MICHAEL PHELPS is heading for the Rio Olympic Games next year a new man after coming through the toughest period of his life, he told American magazine Sports Illustrated.

    The lead-up to the Olympics has started to get serious for the swimmers, and Phelps just might be in his best shape yet, both mentally and physically, despite turning 30 in June.

    Barred from the world championships in Russia because of his second drunken-driving arrest, Phelps re-established his place as the planet’s most dominant swimmer with a turn-back-the-clock performance at the U.S. national championships in August. He posted world-best times in the 100-meter butterfly, 200-meter butterfly and 200-meter individual medley that week in San Antonio.

    The headliner among a slew of stars on the slate for the first of seven Arena Pro Swim Series events, unofficially kicking off the pre-Rio race season Thursday at the University of Minnesota, Phelps was in a peaceful, confident, healthy place he hardly could have foreseen a year ago.

    In a cover feature entitled “The Rehabilitation of Michael Phelps,” the man who has won 18 Olympic titles, more than anyone else, gave a frank account of his descent into alcoholism before turning his life around again.

    Phelps reached rock bottom in September 2014 when he was arrested in Baltimore, for drunk-driving after a night out at a local casino, the second time he had been found to be driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

    He pleaded guilty to drunk-driving and was given one-year suspended sentence and 18 months’ probation, but was spared jail.

    It served as a wake-up call for the swimming superstar. “I was in a real dark place. Not wanting to be alive anymore,” he explained.

    And he checked himself into rehab and is now ready to return to Olympic competition.

    “It’s probably the most afraid I’ve ever felt in my life,” he said.

    “I look back now, I lived in a bubble for a long time.”

    Phelps was arrested after the 2004 Athens Olympic Games for driving while impaired, and in 2009 was photographed using a marijuana bong in South Carolina.

    But after spending 45 days in an Arizona rehab clinic, he told the magazine, “I wound up uncovering a lot of things about myself that I probably knew, but I didn’t want to approach.

    “One of them was that for a long time, I saw myself as the athlete that I was, but not as a human being.”

    (SD-Agencies)