OlympicTalk · Apr 17, 2020
Why Michael Phelps came out of retirement in 2013
Michael Phelps held up a gold medal at the London Olympics and told Bob Costas in a primetime sitdown interview, “This was the last medal that I will ever swim for.”
The following summer, Phelps had quietly unretired, re-entering the drug-testing pool to set a run for a fifth and final Olympics in 2016.
“That’s the only reason I want to do it. For me. I love to swim. I want to swim,” Phelps told longtime coach Bob Bowman in a 2013 dinner at the Four Seasons in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, according to Bowman’s 2016 book, “The Golden Rules.” “And I have more things I want to accomplish.”