The Gold In Connor Jaeger’s Silver Lining: New Life & Plenty Left To Give To The Old One

Connor Jaeger, the Olympic and World-Championships silver medallist over 1500m freestyle, has retired from elite racing at 25 years of age.

Armed with a master’s degree in business management from Michigan, Jaeger has switched pursuit of Paltrinieri (Gregorio, Italy, Olympic and World gold, 2015/16) to chasing down a job in the corporate world he also trained for.

Rio 2016, on the back of the 2015 world titles final over 30 laps, produced towering efforts from Jaeger. Olympic silver medals are enough to get known but not enough to build a career on. Jaeger must carve a new pathway at the start of a new book, the lessons learned in the first tome he wrote in fast waters likely to be of great value to him.

“We can’t all be Michael Phelps and be set for life,” Jaeger told the Washington Post at a recent swim clinic at the YMCA.

“I ended up going further with swimming than I ever thought I would. But I was always making decisions along the way where – if I stopped swimming tomorrow, and I’m not an athlete anymore, how am I going to be ready? That’s how I lived my life.”

A fine approach and useful to swimmers of all ages, including those heading for and in the midst of success stories in the pool.

Instead of returning to Ann Arbor this autumn, Jaeger moved, along with his girlfriend, to Hoboken, N.J., with an eye on the Manhattan real estate industry. His will to win is with him, as is pragmatism and the wherewithal to realise that the life of an Olympic swimmer tends to make the next stroke less thrilling than the last for a while:

“I’m super-competitive and I hate losing. But I can direct that where I want to. I’m hoping that whatever job I get, I can channel it. The reality is, whatever I’m doing – I mean, I always loved swimming. I looked forward to going to practice in the morning, or the afternoon. That’s the one thing – I may not enjoy this next thing as much.”

Jaeger heads into the real (estate) world with a useful pay day in his account, one that takes him much further than most graduates who enter the workplace with debts not bonuses: his silver attracted $15,000 from the U.S. Olympic …

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