U.S. swimmer Caeleb Dressel broke down in tears after he did not defend his Olympic gold medals Friday within the 100-meter butterfly and 50-meter freestyle occasions.

Dressel —who has 8 gold Olympic medals— was favored to clinch the highest spot on the rostrum on the Paris Video games after nabbing gold in each occasions within the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.

He made it to the Paris Olympic finals within the 50-meter freestyle however positioned sixth within the race with a time of 21.61 seconds, greater than .35 seconds behind Australia’s Cameron McEvoy, who took gold. 

Lower than an hour later he bought knocked out within the semi-finals of the boys’s 100-meter butterfly. Dressel got here in fifth with a time of 51.57 seconds, greater than a second behind France’s Maxime Grousset’s first-place end of fifty.41. 

That’s when photographers captured the 27-year-old Florida resident crying, maybe overcome by the frustration elite athletes typically really feel after they do not carry out their greatest below excessive stress.  

Dressel did win a gold medal in Paris within the males’s 4 x 100m freestyle relay with Crew USA – the county’s first on this yr’s Video games– on Saturday. 

Dressel nabbed a gold medal in 2020 Tokyo Olympics with a world-record time of 49:45 seconds within the males’s 100-meter butterfly, and set an Olympic document within the males’s 50-meter freestyle of 21.07.