The Olympic highs and crushing lows of Caeleb Dressel, Paris hopeful (2024)

At his most vulnerable, Dressel is none of those things. At his most vulnerable, as during an eight-month break from swimming that started in August 2022 and contributed to his failure to make the U.S. roster for the 2023 world championships, he couldn’t even stomach the smell of chlorine.

But there is another, newer iteration of Dressel, one that will be on display, though with less hype and fewer expectations, over the next nine nights at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis — and, if all goes well, a month later at the 2024 Paris Summer Games.

This Dressel, 27 years old, is fortified by the months of therapy and self-discovery that followed his abrupt withdrawal from the 2022 world swimming championships in Budapest (for what was described at the time as an unspecified medical issue, and later revealed to have been a mental health episode) and that still continue today. He is a father now, with wife Meghan giving birth to son August in February. As another Olympic summer arrives, both his outward demeanor and his times on the scoreboard are trending in the right direction.

The unknown quality of Dressel’s current abilities — and the juxtaposition of his towering, five gold medal performance from Tokyo in 2021 against his total absence from last summer’s world championships in f*ckuoka, Japan, where Australia punctured Team USA’s historic world dominance by winning 13 gold medals to the Americans’ seven — will make him the most compelling figure in the pool in Indianapolis.

“A double-edged sword,” Dressel said in describing his Olympic track record during a sponsor appearance in April. “I would say it gives me confidence, knowing that I’ve done it before, but then also a lot of pressure that comes with having to do it again.”

But over the next nine nights, the central figure of these 2024 U.S. trials — as measured by media coverage, fan engagement and sheer awe — will not be any swimmer but rather the building in which they will compete.

After four straight trials in Omaha, in a basketball arena with a capacity of around 13,000, USA Swimming made the bold decision to move its signature event to Indianapolis and into the cavernous home of the NFL’s Colts, constructing a pool atop the ground where Peyton Manning once threw touchdown passes. Even with half the stadium curtained-off to accommodate a warm-up pool, it will have a capacity of roughly 30,000. Though official attendance records for international swimming don’t exist, anything close to that number probably would represent the largest crowd ever to witness a swim meet.

There also will be no shortage of compelling human characters to document over the course of the nine-day meet, beginning with legendary freestyler and seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky. Seeking to become a four-time Olympian at 27, she is expected to compete in the 200-, 400-, 800- and 1,500-meter versions of that stroke in Indianapolis, then head to Paris needing two more golds to leapfrog fellow American Jenny Thompson’s eight for the most by a female swimmer in Olympic history.

Multi-stroke star Kate Douglass, who won seven golds at the 2023 NCAA championships for the University of Virginia, could swim as many as five events in Indianapolis and will be the top seed in the 100-meter freestyle, the 200-meter breaststroke and the 200-meter individual medley. In Paris, she could duel with Canada’s Summer McIntosh for the title of the world’s best all-around female swimmer.

Given the lack of depth on the men’s side, Team USA will need its female stars to do big things in Paris. There is little doubt the rest of the world is catching up to the Americans in the pool — if it hasn’t already caught them.

It was not so long ago that American dominance was unquestioned. At the 2012 London Olympics, Team USA won 16 of the possible 32 gold medals, then matched that number at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games; in the latter meet, Australia and Hungary tied for a distant second with three golds each. But by Tokyo, which took place in 2021 after a one-year coronavirus pandemic postponement, Australia had closed the gold medal gap to 11-9, still in favor of Team USA.

And by last summer’s world championship in f*ckuoka — the one for which Dressel, still in the early stages of his post-break comeback, failed to qualify — the Aussies had surged ahead. While the Americans topped the overall medal table, 38-25, losing the gold medal count to Australia was a blow.

“We want to win the most medals possible, and we want to win the gold medal count,” said Tim Hinchey, USA Swimming’s CEO. “That’s something that’s always our objective, every time we get out athletes in front of a global audience.”

It is not quite accurate — or fair — to pin the entirety of Team USA’s hopes for dominance this summer on the shoulders of Dressel. But it is also true that the Aussies’ gold medal margin in f*ckuoka can be overcome entirely by the events Dressel won in Tokyo and Australia won in his absence. Even if he were to make it all the way back to his Tokyo form — something no one can predict — it may not be enough to keep Team USA on top.

“Caeleb is absolutely the key, at least on the men’s side,” said Rowdy Gaines, a three-time Olympic gold medalist and longtime color commentator on NBC’s swimming broadcasts. “That’s three [individual] golds from Tokyo that didn’t go the U.S.’s way last summer.”

Dressel has spoken only generally about his long break from swimming and the events that precipitated it. He has done almost no mainstream media — declining, through a spokesperson, an interview request for this story — and has spoken in-depth only with an occasional swimming-focused podcast or print outlet. And even then, understandably, he has been sparing with the specifics.

He has spoken of fighting off “the critic in my head” and of “shoving down” a lot of “things” that “all came boiling up.” He has revealed that his results from Tokyo devastated him; despite winning five gold medals and joining Michael Phelps and Mark Spitz as the only male swimmers to win at least three individual golds in a single Olympics, he hit none of his goal times. Though he soldiered on for another year, by the June 2022 world championships in Budapest, he said, he was “done.”

“There were a lot more things at stake than a swim career; I’ll put it that way,” he told the SwimSwam podcast on the website of the same name. After withdrawing in the middle of the Budapest meet, he said, he immediately poured himself into counseling near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville, Fla., where he trains. “Five hours a week,” he said. “Swimming was [not] in the picture. I couldn’t go near a pool. I purposely took the long way around campus to avoid the pool.”

For months, he didn’t so much as dip his toes in a body of water and only then at a river “adventure center” where visitors can swim with manatees — a birthday gift from Meghan. Instead of swimming, he gave himself over to self-reflection and farming, tending to cows and chickens on the 10-acre property the Dressels own south of Gainesville.

It was there, in the spring of 2023, where the seeds of his comeback were planted. Dressel was sitting on his tractor, where many of his biggest epiphanies occur, when he was gripped by a sudden realization: He would be just fine if he never swam again. Paradoxically, that also was the moment he knew he was ready to return — because it signaled he wanted to rather than needed to.

Never a big text-messager or emailer, Dressel suddenly started peppering his Gator Swim Club coach, Anthony Nesty, with messages. For the most part, Nesty had been giving Dressel the space he needed, aside from an occasional check-in. Only sometimes would he receive a reply. But now, Nesty could tell something had changed.

“You could tell he was ready to start the journey again,” Nesty said.

The return to the pool in May 2023 was slow, gradual and grueling. By mutual consent of his coaches and therapist, Dressel’s first practices were limited to 30 minutes, three times a week. Though they eventually ramped up to eight full-length practices a week, with an eye toward June’s U.S. team trials for the world championships, it was impossible to get him back in top form so quickly. He failed to qualify in any of the four events he swam, failing even to make the final in two of them.

As those world championships were taking place half a world away, Dressel didn’t even watch. Though he was disappointed, he was playing the long game: The Paris 2024 Olympics would be far more important to his legacy. In the months in between, his progress, spelled out in digital numbers on the scoreboard, is easy to track.

Take the 100 free, the universal standard for a sprinter. The American record holder at that distance with a time of 46.96 seconds from the 2019 world championships, Dressel won gold in the event in Tokyo in an Olympic-record time of 47.02. But on the first try of his comeback in May 2023, he clocked a 50.29, and at the U.S. team trials in June, he could lower it to just 49.42, well more than a second and a half short of making the team. By the end of 2023, he was down to 48.85, and in his most recent meet this spring, he was 48.30, which ranks fourth among Americans this season.

“Seeing where he was last summer at trials to now? It’s night and day,” Nesty said. “He weathered the storm.”

Ledecky, the American freestyle legend and Dressel’s Florida teammate, added: “It wasn’t a marked difference when he came back — like, ‘Whoa, he’s so much happier.’ He’s always carried that sense of joy. But I would say after he came back, he’s just been on fire — happy and healthy and positive and just a real light on the pool deck. I know if he’s on Team USA [for Paris] he’ll be an integral part of the team energy, beyond the medals.”

Realistically, however, Dressel will need to drop at least another second at these trials to finish in the top two and thus earn a spot in Paris. His ability to do that is anyone’s guess.

“Would I be surprised if he goes 46.9 in Indy? Absolutely not. Would I be surprised if he goes 47.8? Not at all,” said Gaines, himself a former world record holder in the 100 free. “We just don’t know how fast he’s going to swim.”

But Gaines, who counts Dressel as a friend, has seen enough of him recently to know how he looks and sounds. At an event last month in Tampa, they spent several hours together, and Gaines was struck by the difference in Dressel’s carriage and demeanor compared with a year or two ago. That doesn’t tell you anything about his swimming ability, either. But it says everything about how people within Dressel’s circle expect him to emerge from this summer.

“He seemed to be in a really good space, mentally, physically and emotionally,” Gaines said. “He was very upbeat. He seemed to have gained a lot of perspective. And he was at peace with his place in history, regardless of how it shakes out in Indianapolis — and/or Paris.”