Life After Gold: Swimmer Joseph Schooling Talks to TIME
Joseph Schooling, Singapore’s first and solely Olympic gold medalist, is barely embarrassed by a cardboard cutout of himself perched close to the door of his dad and mom’ workplace. The standee, designed for a meet-and-greet session in 2015, exhibits a younger Schooling, then a rising swimming star, grinning ear to ear, frozen in time.
He retains pestering his mum to do away with it, he says, however she gained’t budge. Can you actually blame her for wanting to hold round this life-sized memento of a time when her son appeared on prime of the world?
A 12 months after his mom introduced the cardboard Jo dwelling, Schooling would make historical past at age 21 on the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, besting American swimming legend Michael Phelps on the 100-m butterfly. Phelps, who was competing within the final Olympic particular person occasion of his profession, shared silver with South Africa’s Chad le Clos and Hungary’s Laszlo Cseh in a three-way tie three-fourths of a second behind Schooling, who set an Olympic document. Cseh described it as “the craziest race maybe in swimming history.”
Schooling was already well-known in his Southeast Asian homeland of 6 million individuals, however now he was a nationwide hero.
“Dad used to have a saying: the blind man doesn’t fear the tiger,” Schooling, who turned 29 in June, advised TIME in an prolonged interview earlier this 12 months. “And I didn’t really understand the magnitude or the steepness of the competition,” he mentioned, reminiscing in regards to the Olympics and his late father’s sensible phrases, as he sat surrounded by childhood pictures in his dad and mom’ outdated workplace.
When Schooling returned to Singapore in the summertime of 2016, crowds lined the streets and cheered as he waved from an open-top bus on a victory parade; lawmakers gave him a standing ovation in parliament; and fogeys throughout the city-state signed their youngsters up for swimming classes, little doubt fueled by desires of cultivating the following Olympic champions.
Singaporean swimmer Joseph Schooling provides a thumbs up as he arrives at his neighborhood throughout the Olympic victory parade in Singapore on Aug. 18, 2016.Suhaimi Abdullah—Getty Photos
However lower than a decade later, Schooling is completed with racing. He didn’t compete in Paris, asserting his retirement simply months earlier than the Video games in an emotional press conference. “To say this is a bittersweet moment doesn’t really do this moment justice,” he mentioned.
Those that had been following Schooling’s swimming profession would say they noticed it coming: his meteoric rise gave approach to years of lackluster outcomes and public disappointment. However his expertise additionally sheds mild on the immense strain many elite athletes face, compounded by a stigma surrounding psychological well being help within the trade.
“I feel like professional sport is hyper focused on who is the big item at that moment. And it operates a little like a conveyor belt where the athlete is in the spotlight, and then they just fall off a cliff and disappear from view, like they’re a commodity that is no longer useful,” sport psychologist Daniel Zimet tells TIME. “[Schooling’s] experience post the Olympics, I think, is a great example of how fragile being at the top of the mountain can be, and how fickle people’s grace can become.”
“You will always be the greatest joy in my memories, and also the reason why I stay awake sometimes and worry,” Schooling’s mom wrote in an open letter revealed in Singapore’s nationwide newspaper after his retirement announcement.
Within the races main up to the 2016 Olympics, buzz had been constructing round Schooling, who had been chipping away at his timing and venturing into uncharted waters: he took dwelling Singapore’s first swimming medal on the 2014 Commonwealth Video games in Glasgow, broke a 32-year drought for a males’s swimming gold on the Asian Video games in Incheon later that 12 months, and gained a bronze medal on the 2015 World Aquatics championship in Kazan—yet one more first for the nation.
Schooling swims within the males’s 100-m butterfly ultimate of the Olympics in Rio on Aug. 12, 2016.François-Xavier Marit—AFP/Getty Photos
However after Schooling’s success within the pool in Rio, one thing had shifted.
Nonetheless giddy from his whirlwind gold-medal efficiency, Schooling, then an undergraduate on the College of Texas at Austin, dove headfirst into coaching for collegiate competitors. However on the 2017 NCAA swimming match, proper earlier than Schooling was set to stroll out to the pool, he battled a crippling bout of what he thought had been pre-race jitters; the crew physician would inform him later that it was a panic assault. He failed to defend the butterfly titles he had held for the earlier two years, and he knew the boldness that had fuelled his rise was shortly being whittled down.
“You understand that the stakes are much higher,” he remembers now. “After winning basically every single race the previous two years, losing after the Olympics is just not an option.”
Whereas there have been nonetheless vibrant spots and medals alongside the best way, Schooling’s efficiency over the following a number of years was shaky. He set a brand new document on the 2018 Asian Video games, then failed to make the semifinals on the 2019 FINA World Championships; later that 12 months he gained six medals throughout six occasions on the Southeast Asian Video games, however, in 2021 on the Tokyo Olympics, he finished final in his warmth for the 100-m butterfly. In March 2023, he pulled out of the Southeast Asian Video games in Cambodia, saying that he was “not at the level at which I hold myself to perform.” Just a few months later, he failed to make the reduce to compete on the Asian Video games in Hangzhou.
On prime of the whole lot he was feeling internally, Schooling additionally confronted fixed scrutiny from a public that had tasted the glory he might supply however wasn’t happy with out extra. When Schooling gained weight, he was swarmed with physique shaming feedback on social media. And when he failed to make the Olympic semifinals in Tokyo, he was met with a barrage of denigration.
Schooling appears on after competing in a warmth for the boys’s 4×100-m freestyle relay throughout the 2019 World Championships at Nambu College Municipal Aquatics Heart in Gwangju, South Korea, on July 21, 2019.Manan Vatsyayana—AFP/Getty Photos
“You not only have the expectations of yourself, but you have the expectations of the people around you, the media, the country, and all these eyeballs, where previously they weren’t even in existence,” he displays.
Schooling made local headlines in 2022 after confessing to utilizing hashish whereas in Vietnam, although he was let go along with a warning and maintains that the incident was a one-off mistake. In a public apology, Schooling attributed his drug use to “a very tough period of my life.” His father, who was battling liver most cancers, had died the earlier 12 months.
This blemish on his squeaky clear picture stirred a lot pearl-clutching via the city-state, infamous for its draconian anti-drug stance. Schooling was met with a combined outpouring of sympathy and condemnation. In an open letter within the nationwide newspaper, a sports activities editor provided stern encouragement, with a tinge of chiding over poor selections. “You’ve made us think about a lot of things this week. About champions and sainthood, drugs and humanness, errors and preachiness,” goes the letter’s final paragraph. “About why societies elevate athletes and who’s there to guide them. We’re all trying to learn and so, hopefully, will you.”
Whereas Schooling’s retirement at age 28 is sooner than another elite swimmers who’ve continued into their 30s, he’s removed from the one younger skilled athlete to make the choice to reduce brief their profession.
In April, 29-year-old Japanese badminton participant Momota Kento announced that he was retiring from worldwide competitors. After almost shedding his life in a automobile accident in 2020, the previous world champion by no means discovered the best way again to his peak. “I tried so many things but I just couldn’t close the emotional, physical gap between who I used to be and who I am. I felt I couldn’t become world No. 1 again,” he mentioned. And in Might, two-time world champion determine skater Uno Shoma retired at age 26 as a result of he felt “lonely,” he mentioned, after the departure of his longtime rink rival, Hanyu Yuzuru, who had hung up his skates two years earlier. Even Phelps introduced his retirement at 27 after the 2012 Olympics, saying later that he “was ready to move on”—although he modified his thoughts in 2013 and finally stop aggressive swimming after successful 5 extra gold medals in addition to the silver behind Schooling on the 2016 Olympics.
The gravity of such selections, significantly for athletes who’ve made it to the very prime of their area, is troublesome for most individuals to comprehend, says Zimet, the game psychologist. “There’s a real sense of ‘Have I reached the apex of my life? Will I ever have an experience like this again? Or is it all downhill from here?’” Zimet explains. “To be [their age] and feel like your life’s greatest achievement is now behind you and you’ll never have that feeling again—it’s tough.”
The pains of an athletic profession can show backbreaking from an early age, the place the professionalization of youth sport is accompanied by excessive coaching quantity and strain. Within the U.S., 70% of youngsters under the age of 13 drop out of organized sport, pushed by factors like harm, a lack of enjoyment within the exercise, and unattainable expectations from dad and mom and coaches.
A younger Schooling celebrates successful the boys’s 50-m butterfly ultimate of the 2011 Southeast Asian Video games at Jakabaring Sports activities Advanced in Palembang, Sumatra, Indonesia, on Nov. 12, 2011.Matt King—Getty Photos
As adults, collegiate {and professional} athletes suffer disproportionately from psychological misery and sleep issues. Many flip to substance use—in 2009, Phelps famously was quickly suspended by USA Swimming and dropped by sponsor Kellogg, for whom he had appeared on cereal packing containers, after he was photographed apparently smoking marijuana—although specialists warning that the behavior usually takes a toll on sleep high quality, which might in flip detrimentally have an effect on their psychological well-being.
Sports activities organizations have been more and more targeted on psychological well being help for athletes. The NCAA, NFL, and NBA now mandate psychological well being providers to be accessible to their athletes, whereas the Worldwide Olympic Committee has lately honed its emphasis on athletes’ psychological well-being, acknowledging that “our mental health is irrefutably intertwined with our overall health, yet in sport it is often overlooked.”
In a hopeful development, extra prime athletes, too, are breaking the longstanding taboo. Phelps has spoken openly about his struggles with anxiousness and melancholy, and lauded fellow athletes who’re doing the identical, corresponding to tennis participant Naomi Osaka. The four-time Grand Slam champion withdrew from the French Open in 2021 after being fined for declining to attend press conferences, citing her psychological well being.
“In any other line of work, you would be forgiven for taking a personal day here and there, so long as it’s not habitual. You wouldn’t have to divulge your most personal symptoms to your employer,” she wrote in a canopy story essay for TIME after her French Open withdrawal. Later that 12 months, when American gymnast Simone Biles pulled out of a few of her occasions on the Tokyo Olympics due to the “twisties,” Biles credited Osaka’s phrases of encouragement: “I know she knows exactly the feeling that I was going through, so it’s nice to relate to somebody on that high level.”
After a two-year hiatus, Biles returned in 2023, gained golds on the World Inventive Gymnastics Championships, and have become essentially the most embellished gymnast in historical past. Her momentum continued into 2024, taking the all-around gold on the Core Hydration Basic in Might earlier than successful two particular person golds, one crew gold, and a silver particular person medal on the Paris Olympics, throughout which she pointedly advised the general public and press to cease speeding to ask medalists “what’s next?”
The truth that athletes can take a break and are available again stronger exhibits that relaxation does work. And Schooling can solely surprise if he might have gone on to enhance his private greatest set in Rio—which was 0.57 seconds behind the world document then held by Phelps—had he discovered how to correctly take a break. “In hindsight,” he says, “I would have taken a bit more time off [after the 2016 Olympics] to just separate from swimming. Give me two, three months, completely off, not have to worry about coming to practice, not feel like it’s a chore … I actually to this day believe that, had I walked [that] path, I would have gotten that world record.”
“The body does need a certain measure of rest, and just training physically in and of itself is not enough to be able to win at the highest possible levels. You need to have the right mindset, you need proper rest,” says Zimet. “There’s more to it than just training 12 hours a day physically.”
After spending years on a Sisyphean mission to reascend to the height, Schooling would by no means once more clock his document Olympic timing, which U.S. swimmer Caeleb Dressel later broke. Schooling mentioned in his retirement press convention in April that his efficiency ultimately dimmed due to “complacency.” However talking to TIME a month later, he attributed it to getting burned out. “You’re pushing yourself day in and day out to the brim,” he says. “I wanted to travel. I wanted to do something else that was not swimming.”
Schooling poses for a photograph along with his cardboard standee on Might 3, 2024.Koh Ewe
Schooling speaks with TIME from his dad and mom’ workplace in Singapore.Koh Ewe
A couple of 12 months in the past, Schooling’s well-oiled routine began to creak. He not loved waking up early for morning observe, or plunging into a chilly pool at 5:30 within the morning. “I thought I’d sleep it off and one day just wake up and be magically in love with swimming again,” he says. “And that wasn’t the case.”
The emotions got here as he was serving two years of army service—a compulsory ceremony of passage for males in Singapore—which had taken a toll on his coaching. After enlisting in January 2022, Schooling revealed to the nationwide newspaper in April that 12 months that he had briefly determined to retire the earlier month—“due to existential circumstances”—earlier than taking it again.
Schooling confided in his greatest buddy, Teo Zhen Ren, whom he describes as his “sounding board.” The pair met whereas swimming, first as youngsters in the identical nation membership and later for the nationwide crew and their respective universities. Whereas Schooling represented the College of Texas at Austin, Teo swam for Santa Monica Faculty in California. They’d commerce pleasant banter, examine their swim occasions, and provides one another actuality checks.
As Schooling unraveled his emotions of ennui, over dinners and on the golf course, Teo understood precisely what he was saying, having retired in a lot quieter vogue earlier than Schooling. (After years of breaking nationwide information and having battled a cussed shoulder harm, Teo swam his final race for Singapore in 2015 and competed within the NCAA for one more two years earlier than calling it quits.)
Teo tells TIME from London, the place he’s at present doing an MBA, that his resolution to retire got here after “realizing that there’s so much more to life than just one thing that you do.” And it “really feels like there’s only one thing that you do for that 15 to 20 years when you swim competitively.”
With coaching taking over so much of an elite athlete’s time, there’s little alternative for them to pursue different ambitions exterior of their sport. Because of this, upon retirement elite athletes usually discover themselves with little work expertise that makes them aggressive on standard job markets—on prime of a sense of loss of their id.
“I’ve worked with a lot of post-career athletes, who feel like they’ve been abandoned by their sport and their fans after they no longer serve a purpose,” says Zimet, the game psychologist.
Teo says he noticed a renewed vitality in Schooling when he talked about his initiatives exterior of his athletic profession, from constructing a swim faculty in Singapore to beginning a enterprise capital agency with a few companions. Teo says it gave him “a lot of comfort” that Schooling had plans for what to do subsequent. However, Teo provides, “I think everyone who dedicates their life for many years to something and suddenly stops doing it, no matter how well you prepare for it, it will be hard. So I’m not saying it will be easy for Joseph as well.”
“That was what I spent most of my time reflecting on or internalizing, knowing that my worth isn’t pegged to swimming,” Schooling tells TIME. It’s additionally an perspective that he’s taken into his post-retirement teaching and investing endeavors. “These are all ventures and these are all pathways which somehow deep down inside me I know that I need to be on,” he says. “How can I use my experiences and help that person, help the younger pipeline, youth athletes achieve greater heights than I did? … We want to provide them the platform and give them the tools in order to be the best versions of themselves.”
Schooling’s retirement announcement in April ushered in a flood of tributes, hailing his historic feat that continues to encourage Singaporeans from all walks of life.
In a telephone name with TIME from Paris, the place he was coaching forward of the 2024 Olympics, swimmer Jonathan Tan reminisced about watching Schooling’s famed race eight years in the past. “That was a time when we realized that it was actually possible for someone from Singapore to win an Olympic gold medal.”
Inch Chua, a Singaporean singer-songwriter, tells TIME that she discovered resonance in Schooling’s resilience on the highest degree. “People have let him down a lot,” she says. “It really takes a very powerful dreamer first and foremost, and then a really strong, passionate, and committed person to get there,” she provides.
“Ain’t it funny, when you got it all / the crowd is waiting for you to fall,” goes a song Chua wrote about Schooling in 2022, as his hashish incident dominated headlines. “Break your back, no time for brooding / I wanna be like Joseph Schooling.”