Michael Phelps

b. 1985 Tier II

Diagnosed with ADHD at nine, he found focus in a pool

Portrait of Michael Phelps — Agência Brasil Fotografias — 2016 — CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons

Phelps grew up in the Rodgers Forge neighborhood of Towson, Maryland, the youngest of three children of a state trooper and a middle-school principal. His parents divorced when he was nine, a split he later said hit him and his sisters hard, and his relationship with his father stayed distant for years. Diagnosed with ADHD around the same time, he was bullied at school for both the diagnosis and his protruding ears. He had started swimming at seven, partly to give his energy somewhere to go, and by ten held a national age-group record in the 100-meter butterfly. At eleven he began training under Bob Bowman at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, a coach Phelps compared to a drill sergeant, and stayed with him for the rest of his career.

Phelps made his first Olympic team at fifteen in Sydney in 2000, finishing fifth and winning nothing. Four years later in Athens he won six golds and two bronzes. In Beijing in 2008 he won eight golds in eight events, breaking the seven-gold record Mark Spitz had held since 1972 and passing all nine drug tests given to him at the Games. London in 2012 brought four more golds and made him the most decorated Olympian in history, and he retired afterward — for about two years. He returned for Rio in 2016 at 31, won five more golds and a silver, carried the flag at the opening ceremony, and finished his Olympic career with 28 medals, 23 of them gold, more than twice as many as anyone else has ever won.

The record came with a public unraveling that ran alongside it. Arrested for drunk driving at 19 in 2004, he was photographed with a bong at a party in late 2008, and when the picture surfaced in February 2009, Kellogg's dropped his endorsement and USA Swimming suspended him three months. He kept competing and kept winning. Then, on September 30, 2014, police arrested him for a second DUI in Baltimore, this time driving well over the speed limit, and USA Swimming suspended him six months while he checked into inpatient treatment. In January 2018 he said publicly for the first time that he had lived with both ADHD and depression his whole life, and that after the London Olympics in 2012 he had thought seriously about killing himself.

Phelps married Nicole Johnson in June 2016 — they have four sons and live in Paradise Valley, Arizona, where he still coaches part time alongside Bowman at Arizona State. Since 2018 he has spoken openly and often about the depression that nearly followed him out of the sport altogether, working with mental-health and water-safety organizations and telling interviewers as recently as 2026 that saving a life matters more to him now than any medal did. He was inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame in 2023. His medal total, 28 in all, is treated across the sport as effectively permanent — nobody training now is within reach of it.

Lifespan

15401700180019002030

Michael Phelps's life against the full span of the corpus — the fading end marks a life still in progress.

Notable works

No Limits: The Will to Succeed book
Memoir published before the Beijing Olympics 2008
Michael Phelps Foundation company
Water-safety and youth swim programs 2008
Beneath the Surface book
Second memoir, written with Brian Cazeneuve 2016
MP Swim School company
Learn-to-swim franchise under the foundation's mission 2016