Big Optimism: That’s pretty crazy, what happens in eight years
They say don't meet your heroes, but this Olympian met his twice.
Let’s talk today about someone who became a hero to his country — but since it probably isn’t your country, you might not remember.
Joseph Schooling was born in Singapore in 1994, and he also was a born swimmer.
In 2004, when Schooling had just turned 10 years old, he watched as Michael Phelps won six gold medals at the Athens Olympics. Two years later he watched as Phelps walked away with five more golds at the Pan Pacific Championships.
Phelps became Schooling’s hero, and he looked forward to the 2008 Games in Beijing. The question at the time: did Phelps have a chance of breaking Mark Spitz’s 1972 record of seven gold medals in a single Games?
Phelps’s own idol, Ian Thorpe of Australia, said it wasn’t possible — which Phelps said he used as extra motivation to try and pull it off.
All of which leads us to the first time Joseph Schooling actually got to meet Michael Phelps — in the leadup to the 2008 Games, when the U.S. Olympic swim team did a training camp in Singapore.
“They came to the country club that I trained at,” Schooling later recalled. “Everyone just rushed up and was like, ‘It’s Michael Phelps! It’s Michael Phelps!’ and I really wanted a picture.”
Sure enough, Schooling, then 13 years old and barely coming up to Phelps’s chin, got his photo. “It was very early in the morning,” he remembered, “and I was so shell shocked, I couldn’t really open my mouth.”
Phelps went on to win his eight Olympic gold medals in Beijing, and then another four medals at the 2012 Games in London. Meanwhile, Schooling kept swimming, rising through the ranks in Singapore as a teenager, and then coming to the U.S. to attend high school in Florida.
He was good enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin, ultimately setting collegiate records in the butterfly — the same stroke Phelps had won at every Olympics since 2004.
Singapore, meanwhile, had a birthday coming up. On August 9, 1965, the country hadn’t so much declared independence as had it forced on it — expelled from the Malaysian Federation, cut loose with no natural resources and no real plan.
Lee Kuan Yew announced the split on live TV and broke down crying while he did it.
Fifty-one years later, Singapore had built one of the fastest-growing economies on earth. One thing it hadn’t done, however, in all that time, in any sport, was win an Olympic gold medal.
Three days after that anniversary — August 12, 2016 — Schooling was in the pool in Rio, in Lane 4, next to Phelps, in what Phelps had already announced would be his last individual Olympic race.
Schooling got out fast and just never let Phelps back in. 50.39 seconds. An Olympic record.
Phelps touched three-quarters of a second later, tied for silver with Chad le Clos and László Cseh, the kid from the photo having just beaten his own idol.
Schooling’s reaction:
“That’s pretty crazy, what happens in eight years. I’m just honored and privileged to have the chance to race alongside him.
If it wasn’t for Michael, I don’t think I could have gotten to this point. I wanted to be like him as a kid. … He is the reason why I wanted to be a better swimmer.”
Phelps’s reaction—on what turned out to be his last-ever competitive race:
“I’m not happy, obviously, nobody likes to lose. But I’m proud of Joe.
I wanted to change the sport of swimming. With the people we have in the sport now I think you are seeing it.”
Singapore lost its mind, by the way.
Schooling flew back to the city-state for an open-top bus parade with people packed along the route. Parliament gave him a standing ovation.
For a stretch there he was about as famous as it’s possible to be in a country of six million people. There’s a life-sized cardboard cutout of him from a 2015 meet-and-greet that still sits in his parents’ office — he’s asked his mom to get rid of it more than once, and she won’t.
For what it’s worth, the Rio Olympics were the pinnacle of his career. He picked up plenty of gold at the SEA Games, and did well at the 2018 Asian Games, but never reached an Olympic podium never happened again.
At Tokyo in 2021 he didn’t even get out of his heat, and some of the same country that had carried him through the streets five years earlier turned on him online. It got bad enough that President Halimah Yacob wrote a public post defending him, saying people were quick to put someone on a pedestal and just as quick to “thrash them to the ground” the moment they didn’t deliver.
In 2022 Schooling admitted he’d used cannabis while on leave from Singapore’s mandatory military service in Vietnam, which was a big deal under the country’s strict drug laws — and apologized for it publicly. He retired in 2024, at 28.
Still, he’s still the only person from Singapore who’s ever won an Olympic gold medal In the post-Schooling era, enrollment in kids’ swim classes have spiked.
I’m kind of curious to see what aspiring teenaged swimmers might have managed to get a photo with him, much like he got with his hero, Phelps. And even more curious if we’ll see one of them on the podium in Los Angeles in two years.
7 other moments from history this week
Sunday, August 9: “I want to encourage women: Don’t be afraid. Pursue and have dreams. This is my dream.” — Shannon Eastin, on the eve of becoming the first woman to officiate an NFL game, in a preseason matchup between the Green Bay Packers and San Diego Chargers on this day in 2012. She’d spent 16 years officiating college and high school football before getting the call.
Monday, August 10: “Today’s permit marks the true beginning of our commercial operations in San Francisco.” — Tekedra Mawakana, co-CEO of Waymo, after California regulators voted to let Waymo and Cruise operate driverless taxis throughout San Francisco at any hour on this day in 2023. It made San Francisco the first major U.S. city with two competing fleets of fully autonomous vehicles.
Tuesday, August 11: “Have we been listening to a thing, a piece of property, or a man?” — William Lloyd Garrison, addressing the crowd after Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave, gave his first public speech to a mostly white audience at an antislavery convention on Nantucket on this day in 1841. The crowd roared back “A man!”—and Douglass was recruited on the spot to become a paid lecturer for the abolitionist movement.
Wednesday, August 12: “This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus or at home.” — C.B. Rogers Jr., IBM vice president, introducing the IBM Personal Computer at a press conference at New York’s Waldorf Astoria on this day in 1981. It sold for $1,565 and legitimized the entire personal computer industry almost overnight.
Thursday, August 13: “This isn’t for me, this is for them.” — Monica Puig, after upsetting world No. 2 Angelique Kerber to win Puerto Rico’s first-ever Olympic gold medal, in women’s tennis singles at the Rio Games on this day in 2016. She was unseeded and ranked 34th in the world going in.
Friday, August 14: “Today a hope of many years’ standing is in large part fulfilled.” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt, on signing the Social Security Act into law on this day in 1935. It established old-age pensions and unemployment insurance for millions of Americans during the depths of the Great Depression.
Saturday, August 15: “I am going to make the dirt fly.” — President Theodore Roosevelt, on his determination to finish the Panama Canal, which officially opened to global shipping on this day in 1914 with the passage of the SS Ancon. The canal cut nearly 8,000 miles off the sea route between the Atlantic and Pacific, reshaping global trade almost overnight.
When you get a break in your day, enjoy this.
https://youtu.be/6LNuRW9t4JA?si=zYBhQj2n9gY4zzBA