Before he was the most decorated Olympic athelete of all time, Michael Phelps was just a kid who loved swimming and wanted nothing more than to “get faster.” With the Olympics in full swing, reddit user “stevethenewsguy” decided to dig into the archives of his early work as a sports interviewer for local Baltimore TV station WJZ-TV and unearth this great clip from an interview with a teenaged Michael Phelps. Here’s some background from stevethenewsguy’s post:
It was just a few weeks into my first job as a sports producer. A couple years ago I remembered the interview and amazingly they still had the raw tape. We had the entire interview posted on their website this week as a flashback, but a lot of what he says in the full interview is about his preps for the World Championships back in 2001. This little snippet was my favorite part.