Phelps Jumps Back in the Pool

After Layoff, Olympic Champion Eager to Return to Form

BALTIMORE -- With his hair still wet from swim practice, Michael Phelps hurried through a hallway with his coach, Bob Bowman, at his side, insisting that Phelps don a suit and tie and appear clean-shaven for a charity event that night. A decidedly scruffy Phelps protested -- "I'm not losing the 'stache" -- as he and Bowman swung into sight of his personal trainer, waiting on a bench outside the weight room at Loyola College Fitness and Aquatic Center.

Trainer Dawn-Marie Cain grinned in delight as she looked up at Phelps, more than a foot taller and perhaps 100 pounds heftier than she.

"How are you?" she exclaimed.

"Great!" responded Phelps, mimicking her perkiness. "Ready for another day of lifting!"

Weeks after he considered walking away from the sport for good, Phelps peppered a grueling training day with the wisecracks, playfulness and relentless teasing that his training mates had sorely missed as he wrangled with his future. After winning eight gold medals at last summer's Olympics in Beijing, Phelps took more than four months off and tried to determine if there was anything else for him to achieve in swimming.

Phelps said the answer suddenly became obvious and unarguable, but he can't pinpoint how or why.

"I literally just woke up on a Sunday and wanted to swim another four years," Phelps said. "I don't know what it was . . . but it switched on in my head.

"During the break . . . I was up in the air about everything. . . . The hardest thing was, I did everything I wanted to do. I was like, 'Where do I go from here?' "

That question became harder to decipher when on Jan. 31, a British tabloid published a photo of Phelps appearing to smoke marijuana at a party in Columbia, S.C.. Phelps, 23, immediately issued an apology through his management agency for "regrettable behavior," but the matter took on a strange life of its own, fueled in part by a local sheriff who threatened to file criminal charges against Phelps.

Amid the furor, USA Swimming handed down a three-month competition ban for bad behavior that concluded this week and the Kellogg Co. did not renew its sponsorship with Phelps. The sheriff's office dropped the case, but paparazzi gathered daily at the Meadowbrook Aquatic Center and around Phelps's townhouse at Fells Point, complicating an already stressful period for Phelps, who suddenly stopped showing up at swim practice.

"I just felt like he was so down," Bowman said. "He was definitely lost. . . . We had a whole month of, 'Can we get through this day?' "

Said fellow Olympic swimmer Katie Hoff, 19, who has known Phelps for six years: "He [became] more serious. He wasn't himself. He was completely not motivated. It wasn't the Michael I knew."