Sports
Phelps on Life After DUI: 'I Was in a Really Dark Place'
Olympic swimmer said he wanted to die, in newly released Sports Illustrated interview.
More than a year after he received his second DUI, Michael Phelps has opened up about his dark days.
On his way home from the Horseshoe Casino in Baltimore in September 2014, Phelps drove erratically through the Fort McHenry Tunnel and received his second DUI in a decade.
For four days after his arrest, Phelps did not leave his home, he told Sports Illustrated, in a newly released tell-all cover story.
“I was in a really dark place,” Phelps said, admitting he was “not wanting to be alive anymore.”
Read the full Sports Illustrated story.
His coach Bob Bowman said he anticipated Phelps would hit a breaking point.
“I had been living in fear that I was going to get a call that something had happened,” Bowman told Sports Illustrated.
Once the call came in that he had gotten a DUI, Phelps went to rehab in Arizona for six weeks, where he worked through what his sisters described as an edginess and tenseness that gripped him.
In Maryland, he was sentenced in December to 18 months of probation for driving under the influence.
After accepting help, Phelps appeared to have tapped into something good in August, when—following a six-month suspension from USA Swimming—he made a splash at the U.S. National Championships in Texas, clocking in with his best time since 2009 in the 200-meter fly.
“I can do whatever I put my mind to, and this next year is gonna be pretty damn fun,” Phelps said after nationals.
The better-than-ever version of Phelps also came across in the Sports Illustrated article, which concluded with the declaration that Phelps had become a “new man.”
The writer, Tim Layden, first interviewed the swimmer when Phelps was 18.
Read the full Sports Illustrated story.
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Now Phelps is in Arizona, where he’s training for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
He says he will not compete in the 2020 Olympics in Toyko, according to Sports Illustrated.
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