It’s probably bittersweet for Ryan Lochte that this week’s national swimming championships in Indy will be the first since 1999 without all-time Olympic champion Michael Phelps, because while he may not have his close friend to compete against, Lochte does have a better shot at owning the event.
But Lochte isn’t shy about his assumption that we haven’t seen the last of Phelps in competition.
“I think we all know by now that he’s coming back,” Lochte told USA Today after a workout. “I don’t think it’s really a surprise. It’s just a matter of when is he going to get back in the full swing of training.”
Of course, Phelps’s longtime coach Bob Bowman, who has already signed up to consult with the Turkish national swim team and to train two-time London Olympics champ Yannick Agnel of France, said he’d be the first to hear about a Phelps comeback... and he hasn’t heard anything yet.
"[Phelps] is really enjoying himself,” Bowman said. “He’s playing a lot of golf and I think he’s in good place as a person, and that’s real important to me, because he had a hard four years. I think it was tough on him.”
Instead of chatting about a comeback, or even swimming in general, Bowman said he and Phelps text back and forth about the two-year-old race horse they bought in May, which they’ve affectionately named “By A Hundredth” after the amount of time by which Phelps won the 100m butterfly in Beijing. Memories...
