Swimming and springboard diving were my sports as a kid, and growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a great time to be in the water. Mark Spitz, one of the greatest Olympic swimmers of all time utterly dominated the 1972 Munich games and set world records in every event in which he competed. He was hugely popular for years afterwards, and any kid who took up swimming at the time had dreams of becoming just like Mark the Shark. (Dreams, indeed; the summer I was set to break my league's long-standing record in the 25m backstroke, I pulled a groin muscle while swimming in my sleep two nights before the championships and missed my chance.)
After my backstroke career, I took on springboard diving right as the world's greatest Olympic diver, Greg Louganis, was making himself known. For a diver at the time, it's hard to overstate just how much of a titan Louganis was to the sport. His comeback to win gold medals at the 1988 Seoul games, after infamously hitting his head on the diving board during a qualifying round, only added to that. (This, of course, was largely undone by the revelation afterwards that Louganis was secretly HIV-positive at the time of the accident.)
So with these heroes in my own sporting past, you can imagine how stoked I was to see Michael Phelps perform in London in what he vowed would be his final Olympics. Already, Phelps was a more decorated Olympian than Spitz and Louganis combined, a swimmer so context-breaking I'm surprised the IOC didn't try to test him for dolphin DNA. And true to form, Phelps rocked the London games, racking up another four golds and two silvers, surpassing the all-time Olympic medal record, with 22 total medals. He's got 18 gold medals, which is double the amount won by the next-highest Olympians, and the same number of total medals won by Larisa Latynina, the Soviet gymnast he passed to become the most decorated Olympian in history. After London, he retired from swimming on what is surely one of the greatest high notes in modern athletics.
But what do you when you retire at only 27 years old? Mark Spitz proved that there is definitely a life after swimming, earning millions of dollars in sponsorships, commercials and minor acting gigs, all of which he segued into a successful real estate and motivational speaking career. Likewise, Louganis enjoyed a lucrative career as a spokesman (which virtually ended in 1995 when he went public about being homosexual), and was a mentor to the 2012 Olympic diving team.
Much of the life and health industry's efforts are dedicated to helping people plan and prepare for their retirement. While a lot of people might not be retiring fully at 65 nowadays, there is still a robust dream of a time when your life hits that second chapter and you can pursue a different set of priorities. But for those like Phelps, who are smart to retire before the age of 30, figuring out how to fill the years that come after might be harder than winning all of those medals in the water. He will not be hurting for money, and his glory, barring some kind of misfortune, will surely outlast our own lifetimes. But then what? Phelps says he will work with his own foundation to promote swimming sports and healthy lifestyles. That is a great start, and I hope that his retirement—which will probably be decades longer than any of our careers—will be a happy and fruitful one, in which he will find ways to parlay his early success into many others. After all, for as much as the rest of us might dream of being able to retire so young, I imagine a guy like Phelps dreams of never having to retire at all.
© Touchpoint Markets, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to TMSalesOperations@arc-network.com. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.