Michael Phelps was in no rush to make his retirement official after the Rio Olympics.
Some time after the Games, Phelps said in an interview with Charlie Rose -- sitting next to longtime U.S. men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski -- that he had not yet completed paperwork that would take him out of a drug-testing pool and make him ineligible for major competition.
“I am, technically, not retired, but I’m retiring soon,” Phelps said in a video published last Friday, which Rose said was taped in Chicago. “I haven’t signed the papers, but I am retiring.”
Phelps was reportedly in Chicago as far back as September, so he very well could have dotted all the Is by now.
In the 40-minute Rose interview, Phelps and Krzyzewski went deeper into their careers, with Phelps repeating many stories he has often told.
“I’m ready [to retire], and I think this time I’m actually ready,” Phelps said. “I think in ’12, I kind of forced it [retirement].”
In early 2013, Phelps unretired by re-entering the drug-testing pool, becoming eligible to swim in 2014 after a mandatory nine-month waiting period.
Of those drug-testing papers, Phelps reportedly said after his last swim in Rio, “Were the papers here, I’d sign them tomorrow.”