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.