Watch our Olympic coverage ahead of the Paris Olympics.
Caleb Dressel’s seven gold medals might suggest otherwise, but he knows swimming can be a brutal and suffocating sport.
He is without a doubt one of the best in the world at sprinting from one end of the pool to the other (and sometimes back again). He holds the world record in the men’s 100m butterfly, having first taken the historic mark from Michael Phelps in 2019. Dressel then broke the world record in the event at the Tokyo Olympics. He has won five gold medals in five events.
Nevertheless, Dressel was miserable.
He was fixated on where he felt he had failed. In one race, it was the turn. In another, it was the finish. It was his head position. It didn’t matter that he kept touching the wall first. It didn’t matter that he brought home the gold medal and helped Team USA reach the top of the medal count. He was chasing perfection. He was chasing records. He was chasing stretch goals. He wasn’t achieving them.
“I created a monster inside of myself because I was so caught up in perfectionism,” he told former Olympians Missy Franklin and Katie Hope on the “Unfiltered Waters” podcast. “I was so caught up in it. I thought, ‘If I don’t see these records, then I’m a bad person, or I didn’t train hard enough. If I don’t see a world record, then … I wasn’t obsessed enough.’”
The sport he had been so drawn to as a kid because it was so fun was the opposite. And it continued for years. But Dressel kept pushing himself, listening to his inner critic tearing him apart.
He said that until he “broke down”, when he suddenly pulled out midway through the 2022 World Championships in Budapest and was out of the sport for eight months.
Dressel wouldn’t go into detail about that time in Gainesville, Florida, other than to say he spent a lot of time with a therapist. His wife, Megan, was there for him, but she realized Dressel had a lot to talk about in his head. Some days, not so much. Most days, he avoided the University of Florida pool. He didn’t want to smell chlorine.
He had to figure out who he was and what made him tick outside of the pool, even after the best of times. He had to recalibrate himself, figure out what other people thought of him and why they loved him. He had to learn how to smile again.
The process hasn’t been easy, and progress hasn’t always been linear. But it’s what has made Dressel, 27, the swimmer and the person (and new dad) he is today. It’s also why he’s back in the pool and headed to Paris as one of Team USA’s headliners, a crucial piece of the puzzle in the team’s quest to win more gold medals than its peers. There’s pressure from the outside, of course. But in his mind, Dressel’s biggest critic is quieter.
“It’s really hard,” said Dressel. work out Last month. “That’s something that’s ingrained in me. Always wanting to find ways to get better. I still do that, but I don’t obsess over it or get so caught up in it that I forget what’s actually fun about the sport. It’s hard, and it’s not something I figured out this year. There are things that I’m really proud of that I did differently. It’s like being able to enjoy a part of the sport without beating myself up for not being perfect.
“It’s still a work in progress.”
Caleb Dressel won five gold medals at the Tokyo Olympics. But a year later, he retired from the sport. He said his return was “still a work in progress.” (Tim Clayton / Corbis via Getty Images)
Now, Dressel sounds like someone who has learned a lot about himself through therapy. One of the first things he’ll tell you is how helpful regular appointments with a therapist have been.
“I’ve tried not to focus on the results and just enjoy racing and training, which are the two parts of the sport that I really enjoy,” Dressel said. “There are parts of the sport that I really hate, and I really dislike. But it’s worth it to endure for the moments that I really enjoy. It’s a balance. I don’t expect every part of the sport to be the best for me, but I lean into the parts of the sport that I really enjoy.
“That was the biggest difference for me. I’ve always loved training. I’ve always loved being on the team. I really, really enjoyed the actual racing part. As soon as the gun went off, it was just fun. So I just tried to swim. This year, I’m just going to swim.”
Dressel will only swim the 50m freestyle and 100m butterfly as individual events at the Olympics, and is likely to participate in several relays. At the U.S. Olympic Trials in Indianapolis, he finished third in the 100m freestyle final, missing out on a chance to defend his gold medal in Paris.
But he is happy to be part of the Olympic team. He is proud of his accomplishments in the trials leading up to the Olympics. He is thrilled to see it all with his infant son August in Meghan’s arms in the stands.
“Nobody can take that away from him,” Dressel said from Indianapolis. “He won’t remember it. I’ll tell him. Trust me, I took pictures to prove it. … It was a really special moment. Megan knows what goes into this. She gets to see firsthand the challenges that come with sports, not just the parenting aspect.
“The tears that come with it, the frustrations, and also the highlights, and being able to share that with them, because they go through it too. For August to see that was really special.”
Meghan shared a video of Dressel and baby August from her North Carolina Olympic training camp this month, another moment captured and saved to commemorate the once-in-a-lifetime moment. They will be in Paris with Dressel’s parents and family. Dressel says he wouldn’t be where he is today without their support. And he wouldn’t be where he is today without Meghan, who he calls the family’s “superhero.”
Becoming a parent is a wonderful experience in many ways, but perhaps the biggest lesson is having the right perspective, especially for someone who spends their whole life chasing time and searching for perfection that doesn’t exist.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever set a new best. It’s hard to say out loud. I really do,” Dressel said. “When you’re 19, 20, 21, you just keep chopping, chopping, chopping. I’m still working harder than ever and looking for every way I can to shave off that two-tenth. But I don’t know. I don’t know if I can. I’m really good at racing. If you put me in a race, I’m going to get as close, as close as I can, even if I have to kill myself to get there. I’m going to put myself in that situation.”
So he doesn’t know exactly what Paris will be like. But he does know that he’s older, wiser, and genuinely happier than he was before the last Olympics. And other people see it, too, and not just when he’s sprinting across the lane line after a race or splashing water in celebration.
“He always had that smile on his face,” said Katie Ledecky, a seven-time gold medalist and her training partner at the University of Florida. “He would take that time away and come back, and he would have that smile on his face every single day. If you watch his progression over the last year, you see him getting better and better every race. He just seems to love racing, loves training more than racing, and that makes everyone around him better.”
It will also make one of the world’s best swimmers better. And that’s why whatever medal hangs around Dressel’s neck, that smile is as good as gold.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to do my best again, and it’s hard to say out loud,” said Caleb Dressel, who is scheduled to try in Paris later this month. (Maddie Meyer/Getty Images)
(Image above: Dan Goldfarb / work out; Photo: Sarah Stier / Getty Images)
