The rise (and fall, and rise) of Michael Phelps

Im more relaxed, I think, at a poker table than I was in the pool, he told PokerStars.com in 2013. When I was in the pool, that was my job. Outside the pool, he had no job, and no identity. I looked at myself as a swimmer and nothing else, he says.

“I’m more relaxed, I think, at a poker table than I was in the pool,” he told PokerStars.com in 2013. “When I was in the pool, that was my job.”

Outside the pool, he had no job, and no identity. “I looked at myself as a swimmer and nothing else,” he says.

His mother says the family tried to move on from swimming — “we were separating ourselves from the sport.”

On Sundays, Phelps, then living in Baltimore’s Canton neighborhood, would join the family in his stadium suite at home Ravens games. “We just started living like a normal life,” his mother says.

But he was still trying again to figure out where he belonged, Debbie Phelps says. She thought her son looked tired, and lost.

In August 2013, Phelps asked Bowman if they could have dinner.

They had seen little of each other since London. During the meal at a luxury hotel in Baltimore, Phelps announced that he wanted to make another comeback and try for one more Olympics. Bowman was floored.

“I did not want to go through it again,” he says. “I couldn’t. No way.”

He told Phelps that if he was coming back for his sponsors, or because he didn’t have anything else to do, it would be a big mistake.

“You’re telling me that somebody that has all the money ... all the freedom, all the choices, that somehow all of those things don’t meet a need inside of you that swimming does,” Bowman says he asked.

Phelps said yes.

“I said, ‘Under those circumstances, if you agree to do it the right way, then I would approve,’” Bowman says.

The swimmer resumed training a month later.

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