Phelps told Nick Zaccardi of NBC Sports on Monday that what sealed his decision to finally hang up his goggles was something to which even we mere mortals can relate: He was sick of all the paperwork. Athletes at his level must constantly file updates on their movements, so that drug-testers know where to find them at a moment’s notice.

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Calling that relentless system of alerting officials to his whereabouts “brutal,” Phelps said that he told his agent, “Get the papers, can we just sign these things, so I don’t have to do the daily updates and everything?” He added, “I’m still in the pool [recreationally]. I’m still not coming back.”

That agent, Peter Carlisle, is also a close friend of Phelps who presided over the June wedding that the latter kept a secret through August’s Olympics in Rio and into October. The 23-time gold medalist told Zaccardi that he and his then-fiancee, Nicole Johnson, hastily held a “backyard wedding” to make it easier for her and their infant son, Boomer, to travel together under the same last name.

In Rio, Johnson and Boomer, plus Phelps’s mother Debbie, were able to cheer him on as he won five gold medals and a silver, giving him a total of 28 total medals and adding to the record he already held. Shortly before serving as the flag-bearer for the U.S. team, Phelps had said, “To have our firstborn be able to watch — I’ll say this just, in case I come back — my potential last Olympics. Just so you guys don’t beat me to death if I come back, I’m just going to say that: To have him watch the potential last races of my career is something I look forward to being able to share with him.”

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Of course, Phelps said similar things following the 2012 London Games, after which he also filed paperwork to remove his name from the drug-testing pool and “officially” retire, then unretired by adding his name back into the program in 2013 ahead of his comeback. Perhaps this time will stick, and his Rio races will be, in fact, the final ones of Phelps’s incomparable career.