‘It's just sport. Nothing more': How Florian Wellbrock, four-gold world champ, revived his career

Straits Times

4 days ago

King of the high seas: Germany's Florian Wellbrock won four golds in the open water during the World Aquatics Championships in Singapore.
'Oh my god.'
Leaning on a metal barrier, Florian Wellbrock does something unusual for him. He's the poet laureate of endurance swimming, the lean, liquid prince of persistence who can't stop, whose hotel safe must barely close because it's stuffed with world championship golds from the 10km open water, the 5km, the 3km knockout sprints, the mixed 4x1,500m relay and he's not finished yet.
The German's life is measured in fractions but right now the seconds are slowly ticking away. He's a silent study in concentration. How do you tell a reporter the madness of your life, the rise, the Olympic gold in 2021, the fall thereafter, the struggles, the pressure so suffocating it 'killed' him at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the revival?
So he thinks. For five seconds, 10, 14, the pause dramatic, broken only by the 'oh my god' at the question, and then this man, who always finds things, like his way back to greatness, finds the words.
In a unique feat, Wellbrock collects gold in the 10km open water and 1,500m (in the pool) at the 2019 world championships and then gold and bronze in those events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. 'At this point,' he says, 'it felt like normal to be on the podium, to win a gold medal, but to be honest it's not normal.'
No, it's not. The podium requires a freaky confluence of talent and timing, of skill polished over thousands of kilometres and then unleashed at a precise moment to best an entire planet. 'You need a lot of work,' continues Wellbrock, 'a lot of passion, it's so hard to stay on the top level. It's easy to become a world champion, but to stay on this level is much harder.'
He's talking pressure, that sneaky feeling that steals joy from athletes, freezes their joints, warps their perspective. Suddenly self-worth is measured only by which level you rise to on a podium.
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Pressure for Wellbrock came from the media, friends, family, himself. His training group in Magdeburg in Germany was 'really strong' and 'everybody's talking about medals, about gold medals especially. And then you have the feeling that you have to win and even if it's silver you are losing because you didn't achieve the gold medal.
'And this is a kind of pressure which is not good for yourself.'
Pressure flattens Wellbrock at the 2024 Olympics and he'll tell you this with disarming bluntness. Of the many fascinating parts which comprise the athlete, one is ownership of defeat. If they fumble, they own it. He's 14th in the pool in the 1,500m and eighth in the 10km open water and his verdict is unvarnished.
'I think the pressure killed me in Paris.'
Redemption starts with an interrogation. Why am I doing this? What do I want from it? How does it fulfil me? Wellbrock has his own list. 'I was thinking, okay, I put so much work into my sport, is it okay to finish like 12th, 15th, whatever?
'And for me it was clear, it's not okay. Because when I do like 80, 90 kilometres in the water, gym, pour everything to be in the top shape, I want to be one of the top athletes, I want to be on the podium.'
Comebacks are born of humility, from an admission that life as it was isn't working, that bodies may have to be resculpted, plans redesigned, philosophies reworked. It's why golfers change equipment and badminton players their coaches and Novak Djokovic his diet. Sometimes all that needs tinkering with is attitude.
Wellbrock makes progress after Paris with a mental coach and says 'now I find a way to swim again with fun and not with too much pressure'. It's a process and for some athletes this may involve mantras they recite and journals they write in, something which clarifies their mission and releases pressure, something not necessarily profound but powerful, something as simple as the word Wellbrock now tells himself.
'Relax.'
You actually tell yourself 'relax'?
'Yeah. It's just sport. Yeah, nothing more.'
Even in this no-frills, no-excuses 27-year-old from Bremen lies the hint of a poet and you can hear it when he talks about open water swimming. 'You float on the water. There's no gravity any more. Especially at home during the morning practice at 7am, early in the morning, it's so bright around you, it's just you and the water, nothing more.' A man in his element.
In Singapore he enters the water one last time on Aug 3, in the 1,500m freestyle final, chasing nothing else but his best self on this particular day and not a specific colour of medal. 'At the moment, I don't care. Because I know the feeling, how it is if I win, and I know the feeling how it is when I lose.'
He's saying he doesn't care if he comes second. Which may be exactly why in Singapore he has only come first.