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Phelps Relishes Fresh Start

The speaker, Danny Kelly, is a character in the recent novel “Barracuda,” by the Australian author Christos Tsiolkas, but his lament was echoed last week by 18-time Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps, who returned to competition after a six-month suspension resulting from a second drunken-driving arrest. Phelps, 29, who spent 45 days at an alcohol-rehabilitation center in Arizona about an hour’s drive from here, said that in the years after the 2000 Olympics, for which he qualified as a 15-year-old, he gradually distanced himself from his mother and two sisters. Phelps said he feels like a new person, but the results were the same as usual when he raced at the Arena Pro Swim Series at Skyline Aquatics Center. In his first competition since the Pan Pacific Championships in August, Phelps won the 100-meter butterfly, defeating his longtime rival, Ryan Lochte. No swimmer — not even the Olympians-turned-Hollywood stars Johnny Weissmuller and Eleanor Holm — has achieved greater fame than Phelps, whose high profile saddled him with a public image of rectitude that was unsustainable. “My hat goes off to him,” said Lochte, a five-time Olympic medalist in 2012. When I’m in training, I do feel like I’m back in high school. Swimming began as a sanctuary from the school bullies and his parents’ disintegrating marriage. After Phelps’s record performance of eight gold medals at the 2008 Olympics, it became a type of prison, he said.

 

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