Michael Phelps as a child: how the most decorated swimmer in Olympic history was made
A teacher had written him off: too restless, unable to sit still. Michael Phelps was a child with ADHD, and in a swimming pool he found the space to turn that energy into discipline, going on to become the most decorated athlete in Olympic history.
At school, a teacher told his mother that boy would never manage to focus on anything. Michael Phelps was still young, and in the classroom he could not sit still for a moment: he fidgeted, he interrupted, he seemed incapable of following a lesson through to the end. At nine, the diagnosis arrived: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, ADHD.
Born in Baltimore, Maryland, on 30 June 1985, Michael was the youngest of three children. His mother, Debbie, was a middle school headteacher, and she refused to accept that all that boundless energy was simply a problem to be corrected. She looked for a way to channel it, and she found it in a swimming pool.
At seven, Michael started swimming, encouraged also by the example of his older sisters, who were already competitive athletes. At first, he did not like putting his face under the water, and he learned backstroke first. And it was in the water that this energy, which at school had seemed such a hindrance, found a space to become something useful: the concentration needed to count strokes and keep to the pace, repeating the same movement for hours.
By the age of ten he held an age-group national record in the 100-metre butterfly. At eleven, he began training with Bob Bowman, the coach who would guide him for the rest of his career at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. Bowman quickly sensed that the boy had a rare talent, but he never treated him as a prodigy to be shielded. He built a discipline around him made of fixed hours and daily training, the same kind of structure that helps many children with ADHD find something solid to hold on to.
The rest is sporting history. Phelps made his Olympic debut at the Sydney Games in 2000, aged fifteen, without reaching the podium. Four years later, in Athens, he came home with six golds and two bronzes. But it was in Beijing, in 2008, that he wrote a page no one had ever written before: eight gold medals at a single edition of the Games, a record that surpassed Mark Spitz's seven, held since 1972. Between Sydney 2000 and Rio 2016, his final tally stands at 28 medals, 23 of them gold: no other athlete in the history of the Games has ever come close to those numbers.
In the years since retiring, Phelps has spoken openly about the difficulties he faced even as an adult, including anxiety and depression, describing how much sport had helped him manage a struggle that no one at school had known how to address. And he has often recalled that teacher's remark, the one that had written him off, not to claim some kind of revenge, but to tell anyone who feels wrong that sometimes all it takes is finding the right place to put to good use what you already have.
His story is also told in the book from the Little Great Heroes collection, available on Amazon: a story written for children who are learning to read, tracing the years in which Michael learned to turn restlessness into energy, and energy into discipline.
How many children today are labelled as "too much" before they even discover where to put that same energy?