In July 2021, Sports Illustrated dedicated a report to Caeleb Dressel (25).
He titled it: The swimming machine.
The report told us about a superman, not a swimmer. Steve Spurrier, head football coach at the University of Florida, said, "Dressel should have played wide receiver for the Gators."
In squats, deadlifts, and benches, Dressel handled as many pounds as a football pro. And in the vertical jump, he rose to 109 centimeters. In 2020, only two NBA players had made that flight.
Transferred to the platform, that leaping ability is a boon for Dressel, projecting him farther than his rivals. And his efficiency underwater, his "similarities to a fish" (in the words of Russell Mark, head of high-performance American swimming), allows him to open up a remarkable margin in those first fifteen meters: the twisting of his shoulders and his arms creates a curious effect because, even moving more slowly than his opponents, Dressel advances faster.
We were able to verify everything that that report told us yesterday, at the swimming legend's debut at the Budapest World Championships: in a flash, Dressel took over the 50m butterfly (22.57), the first of the five gold medals that could pick up at the Duna Arena, right there where five years ago he made his way into the popular imagination (then he won seven world titles).
What the report did not talk about was life beyond the pools.
And that, Dressel wears regularly.
–Now that Phelps and Lochte are gone, the whole weight of swimming falls on me. And coping with that is not easy.
(...)
After his universal success at the Tokyo 2020 Games (five golds), Dressel confessed to journalist Graham Bensinger in an interview. He told her about his anxiety and panic attacks and his depressive processes, a matter that we have already touched on other occasions, with other legends: Simone Biles, Michael Phelps, Ian Thorpe, Naomi Osaka...
At one point in the chat, Dressel opens his training diary and reads aloud:
“Yeah, don't fuck with me. This is fucking terrible. My body is broken (...) This is a four-year preparation process and you are broken. It's like, 'It has to be perfect,' but I feel like crap."
Then Dressel looks at the camera, laughs and says:
-Now I'm laughing. But when he wrote these reflections she was very serious. I try to be honest with myself in these diaries, because until now none of this was going to be made public.
Dressel talks about the dark room, in the bowels of his mind. He studied at the University of Florida (he's still there), breaking records for his age (he was the youngest to break the 19s barrier in the 50m free), but he didn't always do it, and when he failed, the demons took him away .
"I've seen him pale as a ghost, babbling and convulsing," says his mother, Christina. And then she would lock herself in her dark room and refuse to come out. For days she didn't eat, she didn't even go to the bathroom.
"And did you fear for him?" –She asked him.
"Do you mean if you were afraid he would kill himself?" No. But I had heard from other parents of swimmers that they did fear for their children, and that it was all due to pressure, and I knew that Caeleb put a lot of pressure on herself. Deep down I was thinking, 'No, no, this is not Caeleb. But I never denied it so much to the point of blinding myself as a mother.
This Sunday, Dressel, the new Phelps, told the microphones: “After the morning qualifications (I had scored the third time), I locked myself in the fourth and I thought about it. But already on the platform I don't think, I just swim”.
Now he is looking for another three individual golds in Budapest.
