Outside Magazine

Last fall Caeleb Dressel, the world’s fastest swimmer, sat in a hotel coffee shop on an island in the Danube in Budapest, sipping water from a bottle and trying not to think about a world without the Olympics. This was not easy. The 24-year-old from Florida was in Hungary’s fairy-tale capital of castles and grand hotels, along with 300 other Olympians, for the second season of a new competition, the International Swimming League (ISL), whose regard for the Games and their domination over watersports was summed up by its slogan: “This. Is. The. Revolution.”

Dressel was doing much to stoke the rebellion. A year earlier he’d won six golds and two silvers at the World Championships in Kwangju, South Korea, signaling his potential to match Michael Phelps’s all-time record of eight golds at a single Olympics. When the pandemic forced the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games, Dressel came to Budapest, where during six weeks of racing he broke four world records in seven days. That, plus five more world records set by other swimmers in Hungary, suddenly made the league, not the Games, the place where sports history was being made. That in turn made Dressel and his left-arm sleeve tattoo the icons of an Olympic sport fast evolving beyond the Olympics.

Dressel wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He had built his entire existence around the Games. “My whole life,” he said, “you hear swimming, you hear track, you hear gymnastics, you think Olympics.” But in the league, he said, he had discovered “what swimming should be.”