Phelps relishes the cheer and challenge of his new reality: parenthood
Michael Phelps, headphones in, was listening to music on his smartphone to pump himself up for a race at the United States Olympic trials when he felt the phone vibrate in his hoodie pocket. Phelps has faced plenty of distractions in his 16 years as an Olympic swimmer, but nothing like this.
Phelps’ 2-month-old son, Boomer, was in the stands to take in his first Olympic trials, and Phelps’ fiancée, Nicole Johnson, was sending him photographs to commemorate the occasion. She had forgotten that Phelps’ phone held his prerace playlist, a mix of songs from Eminem, Young Jeezy and a more recent addition, Eric Church.
With victories in the 200-meter butterfly, the 200-meter individual medley and the 100-meter butterfly at the trials in June and July, Phelps qualified for his fifth Olympics. His vibrating phone signified the cheer, but also the challenge, of juggling his old, proven routines and a new, unpredictable life.
The five weeks after the trials in Omaha were a blur of training swims and video chats. Phelps had more on his mind than the two opportunities that he will have in Rio, in the 100 butterfly and the 200 IM, to join the track and field Olympians Al Oerter and Carl Lewis as the only Americans to win an individual event four times.
To chase the record of Oerter and Lewis, Phelps had to leave behind in Arizona his main sources of inspiration, his fiancée and their son. He had looked forward to seeing both during the designated family weekend at a training camp in San Antonio in July, but Johnson reluctantly canceled the trip after Boomer developed a fever and a nagging cough.
“So now it’s like I’m always worried that he’s sleeping right, breathing right, getting enough food, getting better,” Phelps, 31, said the next day after a practice.
“So it is challenging,” he added. “We just left FaceTime on yesterday, even if we weren’t saying anything.”
Johnson and Boomer made the trip to Atlanta, the site of a second training camp, a little over a week later. They were planning to rejoin Phelps in Rio de Janeiro, where they will serve as the most demonstrable proof of the transformation Phelps has undergone since his last turn as an Olympic star.
“He’s just very grounded, and he’s living well,” Bob Bowman, Phelps’ longtime coach, said, adding, “The swimming is far from the only thing that he is doing.”
Phelps has won a record 23 Olympic medals, including 19 golds, through meticulous planning. In preparation for past Olympics, he counted his strokes in case his goggles filled with water and prohibited him from gauging the distance between walls, as they did in the 200-meter butterfly final at the Beijing Games in 2008. In September 2013, Bowman handed him a schedule for the 1,068 days leading up to the Rio Games.
In the aftermath of Phelps’ arrest in 2014 for driving under the influence, his second such arrest, and his subsequent six-week stint in a recovery center, he set out to apply the same detailed approach to his personal life. He re-established contact with his father, Fred, from whom he had been estranged for several years.
In February 2015, Phelps became engaged to Johnson, whom he had dated off and on since 2007, and mapped out the future: After the Olympics, the couple would get married, embark on a long and luxurious honeymoon and then start a family.
The plan went awry when Johnson became pregnant in the fall.
“Michael was more excited than I was,” Johnson said. “He was over the moon about having a kid.”
Phelps credits his personal growth, evident in his teammates’ voting him a team captain for the first time in his Olympic career, to a different reconciliation — the one he initiated with Johnson four months before his DUI arrest in Baltimore in September 2014.
“We’ve been through a lot,” he said. “But I love her to death. We’ve been able to grow as a couple through everything we’ve been through, the positive changes I’ve made in my life.”
The two met at the ESPYs in 2007. Phelps was presenting an award with the race car driver Danica Patrick, and Johnson was an athlete guide who harbored dreams of becoming a Formula One racing correspondent. As such, she was not thrilled to be assigned to usher Phelps around.
“I really wanted to escort Travis Pastrana,” she said, referring to the motor sports and action sports star.
To Johnson’s surprise, “Michael and I just completely hit it off,” she said. They both had divorced parents, and they made each other laugh. Within days, they were a couple.
Johnson chose not to attend the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, where Phelps won eight gold medals to surpass Mark Spitz’s record for a single Games, because she did not want to distract Phelps from his singular pursuit of history.
“My friends all thought I was crazy for not going,” said Johnson, who was around for the madness that ensued as Phelps waded into the celebrity culture and was carried out to sea by fame’s riptide.
Phelps’ mother, Debbie, recalled one moment of many that had illustrated how different her son’s life had become. She was on the phone with Phelps, who was with Johnson at an outdoor shopping mall in Newport Beach, California, when it became obvious that she no longer had his full attention.
As she recalled, he said: “Mom, I have to call you back. Kobe just pulled up.”
He meant the NBA star Kobe Bryant, who had rolled down the tinted window of his car to greet Phelps.
Johnson, a graduate of the University of Southern California, had her own experience with the crosscurrents of a public life. She entered beauty contests, enticed by the scholarship money. In November 2009, she won the Miss California USA pageant, held in Palm Springs. During her 2010 reign as Miss California, she gained a better understanding of the competing interests that were tugging at Phelps.
“It’s hard to put your heart into things when you feel you’re being pulled in so many different directions and people are taking advantage of you,” she said.
The two drifted apart, got back together again in 2012 and then broke up, presumably for good, before the London Olympics. Phelps, who had been unable to commit either to Johnson or to swimming, overcame his haphazard preparation to win six medals, including four golds. Then he retired, accelerating the downward spiral that Johnson said had begun after the 2008 Games.
“He lived in a bubble for a long time,” Johnson said, adding: “It’s hard to develop as a person when you need them to perform at such a high level. He had to grow up really, really fast.”
Phelps returned to swimming in 2013. The following year, he was in Rio de Janeiro for a swimming clinic when he turned to his agent, Peter Carlisle, and started to say, “If I ever get a chance to get Nicole back.” Before he could continue, Carlisle corrected him, saying, “No, whenyou get her back.”
A week after that conversation, Phelps sent Johnson a text that laid bare his feelings for her.
“And here we are in 2016 with a child and going to Rio,” Phelps said.
It was a little more complicated than that. Johnson was seriously involved with someone when she received Phelps’ text. She wrote him back, saying she was dating someone and would not do anything to jeopardize the relationship.
But a few weeks passed, and she could not get Phelps’ words out of her mind, which she took as a sign. Johnson broke up with her boyfriend and cautiously resumed contact with Phelps. To the delight of everyone in his inner circle, they got back together and have been a team since.
“It’s been a really fun journey over the last couple of years,” Phelps said, “and a journey that I think has made me the person who I am and helped me transform to me just being me.”
Phelps described himself as thankful for Johnson and their sweet life together. He knows how close he came to not knowing such joy.
There is a song by Eric Church, one of his favorite artists, about a man named Michael who has a boy who is “starting to look like me.” The man is a recovering alcoholic pining for the family he lost because of his addiction.
That song, Phelps said, is not on his playlist.
