Phelps slams ‘failing’ USA Swimming

August 21, 2025

USA nonetheless topped the medal desk eventually 12 months’s Olympic Games in Paris with a complete of 28 metals (together with 8 golds), leaving Australia out of the working with 19 (7 golds). A feat they would repeat at the recent World Championships in Singapore, bringing residence 32, 9 greater than final 12 months. Phelps stated the staff’s poor outcomes over the previous decade had been proof of how disorganised the self-discipline had turn out to be within the US. “There have always been cracks in the system, but over the past nine years I have seen those cracks grow,” the former athlete posted on his Instagram.

“In 2016, I had the honour of being part of the American swimming team in Rio, possibly the most successful in the history of the sport, and we won 57% of the medals we had the opportunity to win. Eight years later, in Paris, the US roster secured only 44% of the medals it had the opportunity to win in the pool, the lowest percentage seen in the sport since the 1988 Olympics,” the champion continued.

Australia (40), China (18) and Canada (14) have been a number of the main beneficiaries in the medal distribution in recent editions of the Games. In the lengthy shadow of the post-Phelps period, the American large’s faltering type within the pool has solely magnified the chasm left by its departed icon. However, the aforementioned new powerhouses are usually not the one ones, as new powers have begun to emerge, such because the United Kingdom and France, which managed to scrape collectively nearly twenty between them in Tokyo and Paris. Yet Phelps stated that the issues transcend the variety of medals gained and misplaced.

“I’ve asked myself what has changed in our sport, and the answer is clear,” he mirrored, earlier than concluding, “This isn’t the fault of the athletes, who continue to give their all with what they’ve been given. The blame lies with the leadership of USA Swimming. Poor leadership trickles down and can damage the organisation at every level.” Phelps, the prodigy who burst onto the scene at 15 in Sydney 2000 and went on to compete in 5 Olympic Games, has not turn out to be a sudden, impulsive and acute choose of his sport. The best of all time has successfully lengthy been utilizing his platform to campaign for better treatment of swimmers.

Ineed, it’s removed from the primary time he has spoken out in opposition to what he sees as unfair practices. In December 2024, he took aim at the United States Olympic Committee, urging them to offer stronger psychological well being help and accusing them of failing him when he started to wrestle with nervousness and melancholy. “I walked into the training rooms at the US Olympic Committee and received no care. Athletes must come first,” Phelps said on NBC. “Without a doubt, organisations like the USOPC have taken steps in the right direction to provide the help and care we need as athletes, but they are not doing everything they could, and that worries me.”

To attain the summit, swimmers should endure punishing coaching regimes and keep on with strict diets to maintain their weight down, usually for comparatively modest monetary reward, a minimum of when put next with different sports activities. The bodily and psychological toll at elite stage is immense, and it reveals. It shouldn’t be uncommon to see rivals break down in tears after their races, whether or not they contact the wall first or end on the again.

Phelps has spoken candidly about his personal battles with melancholy and moments of self-destructive ideas, and he has by no means shied away from demanding that the game’s directors do much more to safeguard the wellbeing of its athletes. In an interview with Healthline a few years ago, he opened up about his ‘demons’ and the burden of fame he carried at an early age.

This phenomenon is hardly an solely American concern, although. Other swimming powerhouses, together with Australia, have acknowledged deep flaws of their techniques, starting from surprising circumstances of abuse in opposition to feminine athletes to ongoing struggles with psychological well being. Nonetheless, returning to the American borders, the place Phelps is focusing his consideration, there may be a lot work forward, in keeping with the 40-year-old former swimmer.

Earlier this 12 months, incoming chief government Chrissi Rawak resigned after only nine days in the role, following the surfacing of a beforehand undisclosed SafeSport criticism from her teaching days. The US Center for SafeSport itself, the physique chargeable for investigating such allegations, has been mired in turmoil: its personal chief government was dismissed amid scrutiny of hiring practices, which included the appointment of an investigator later charged with a number of sexual offences resembling rape, intercourse trafficking and soliciting prostitution. Experts have lengthy warned of a dangerous code of silence throughout the sport, a tradition the place those that communicate out are sometimes suppressed, as reported by CODE Sports.

Source: Inside the Games