Watching Michael Phelps’ return to swimming was like worrying a loose tooth with your tongue. His comeback was a cause for nervousness for anyone familiar with the master plan that had made him great.

The blueprint for becoming the most decorated athlete in Olympic history required Phelps, 29, to be a one-dimensional swimming machine, and that singular focus proved a double-edged sword.

It was the tool that enabled Phelps to dominate the best swimmers for more than a decade, but it provided him no mechanism for maneuvering in the world beyond the pool.

So when Phelps ended his retirement after 18 months, it raised a concern: Did he have unfinished business in the water, or was his return an act of surrender, an acknowledgment that he could not find firm footing on dry land?

Phelps was arrested and charged with driving under the influence last week, and like his first such incident in November 2004, it came during what passes for the soak phase in swimming’s competitive cycle. Many of the other post-collegians who competed alongside Phelps in the Pan Pacific Championships in August are just getting back in the water or in the midst of their last extended break before the training thrust that will carry them through the 2016 Olympics.

This down time, when a swimmer’s life has the least amount of structure, has always been Phelps’ danger zone. Give him a goal like winning eight gold medals, becoming the most successful Olympian or making the 2014 Pan Pacific team and Phelps can summon a champion’s focus. Without such a road map, Phelps appears lost.

With his decision on Sunday to enter a six-week inpatient program to address his drinking, Phelps has taken a huge step toward finding himself. It was his decision alone, not an intervention, his handlers said. The truth is, Phelps has been floundering for a long time.

At the USA Swimming nationals in August, Phelps' long-time coach, Bob Bowman, recalled a conversation the two had after the 2004 Olympics in Athens, where Phelps won eight medals, including six golds. Bowman had moved to Ann Arbor to coach the Michigan men's team. Phelps followed him there and was miserable.

Bowman said: “He came into my office and said, ‘I don’t fit in here.’ And I was like, ‘You don’t fit in anywhere.’ He said, ‘I’m just not normal.’ And I was like, ‘That’s right, and isn’t that awesome?’” Well, yes and no. Phelps had clearly defined goals, which separated him from most of the undergraduate population. But he also lacked the social skills that could have helped him find new friends that might have broadened his interests. With the 2008 Olympics approaching, the people closest to Phelps were largely invested in narrowing his world, not broadening it.

In 2009, after a photograph surfaced of Phelps with a marijuana pipe, Bowman acknowledged the trade-offs inherent in Phelps’ becoming the most decorated athlete in a single Olympics, as he did with eight golds in 2008.

“He missed some experiences that other people had,” Bowman said. “I guess the question is, what do we do after that? And I think that’s what he’s working on now, expanding his horizons beyond swimming.”

Phelps’ mother, Debbie, said in 2009 that she could foresee her son becoming a businessman in the next “four, eight years.” Five years and six Olympic medals later, Phelps was back where he started, in the pool training for another Summer Games. It was hard to argue that Phelps ought to be anywhere else when he finished the summer long-course season as one of only two Americans to post a world-best time.

Phelps said he was having fun. Others said he was making a much greater effort than before to connect with his younger teammates. But there were signs he hadn’t changed much at all, as when he gave Bowman an expletive-laced earful in the warm-down pool after one of his losses.

So much of Phelps’ bad behaviour over the years has been enabled by people invested in him carrying his sport on his broad shoulders. Would he be guilty of continuing lapses in judgment if USA Swimming had suspended Phelps for more than three months in 2009, after the marijuana pipe photograph surfaced, and he had been forced to sit out the World Championships in Rome that year?

Would Phelps need this time away to better understand himself if those around him had insisted that he complete his undergraduate college degree, the better to find and develop a passion to drive him for the next quarter-century of his life?

On Sunday morning, Phelps wrote on Twitter, “Swimming is a major part of my life, but right now I need to focus my attention on me as an individual, and do the necessary work to learn from this experience and make better decisions in the future.”

Predictably, the questions raised by his Twitter posts tended to be about his availability for competition and not what he has missed that has hurt him as a human being. Why was the focus not always on Phelps as an individual? Phelps, long the face of the sport, has also become the face of the failure of the sport's guardians to nurture the person and not just the performer. New York Times