PHELPS JUMPS BACK IN THE POOL

After Layoff, Olympic Champion Eager to Return to Form

BALTIMORE -- With his hair still wet from swim practice, Michael
Phelps hurried through a hallway with his coach, Bob Bowman, at his
side, insisting that Phelps don a suit and tie and appear clean-shaven
for a charity event that night. A decidedly scruffy Phelps protested
- -- "I'm not losing the 'stache" -- as he and Bowman swung into sight
of his personal trainer, waiting on a bench outside the weight room at
Loyola College Fitness and Aquatic Center.

Trainer Dawn-Marie Cain grinned in delight as she looked up at Phelps,
more than a foot taller and perhaps 100 pounds heftier than she.

"How are you?" she exclaimed.

"Great!" responded Phelps, mimicking her perkiness. "Ready for another
day of lifting!"

Weeks after he considered walking away from the sport for good, Phelps
peppered a grueling training day with the wisecracks, playfulness and
relentless teasing that his training mates had sorely missed as he
wrangled with his future. After winning eight gold medals at last
summer's Olympics in Beijing, Phelps took more than four months off
and tried to determine if there was anything else for him to achieve
in swimming.

Phelps said the answer suddenly became obvious and unarguable, but he
can't pinpoint how or why.

"I literally just woke up on a Sunday and wanted to swim another four
years," Phelps said. "I don't know what it was . . . but it switched
on in my head.

"During the break . . . I was up in the air about everything. . . .
The hardest thing was, I did everything I wanted to do. I was like,
'Where do I go from here?' "

That question became harder to decipher when on Jan. 31, a British
tabloid published a photo of Phelps appearing to smoke marijuana at a
party in Columbia, S.C.. Phelps, 23, immediately issued an apology
through his management agency for "regrettable behavior," but the
matter took on a strange life of its own, fueled in part by a local
sheriff who threatened to file criminal charges against Phelps.

Amid the furor, USA Swimming handed down a three-month competition ban
for bad behavior that concluded this week and the Kellogg Co. did not
renew its sponsorship with Phelps. The sheriff's office dropped the
case, but paparazzi gathered daily at the Meadowbrook Aquatic Center
and around Phelps's townhouse at Fells Point, complicating an already
stressful period for Phelps, who suddenly stopped showing up at swim
practice.

"I just felt like he was so down," Bowman said. "He was definitely
lost. . . . We had a whole month of, 'Can we get through this day?'
"

Said fellow Olympic swimmer Katie Hoff, 19, who has known Phelps for
six years: "He [became] more serious. He wasn't himself. He was
completely not motivated. It wasn't the Michael I knew."

It had been a long time since anyone had seen that Michael --
including Phelps himself. From the moment he claimed his eighth gold
medal in the 4x100-meter medley relay last Aug. 16 and was hustled
away for a series of interviews, everything changed, and far more than
Bowman or Phelps had expected.

"Crazy," Phelps said about that time. "It's hard to believe what it
was like," Bowman said.

After completing his medal pursuit, he had gone on morning shows,
afternoon shows, late-night shows. There was a parade in his honor in
Baltimore. He flew to New York to be named Sports Illustrated's
Sportsman of the Year. He entered poker tournaments in Las Vegas. He
donned an Ed Reed jersey at Baltimore Ravens games. He went to Miami
and frolicked at rooftop hotel pools. He gained 17 pounds.

In November, he traveled to Columbia, where he received a standing
ovation when introduced at a University of South Carolina football
game. During the trip, he visited a party house jammed with students
and other revelers, one of whom surreptitiously snapped a photo of
Phelps on a camera phone and, months later, provided it to the News of
the World. Phelps called his conduct at the party "very stupid and
very regrettable," but described the rest of his time away from
swimming as about as necessary as oxygen.

Mainly because he discovered that doing nothing but having fun wasn't
all that fun.

"I was actually being a kid for the first time in my life," Phelps
said. "I was just having a good time. It was needed after 12 years of
never really having more than a week off."

But "after a while, I was saying, 'Clearly I didn't miss much during
all those years I was training.' . . . I had nothing to do. I would
get up at 12 or 1 o'clock and after that I was like, 'Well, what am I
going to do today?' Sit and watch TV? Go and play video games? What am
I going to do?' "

Despite his increasing restlessness, Phelps struggled with the
question of what goals could excite him enough to return to two-a-day
swim workouts and hard hours in the weight room. The paparazzi that
decamped outside his townhouse for days on end after the photo's
publication did nothing to help him wade through the issue.

"I have too much on my mind to swim," he would say in text messages to
Bowman, who grew increasingly concerned.

Bowman, known for being a strategic antagonist to Phelps, in this case
did not yell or chide. He sent him one text message, Phelps recalled,
that said simply, "We love you and support you."

"I took a step back," Phelps said. "Who are my friends? Who can I
trust to be standing by my side in good times and bad times?"

As Phelps sorted through the situation, he began to realize he hadn't
conquered every conceivable goal in swimming. He could tackle shorter
events that had always intrigued him, but never fit with a training
plan that included the grueling 400 individual medley, one of his
signature events.

"You can kind of compare it to when Tiger [Woods] works on his putting
game or chipping game," Phelps said. "It's something to add to his
toolbox. I want to do other events to say I've done it."

Bowman vividly recalls the moment he learned Phelps would return to
the sport: He was standing in the lobby at the Kennedy Center before a
matinee performance by pianist Evgeny Kissin, holding a cup of coffee.
It was Sunday, March 1 -- four weeks after the photo appeared -- when
Bowman answered his phone and heard Phelps say, "I'm going four more
years."

Though Phelps is finally back, he has found a new normal. When he
arrived for his dual workouts at Loyola College, he drove up in a
solid black Cadillac Escalade with rolled-up, dark-tinted windows that
made it impossible to see inside. He emerged with a black military cap
pushed onto his head and black wraparound sunglasses covering his
eyes, and he had a cellphone pressed to his ear as he cradled two
bottles of water. No one approached.

"He's different, he's really different," Bowman said. "I hate to use
this word -- mature -- but the whole experience since Beijing has been
eye-opening to say the least. When he talks now, he seems more
thoughtful. When I talk to him about his future, he really has
thoughts on what he wants to do."

Next week, Phelps will take part in his first race since the Olympics
at the Charlotte Ultraswim, a professional event expected to draw a
decent international field. At the four-day event, Phelps will swim in
a pair of familiar events, the 200-meter freestyle and 100 butterfly,
and three relatively new ones: the 50 free (only preliminaries), 100
backstroke and 100 free.

Back to his competition weight of 200 pounds, Phelps wants simply to
assess his potential at shorter distances. In the 50 and 100 free, he
will unveil a straight-armed freestyle stroke, which is popular among
some sprinters but completely new to Phelps.

"My expectations aren't like they were going into the Games," he said.
"I know I could swim a lot slower there. I could get beat in every
event. These are all little steppingstones, like we always say, in the
big picture."

He prefers to look ahead to the goal he has now fully embraced: the
2012 Summer Games in London.

"I'm not going to go one year and hang it up," Phelps said. "If I'm
going, I'm going to go for four. I don't see any other way to do it.
There are going to be ups and downs. I'm prepared for it. I'm ready
for it. I've been through about everything you can go through in a
sport. I'm ready for anything that may come my way."