s worthwhile to turn to Katie Ledecky, the greatest female swimmer in history and the rock of the U.S. team for more than a decade. By all appearances, she has been as successful at navigating the mental pressures of her sport as she has been at dominating her signature races.
“The biggest thing for me has just been to always have balance in my life,” she said on a recent media zoom call. “I had that through high school, I had that through college and now as a professional as well. I’ve been very lucky to have coaches and teammates and family around me that have continued to remind me of having that balance.
“It’s a sport, it’s of course something that I take very seriously. … But I remember that I just started swimming for the fun of it as a six-year-old in summer league swimming in the DC area and that’s how it should always be. So when I come to meets like (the world championships), I try to have the best time that I can.
“It’s something that I tell people, don’t be fooled by the serious face that you see behind the blocks. I’m someone that loves a good joke, loves to cheer on my teammates, loves to smile. I just try to have as much fun as I can when I’m on the pool deck and then when I’m off the pool deck; sure there are times when I’m thinking about swimming, but I’m also thinking about other things and spending time with my family and friends and just keeping my life in balance.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: U.S. Olympic swimmers open up on mental health: 'So much pressure'
