Michael Phelps once swore that his children would never swim. 🏊♂️ “I don’t want them to go through what I went through for more than 20 years”, the American, the most decorated swimmer in history, had confessed.
But life has a way of coming full circle. At the Pan Pacific Championships in Irvine, California, Phelps returned to a competition pool ten years after his Olympic retirement. It was there, alongside his wife Nicole and two of his four children, that he noticed something he hadn’t expected: Beckett, just 8 years old, followed every race with his eyes wide open, paying attention to technical details that most kids don’t even notice.
That interest has already reached the ears of Bob Bowman, Phelps’s longtime coach, and the family is now looking into options in Phoenix so the boy can begin training seriously if that’s what he decides. “If he wants to be a swimmer, I’ll support him. I’ll never push him toward it”, Phelps said. A sentence that is, deep down, the mending of a wound of his own: allowing his son to choose the path that, for two decades, had not allowed him to be happy. 🥇