Built to Swim: Olympic Swimmer Michael Phelps
By MICHAEL SOKOLOVE
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/08/magazine/08OLYMPIC.html?th
Published: August 8, 2004
One morning in early March, Michael Phelps emerged from the back seat
of a Lincoln Town Car and stepped onto a Manhattan sidewalk busy with
pedestrians. His chlorine-damaged hair was tousled and badly in need
of a comb. His hands were stuffed in his pockets as he walked, his
torsohunched forward. He did not glide along in the manner of so many
elite athletes, those superior beings who even outside their sport
are so evidently comfortable in physical space, less inhibited by
gravity. Phelps shuffled, as if unsure of his footing. Nothing about
him, other than his height, 6-foot-4, merited a second look or
suggested that he was anything but a big kid still growing into his
frame.
He walked half a block to his destination, a nightclub called
Pressure, near Union Square, pausing to hold the door for someone
else before he entered. The club had been turned into an elaborate
set to roll out a new line of high-tech swimsuits. Techno music
pulsated through the room; young women handing out promotional
material were dressed in white lab coats to accentuate the
scientific, space-age nature of the new swimwear. It was all silly
and overdone, but Phelps listened closely to direction and tried
earnestly to play his role, which was to model these suits on a
runway. When he executed the rudimentary dance steps that had been
choreographed for him, his shy smile indicated that he knew he had
performed with something less than balletic grace -- and more in the
manner of, say, Lurch, the butler on the old ''Addams Family''
television series.
Phelps is no good on land. He is weirdly hyperflexible, what is
sometimes called double-jointed, and therefore not entirely stable.
He does not lift weights. He used to run but gave it up because of a
tendency to step in holes or trip over nothing. To exert himself on
land, even mildly, is to risk orthopedic peril. A couple of years ago
he went bowling with his buddies and caught hell for it. What was he
thinking? Were a couple of frames really worth it?
By early afternoon, Phelps was finished modeling swimsuits and back
in the Town Car, moving toward his element. Wherever he is, water
must be made available to him. He craves it like some sea creature
who can survive for only so long at the ocean's edge. Over the last
seven years, he has spent just 5 days -- 5 out of more than 2,500 --
without being in the water at least once. In 2002 he returned to his
home outside Baltimore from an international swim meet in Japan,
exhausted and planning to take at least one day off, but at 3 the
next morning, unable to sleep, he was on his computer, instant-
messaging his equally jet-lagged coach: ''I want to swim. When can u
meet me at the pool?''
The Town Car drove far uptown to a 50-meter pool, at a recreation
center called Asphalt Green, at York and 91st Street. Within minutes,
Phelps was in his swimsuit and knifing through the water, a soft
warmup that was, nonetheless, mesmerizing to watch. On his back, he
fully extended one arm until it reached toward the ceiling, then
rhythmically brought it back through the water as the other reached
high. His freestyle stroke was a steady, powerful churn. At the
walls, he pushed off and disappeared underwater, re-emerging -- more
quickly than you would imagine possible -- 15 or 20 meters up the
pool. It was like watching a dolphin from the beach. You wondered,
How did he get from there to there that fast? I have seen many other
world-class swimmers. They were all skilled and comfortable, all of
them beautiful in the water. But there is something different about
Michael Phelps. Compared with him, the rest are all visitors.
The pool at Asphalt Green was mostly empty except for a handful of
exercise swimmers. A 60-ish woman walked along the deck toward an
open lane, then stopped at the sight of Phelps whooshing by. She
stood and stared, frozen. ''He's a very good swimmer,'' she finally
said. ''Is he on a swim team?'' I couldn't resist. ''Yes,'' I
said, ''that's Michael Phelps. He's the best swimmer in the world.''
In a sport that measures time in hundredths of a second, where the
difference between gold and silver can be the fraction of a blink of
an eye, Phelps captured the 400-meter individual medley at last
month's U.S. Olympic Swim Trials in Long Beach, Calif., by a
preposterous 5.68 seconds -- while lowering his own world record by
0.68 seconds. He won the 200-meter butterfly by 3.06 seconds, the 200-
meter individual medley by 2.70 seconds. He has now swum the seven
fastest 200 individual medleys in history -- times between 1:55.94
and 1:57.94 -- in a race no other human being has completed in less
than 1:58.16. (The grueling medley consists of all four competitive
strokes: in order, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and
freestyle.)
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Beginning on Aug. 14 in Athens, Phelps, who turned 19 in June, will
try to match or surpass Mark Spitz's hallowed record of seven Olympic
gold medals in swimming, won at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich.
Phelps is entered in five individual events, one more than even Spitz
contested, and could swim on three relays. Specialists predominate at
swimming's Olympic level, swimmers calibrated to one stroke at only
one distance, but Phelps is almost ridiculously versatile, dominant
if not untouchable in three events and a potential threat to reigning
world-record holders in as many as half a dozen others. There are
swimmers, including some of Phelps's U.S. teammates, who seem to
believe he wants to take their world records away, deny them medals,
hoard all of what little glory the sport has to offer -- which is
true. But what he wants most is their competition, the challenge he
cannot find in events he already owns. If he limited himself to just
his best events, he might be crushed by boredom.
It is an audacious goal Phelps has set for himself, a test of
endurance that will push him to and maybe beyond the brink of
physical and mental exhaustion. Including preliminary heats and
finals, Spitz swam 13 times at the Munich Games. With a semifinal
round having been added in the 200-meter events, Phelps could swim as
many as 18 races. He will compete multiple times on most of the eight
days of competition, sometimes twice within an hour, each time
against the world's best swimmers -- many of them seeking just one,
not eight, gold medals. His performance threatens to eclipse, among
others, Ian Thorpe, the Australian superstar swimmer (the Thorpedo)
who won three golds at the Sydney Games and who has expressed genuine
concern that Phelps's goals are unattainable -- or fear at the
possibility that he may succeed. On several occasions over the last
couple of months, Thorpe told reporters that Phelps's pursuit of so
much gold is a bad idea. Usually prefacing his remarks by saying he
was only trying to ''support'' Phelps, he said that his rival had set
himself up for sure failure -- that Phelps was trying to ''achieve
someone else's achievement'' -- and that rather than going after
Spitz's record, he should find his own path.
But this is Phelps's chosen path, and the doubts expressed by others
only harden his resolve. The Athens Games have been preceded by a
drumbeat of disquieting news: concerns about the host nation's
readiness; fears of terrorism; the entire sport of track and field
sullied by doping scandals. Phelps's Olympian ambition -- his
willingness to push the outer reaches of athletic possibility and
dream big at the risk of flagrant failure -- will very likely be the
dominant narrative of the games. Television will dote on him. The
world, or at least that part of it that still looks to sport for
drama and inspiration, will cheer him on. For many months, Phelps has
been waiting for the Games to begin, barely able to contain a
confidence so assured that it is almost as if he has played the whole
competition in his head and knows exactly how it ends. The first time
I met him, back in February, I asked him how much faster he could go
in those races in which he would not be favored. Without pause, he
answered: ''As fast as I want to go. As fast as I need to go.''
n the pool, Michael Phelps is a virgin of sorts, untouched by what
for most swimmers is routine: humbling defeat. A swimmer learns early
on that someone, somewhere, is faster. If you are the local 10-year-
old star, you qualify for your first regional championship and
experience, for the first time, the shock of a rival's touching the
wall before you. Or if you don't encounter your superior at the
regional meet, you meet her or him at your first national meet, where
after never finishing other than first in what you believed was your
best event, you place, say, 46th out of 103 competitors. In the
parlance of all sport, you have, for the first time, just been
whupped. You wonder: Where did they all come from? You are shocked,
then energized to train harder. But this has yet to happen to Phelps,
and it's hard to imagine it ever will. Oh, he works. No one works
like Michael Phelps. But it is never to rise to the top -- only to
extend his dominance.
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Out of the water, life has not been the same flurry of first-place
ribbons. A cheerful, high-energy cutup, Phelps was found to have
attention deficit hyperactive disorder in elementary school.
Homework, especially any kind of writing assignment, was completed
only with much parental supervision and frustration. Phelps's parents
divorced when he was 9. ''It was all just a very hard time in
Michael's life,'' says his mother, Debbie Phelps, a former teacher of
the year in Maryland and now an administrator in the Baltimore County
schools. She still recalls the transition from elementary to middle
school as wrenching for both her and her son, something they survived
only with a great deal of support from within the school. Phelps took
Ritalin for a couple of years, then demanded to come off it as he
finished sixth grade, telling his mother, ''I can do this on my
own.''
The water was his therapy. ''He is not a sit-still person,'' Debbie
Phelps says, ''but he can swim lap after lap.'' The youngest of three
children, Phelps grew up following his two older sisters, both
talented swimmers, to practices and meets, often spending early-
morning trips asleep in the back of the car, still in his pajamas. He
joined the North Baltimore Aquatic Club team at age 7 for the same
reason most younger swim siblings do: he was always at the pool; he
might as well get in. (His sister Whitney was the top-ranked American
woman in the 200 butterfly in 1996 and seemingly a sure bet to
qualify for that year's Olympic Games in Atlanta, but a back injury
ruined her chances, cut short her swim career and, for the Phelpses,
amounted to a kind of family tragedy.)
When Phelps was 11, the new swim coach at N.B.A.C., Bob Bowman, told
his parents that they had to come together for a meeting; he had
something important to tell them. Bowman was a sort of swim-world
drifter, a knowledgeable but tempestuous coach who had probably seen
a wider range of talented young swimmers than anyone in the nation as
a result of his seven coaching jobs, in four different states, in the
dozen years before he ended up in Baltimore.
What he told Debbie and Fred Phelps, a sergeant on the Maryland state
police force, was, basically, that their son was abnormal -- he was a
pure prodigy, a genius in the water. Bowman said that Michael should
practice with the club's elite training group, alongside swimmers as
old as 18, every day -- and eventually, twice a day. Follow the plan,
Bowman told them, and this is what will happen: By age 15, Michael
will be a national-level swimmer and should attend the 2000 Olympic
Games as a spectator just to get a feel for the experience. By 2004,
he will make his first Olympic team and contend for medals. Sometime
after that, he will break his first world records. No later than the
year 2012, he will be the world's greatest swimmer. The Phelpses were
incredulous. How could this coach possibly project so far into the
future? He couldn't. Bowman's timetable was way off.
Instead of attending the 2000 Summer Games in Australia as a
spectator, Phelps made the team at age 15 in the 200-meter butterfly
and became the youngest American male swimmer in the Olympics since
1932. He finished fifth. The following spring, still three months
short of his 16th birthday, he shattered the world record in the 200
fly, becoming the first ever to swim it under 1:55 and the youngest
male swimmer ever to hold a world mark. All of which was mere
prologue. On June 29, 2003, Phelps set a new record in the 200
individual medley at a meet in California. One month later at the
world championships in Barcelona, he shattered five more world marks -
- two of them in one day, which had never been done. Back home in
Maryland, on Aug. 9, he lowered his own world record in the 200
individual medley. Over the span of 41 days, he had set seven world
records, an unprecedented stretch of swimming all the more remarkable
for the fact that Phelps had just turned 18 in a sport where males
typically peak in their early or mid-20's. And by the standards of
world-class men's swimming, he is still just a baby: in this, his
second Olympics, Phelps is the second-youngest male on the U.S. swim
team.
''Michael is the most talented swimmer in the world,'' Eddie Reese,
head coach of the U.S. men's Olympic swim team, says. ''The tough
part for everyone else is he's also the hardest-working. It's a rare
phenomenon. You never see it.''
he fascination of such a once-in-a-generation athlete is, above all,
the question of what makes him so great. There never is just one
answer, but rather a combination of them: physiological and mental
gifts, work ethic, the will to compete and, always, happenstance.
What if Phelps's sisters had not preceded him into the water? What if
he had imagined himself a basketball player instead? In that case, he
would just be another sort of tall guy sitting on the bench -- one
with no idea that he had missed his true calling.
Phelps's build -- 6 feet 4 inches, 195 pounds, broad shoulders, slim
hips -- conforms to the classic swimmer's physique. But he is a type
within that type, with a bizarrely long torso and short legs -- an
inseam of just 32 inches -- that help him ride high in the water like
a long, thin sailboat. The body below hip level is what tends to sag
in the water, creating drag, or resistance, so Phelps, relative to
his overall height, has a short lower body to keep afloat. ''He has
the upper body of a man who is 6-foot-8 but not the legs to go with
it,'' says Jonty Skinner, USA Swimming's national team director of
technical support. ''It's an advantage.'' Another Phelps oddity:
unlike most people, for whom height and wingspan are nearly
identical, his wingspan is 6-foot-7, 3 inches longer than his height.
He is that rare person with short legs but long arms -- that is, long
levers for pulling water.
He has size 14 feet, and his hyperflexibility allows him to flex them
probably 15 degrees beyond average, almost parallel to his shin, so
they operate like big flippers. That is an obvious advantage, but
there are lots of big feet in swimming, most notably Ian Thorpe's
size 17's. Phelps's flexibility, says Scott Heinlein, his physical
therapist, is ''an all-over thing -- feet, knees, hips, elbows, back.
But most elite swimmers either start out flexible or become so
through training. The difference with Michael is control of that
flexibility in the water.''
Swim coaches have their own peculiar criteria for assessing an
athlete's body, a checklist of attributes that do or do not help
propel a person through the water. (''Nice flippers,'' I once heard a
coach say to my daughter, a serious competitive swimmer, as he looked
down at her big feet. He meant it as a compliment.) Bowman, of
course, took careful note of Phelps's physique when he first began
coaching him, and those observations were part of his forecast for
the young swimmer's future. Phelps has, Bowman says, ''what I would
call an aquatic body.'' Bowman also knew that Phelps had started
early -- ''He had been metabolically trained since the age of 7,
which is a plus'' -- and that he had already benefited from far more
sophisticated coaching than what is usually available at the local
pool. Long before Michael Phelps started there, the North Baltimore
team, under its founder, Murray Stephens, was turning out elite
swimmers -- including the Olympic gold medalists Anita Nall, Beth
Botsford and Theresa Andrews.
Bowman noticed one other thing, something that cannot be measured but
is immediately apparent to anyone who knows swimming -- Phelps
possessed, in the extreme, what is called a ''feel for the water,''
the ability to put his body in just the right positions to race
through it. The job of swim coaching is to teach these positions --
to show a swimmer, for example, how to ''streamline'' after pushing
off a wall, meaning how to fold his body into a tight posture so that
it retains the momentum of the push; or how to roll the shoulders on
the backstroke, but not so violently as to bob up and down like a
small boat in choppy seas.
Feel for the water is shorthand for a combination of things: water
gymnastics, flexibility and a specific kind of aquatic strength
different from brute force on land. These skills can be taught, but
only to an extent. A swimmer like Phelps who has an intuitive feel
for the water, a primitive relationship to it, starts out with a huge
advantage. Even Olympic-level swimmers go into slumps; they lose the
feel for a certain stroke, or their timing gets just a bit off. It
happens to Phelps -- he told me at one point of ''trying to get my
butterfly in better sync'' -- but his slumps are short-lived and his
confidence is such that he is never overcome with the fear, as some
swimmers are, that he won't be able to regain his feel.
In testing conducted by physiologists from USA Swimming, Phelps
scored as one of the weakest elite swimmers they had ever measured,
but that was on such traditional tests as the bench press and how
much weight he can lift with his legs. ''He's fine on land,''
Heinlein says. ''He can walk. He can do all the things you want him
to do. But he's not extraordinary in any way. What Michael excels at
takes place in water, so what does it tell you to test him on land?''
At practice one day this spring, I heard Bowman instruct Phelps
to ''get his hips higher'' as he lunged for the wall on the finish of
his butterfly. The fly is the most difficult and physically taxing of
the four competitive strokes, combining a dolphin kick, a constant
undulation of the body and a motion in which the arms simultaneously
are thrown forward before pulling back through the water. It demands
tremendous strength in the abdominal muscles along with exquisite
timing. Done well, it is a thing of beauty -- a swimmer seems almost
to be skipping over the water like a stone skimmed across the
surface. To access the muscles that would bring the hips higher at
the finish of this complex set of movements is not easy, but Phelps
got it right the very next time. ''What Michael knows how to do,
everybody else had to learn,'' says Kevin Clements, a teammate on the
North Baltimore team. ''And most of it, he knew the first time he got
in the water.''
Swimming is an endurance contest not just within the race, but over a
meet. And Phelps has one other gift, a freakish ability to recover
quickly, without which he could not even contemplate a schedule in
Athens that will require him to swim multiple races on short rests.
At a meet in Santa Clara, Calif., in May, I watched as Phelps got out
of the pool after a 100-meter butterfly. He was certainly winded, but
not like one of those runners you sometimes see staggering around
after the finish line. Physiologists from USA Swimming took a
pinprick of his ear, routine at such meets for top swimmers, to
measure his blood lactate level. Lactic acid is what causes ''muscle
burn,'' a sign of the oxygen deficit that causes muscles to shut
down. The race had been a long-anticipated rematch against Ian
Crocker, the swimmer who beat him a year ago and at the same time
took away his world record. On this day, Phelps touched him out at
the wall. His lactate level taken immediately afterward was an
exceedingly low 5.0 (5 millimoles per liter of blood). Other swimmers
after such races typically produce levels of 10 or 15, or sometimes
higher. (Crocker's was not measured.)
Like nearly all his gifts, Phelps's aerobic capacity is genetic in
some measure but also greatly enhanced by the high-level training
that began at an early age -- averaging seven miles a day in
practice, 365 days a year. ''His recovery is exceptional when
compared to his opponents,'' Jonty Skinner told me. ''He doesn't
produce a lot of lactate, and he recovers to pre-race levels in 20 to
25 minutes, sometimes less.''
Phelps has one glaring weakness as a swimmer, and predictably, it is
a land-based movement: he is consistently slow diving off the
starting blocks. At the Santa Clara meet, the crowd gasped as he
slipped off the block on one start and all but belly-flopped into the
water -- a typical racing dive for an 8-and-under in his first
Saturday morning meet but shocking for someone at Phelps's level. A
starting block sits about a foot above the pool deck at its highest
point and slopes down toward the water at a gentle 10-degree angle.
All elite swimmers that I've seen approach the block from the back
and just step up; it's the obvious way to do it. But Phelps,
uncomfortable as always on land, walks around to the front of the
starting block -- lower by three inches -- and ascends gingerly.
arrived one morning at the Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center in
Baltimore, home of the North Baltimore swim team, just as Phelps was
slowly steering his Cadillac Escalade into a parking spot a few
minutes before 7 a.m. (One humane aspect of Bowman's practices is
that unlike those at many elite programs, they do not begin at dawn.)
With both indoor and outdoor pools and a configuration in which
swimmers can train at the 50-meter length or in short-course 25-yard
lanes, the Meadowbrook center is top-of-the-line -- but only by the
Spartan standards of swimming. Phelps, the soon-to-be marquee
performer of the Olympic Games, changes in a cramped locker room near
a Koala Bear Kare diaper-changing station, or just bypasses it and
executes what swimmers call a ''deck change'' -- he pulls a towel
around himself and wiggles into his suit. Recreational swimmers
paddle along in nearby lanes as he trains, including a regular known
to Phelps and his teammates, because of his thrashing stroke, as
Crazy Backstroke Man.
Phelps lives just a few minutes away in a town house he shares with
his mother. He graduated from high school in 2003 but postponed
college for at least one year to devote himself full time to
training. He will never compete on a college swim team because he is
a professional; he has been since signing an endorsement contract
with Speedo at age 16. Speedo has put up a $1 million bonus if Phelps
can match Spitz's seven golds -- an oddity, given that Spitz's image
suffered in the wake of his 1972 medal haul from a perception that
his too-public eagerness to cash in was somehow crass. But that was
another era. Now big money validates a sport and crowns an athlete as
someone who must be watched. ''The public's imagination, for better
or for worse, is drawn to money, financial incentives,'' says Stu
Isaac, a senior vice president at Speedo.
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The bonus, while attention-grabbing, is a bit of a gimmick: it
represents just a fraction of the $5 million already paid or
committed to Phelps by Speedo, Visa, AT&T Wireless, Omega, Argent
Mortgage, PowerBar and other sponsors -- and an even tinier portion
of what what might come to him after Athens. Phelps will profit
handsomely, far more than $1 million worth, even if he captures just
two or three gold medals. After Athens, he will most likely be set
for life, never needing to work a 9-to-5 job. (And Speedo has already
got a huge bonus of its own, because with track and field hobbled by
scandal, Phelps will be an even bigger figure than he might have been
otherwise.) ''What would seven gold medals be worth?'' Phelps's
agent, Peter Carlisle, muses. ''Nobody knows, but as a rough
estimate, I'd say $30 to $50 million over time.'' Bowman says that
the money represents ''another motivator for Michael. It's another
thing to keep him interested in continuing to train and improve. It's
not his primary motivator, but it doesn't hurt.''
I said to Phelps one day, ''You've already made a lot of money,
right?'' He answered: ''For me, yeah. For LeBron James, no. But I
guess I've got a lot for a kid my age.''
Phelps does not know what to do with the money he already has. He
buys fancy cellphones, iPods, big-screen TV's. The Escalade has one
TV screen on the dashboard and two facing the backseat. Heaven for
Phelps is an hour to kill in a Circuit City. He likes to buy gifts --
an expensive watch for Bowman, a Christmas Mercedes for his mother,
smaller trinkets for friends and relatives.
His schedule has not left much time for pursuing outside interests.
All coaches of elite swimmers believe in heavy practice workloads,
but Bowman takes it to an extreme. His philosophy is simple: there is
no substitute for being in the water. Not running or weight lifting,
and certainly not resting. Each day out of the water is a setback.
(The N.B.A.C. team does a little bit of running for cross-training,
but when his teammates put on their sneakers, Phelps now stays behind
and rides an exercise bicycle.) All swimmers in Bowman's elite group,
not just Phelps, are expected to swim almost 365 days a year.
Bowman, a former college swimmer, has short, graying hair and a
manner that alternates between stern taskmaster and wisecracking
provocateur. ''Michael's got a pretty easy life,'' he observes, ''if
you don't count the five hours a day of torture I put him through.''
He sometimes refers to Phelps as the Boy Wonder. The relationship
between coach and star swimmer is exceedingly close, forged over
years of shared success and constant proximity, not just together in
Baltimore but during the trips to national and international meets
that Phelps's fast swimming has earned them. There have been some
clashes between them, raw shouting matches on the pool deck, but
fewer of them over the years.
Phelps has grown to trust what Bowman asks of him. When he is
interviewed, he uses the word ''we'' -- we swam about what we
expected to; we'll choose the events we feel we have the best chance
of winning -- as if Bowman is in the water with him. He has
internalized his coach's philosophies, none more so than the complete
immersion in training. ''If you take a day off, it takes you two days
to get back to where you were,'' Phelps says. ''That's two days
wasted, and you can never get those days back.''
It is more illuminating to watch Phelps work out than compete, and to
see that his utter hatred of being defeated (after his loss to
Crocker in 2003, he put up his rival's picture in his bedroom) even
extends to practice. The North Baltimore Aquatic Club is one of the
most powerful teams in the U.S. It sent 12 swimmers to the Olympic
Trials, including Kevin Clements, 24, who was ranked second in the
U.S. behind Phelps in the 200 individual medley, and Katie Hoff, a 15-
year-old who seems poised to become the nation's next female swim
star. Practices consist of hour upon hour of interval training broken
up into ''sets'' -- for example, 20 repetitions of 100-meter
freestyles, with perhaps 30 seconds of rest in between. The sets are
fast because Bowman does not see the point of practicing slow
swimming. Over the course of several months of observing practices, I
never once saw Phelps let Clements, or anyone else, beat him to the
wall. His focus never wavered, his thirst for training never
flagged. ''I hate to lose in practice,'' Phelps told me. ''If
somebody touches me out at the wall, it puts me in a bad mood.''
A practice can be numbingly tedious. Swimmers resting between
intervals keep up running conversations, ones that stop when they
push off the wall then pick right back up during the next snippet of
rest. They tell jokes, squirt each other with water. The N.B.A.C.
team ranges from girls in their early teens, through a core of post-
college men who gravitated to Baltimore to swim with Bowman and
Phelps, all the way up to 31-year-old Marianne Limpert, a three-time
Olympian from Canada.
Phelps is quite skilled at handling his status and fame within this
tight group. When they travel for meets, he shares a hotel room like
everyone else, even though he could well afford his own. If he is the
first to wake up, his roommate can count on Phelps rousing him with
the whack of a pillow. He flies coach class with the rest of the team
and plays cards, and only occasionally on very long flights upgrades
to first class so he can stretch out. ''Before I started training
with him, I had of course heard about Michael,'' says Limpert, whom
Phelps calls Granny or Grandma. ''I thought he would be this swim
automaton, you know, a really humorless person. But he's a really
good teammate. He pays attention to other people. He knows when
somebody needs encouragement. He jokes around. Most of the time, to
tell you the truth, he's just this big goof.''
But never in the pool. He doesn't keep up those running conversations
during practice. ''The people I train with, they know that I'm not a
person to talk to during a set,'' he says. ''I'm not a person for
someone to come to the wall and say, 'Hey, how was your day?' When it
comes to a set, I'm there to do a job. I'm in a mode, and I'm going
to focus on that.''
During long-distance sets, Phelps, like many swimmers, sings to
himself -- whatever song he last heard in the car. But during faster
sets, he does not sing; he concentrates on form and speed. He knows
his previous best practice times and competes against them. One
morning I saw him swim under 23 seconds in a 50-yard butterfly from a
push-off start, rather than a dive off the racing blocks. He reacted
as if he had just won an big race. ''I felt like I probably went 23,
but I went 22.8, which was amazing,'' he said. ''I was really happy
about that.''
Phelps turns everything into a competition. A constant concern for
him and all his teammates is ingesting enough calories to replenish
what they have burned in the pool, and even that is turned into
something he can win at. He eats at a local diner after morning
practice, not particularly healthfully, just a lot: fried egg
sandwiches, double orders of sausage and grits; big stacks of
chocolate chip pancakes. He and his teammate Cory Knopp, 17, a
promising distance swimmer, have contests to see who can eat the
most. ''But I never win,'' Knopp says. ''There's no way he'll ever
let me beat him.''
ike all child prodigies, Phelps never seems his actual age. In the
pool, he is a full-grown man and then some. Out of the water, he is
in many ways younger than his 19 years -- a boy in a chlorine bubble -
- obsessively monitored by adults. It is all completely
understandable and defensible. Phelps's mission, perhaps his ultimate
purpose in life, is to show what is humanly possible in the realm of
water. How sad would it be, what a stupid waste, if he wrecked the
Escalade one late night and suffered an injury that wiped out his
Olympic Games? Or, another low-level anxiety: what if someone slipped
a banned substance into his water bottle, and the boy fueled by
pancakes and sausages got disqualified from the Games for some kind
of steroid? He is constantly reminded: Don't drink out of any water
bottle but your own, and make sure no one else touches it. All the
sentries -- Bowman, his mother, his teammates -- stand a nervous
watch against anything that could spoil four years of meticulous
planning and hard work. A result is that Phelps has traveled the
world but experienced little of it.
He has high-school buddies he hangs with at home -- typically, they
play video games or watch movies -- but will reveal little beyond
that about his social life. (At the 2000 Games in Sydney, he was
asked at a press conference: Do you have a girlfriend and have you
kissed her yet? He wouldn't answer. Last month in Long Beach, Calif.,
he was asked the same thing. Phelps, with a big laugh, said, ''I'm
still not answering.'')
Phelps was raised by his mother, by his two older sisters and, to a
large degree, by Bowman. (He went close to a year without talking to
his father late in high school, and by several accounts their
relationship is improved but still fragile. Fred Phelps, who was a
college football player, is expected to be in Athens.) With his
single mother working, it was Bowman, 39 and unmarried, who would
drop Phelps off at school after morning practice and make certain he
ate the breakfast his mother packed for him. Years later, the coach
taught him to drive a stick shift. Even now, Bowman serves as a
combination of swim coach and hovering swim parent. In cold weather,
he reminds Phelps that the back steps to his home get icy, so he
should watch his step. He cautions him to drive carefully. No swim
detail is left to chance. At the Santa Clara meet, Bowman told Phelps
between two tightly scheduled events: ''Michael, you've had enough of
the PowerBar. Now drink some of the Gatorade.'' When the evening
turned chilly: ''Michael, get your parka on.''
''I don't feel like a father figure because I've just tried to be his
coach,'' Bowman says. ''But realistically, yes, we've been a lot
closer than most coaches and swimmers, and a lot of that has been by
necessity. But I really am trying to give him his space, so he
doesn't have to worry about me checking up on him. But let's face it,
I probably have an interest in that because we've come this far, and
I want to see all this work.''
Debbie Phelps had no problem agreeing to the intense training regimen
that Bowman proposed when her son was 11. She is personally
conservative, someone who says she believes that a child with free
time will tend to find bad things to fill it with. Even now, whenever
it is suggested to her that Michael may have ''missed'' something,
she reacts incredulously. ''Like what?'' she said to me at one
point. ''Like he missed some of the things that teenagers get into in
this country? I don't feel bad about that. There was always a
balance. He went to basketball games. He went to football games. He
had friends. He was a normal kid. But he always came home early and
got his sleep and went to practice the next day.''
Debbie Phelps says there was a period when Michael resisted the high
level of training. He did not want to do ''doubles'' -- days of
morning and afternoon practices. So in order to persuade him, she
enlisted her daughter Hilary's male teammates from the University of
Richmond, young men her son idolized. ''They made him understand that
the more practices he did, the better it was going to make him,''
Debbie Phelps says. ''It was going to broaden his horizons.''
Earlier this year, Bowman accepted one of the top jobs in swimming,
head men's coach at the University of Michigan. He will leave
N.B.A.C. after the Olympics and move to Ann Arbor. No one can imagine
Phelps and Bowman apart, and they probably won't be: Phelps expects
to train and compete with Club Wolverine, a private team that Bowman
will also coach. (Because all serious swimmers train year-round, it
is common for a coach to lead both a college team and a club team
that includes his college swimmers, in their off-season, and older
post-collegiate swimmers.) Phelps plans to take classes at Michigan
and perhaps to serve as a volunteer assistant coach for the college
team. Everyone agrees that it will be time for Phelps's life to
change a bit, although no one's quite sure what that will
mean. ''He'll get some separation from Baltimore, which is what he
needs,'' Bowman says. ''We'll get to the point where we'll work on
the swimming part, but he'll also have a life because this has to
stop at a certain point -- where there's everybody around him, and
everybody knows what he's doing every minute of every day. It's not
normal.''
It has, however, been the only life possible given the task at hand.
Though Phelps, barring injury, is likely to be a top swimmer for the
next decade or more, he may never be in better shape or better
prepared than he is now. Never will his life and mind be cleared of
all but what is relevant to swimming. Even if Phelps himself does not
yet know it, those around him understand that the last four years
probably cannot -- or at least should not -- be repeated.
he last time I sat down with Michael Phelps for an extended
conversation was late last spring, above the pool at Meadowbrook in a
little room normally used for baby-sitting. He used to romp in this
room while his sisters practiced, but now he uses it to conduct his
interviews. The swim world, at that moment, was obsessed with knowing
his plan. What events would he swim? Which would he drop from his
program? Whose gold medals and glory did he threaten, and who, by his
absence in a certain event, still had a chance to shine? But rather
than announcing his plans, Phelps let everyone wait and worry. ''Why
do they have to know?'' he said with a smile. ''Wouldn't it be better
for them just to concentrate on their own events and not worry about
what I'm doing?''
Swimming prides itself on being a genteel sport, and it is. A sense
of camaraderie prevails, a shared bond among athletes who know how
hard they all work, and for so little tangible reward. But every four
years, there is a little more than usual to go around -- a small pot
of money, acclaim and television time -- and the prospect of one man
taking far more than his share is, on some level, profoundly
irritating to Phelps's rivals. (Stu Isaac of Speedo estimates that
about 45 U.S. swimmers make a sustainable income from the sport,
about $30,000 annually, from $1,250-a-month stipends paid by USA
Swimming, small endorsement contracts, personal appearance fees and
bonus money paid out at some meets. Of those, perhaps a dozen of the
biggest stars make $100,000 and up, enough to call swimming a
career.)
In the weeks leading up to the U.S. Trials and the Athens Games,
everyone seemed to be trying to chase Phelps out of an event or
two. ''How can you get the best out of yourself swimming that many
races?'' Grant Hackett, Ian Thorpe's teammate, chimed in from
Australia. Thorpe himself restated his criticism. Aaron Peirsol, an
American and the world-record holder in the 200 backstroke (Phelps is
right behind him), said: ''My goal isn't to take any of Phelps's
glory away. It's just to preserve my own.''
Fierce competitors like to win, of course, and they disdain losing.
But it is also not uncommon for them to enjoy the discomfort they
cause others -- the intimidation, the fear, the gloom of impending
defeat. And Phelps was clearly taking pleasure in this. He wasn't
doing anything, really, just being a little coy, and still, he was
bothering his rivals. If they were that thin-skinned, how would they
be when they got in the pool against him?
Phelps told me a story about when he first moved up to the elite
group at Meadowbrook and began training with -- and going faster
than -- swimmers a half-dozen years older. ''The girls didn't mind
too much, but to the boys, it was like I was on their territory, and
boys don't like that,'' he said. ''I got picked on some. It wasn't
anything big, but I would get frustrated. But it didn't do what they
wanted, which I guess was to make me quit. It just made me swim
faster.''
Phelps's immense talent -- and his range over numerous events and
distances -- continues to put him in others' territories. Thorpe, the
best middle-distance freestyler in the world, had talked of branching
out into other events but has seemed to lose interest with Phelps's
emergence. Ian Crocker, who took Phelps's world record in the 100-
meter butterfly, is such a pure sprinter that he did not even enter
the 200-meter butterfly at the U.S. Trials. (He did qualify for the
Games in the 100-meter freestyle.) Phelps swims freestyle,
backstroke, butterfly and both individual medleys. No one doubts that
if he takes up the breaststroke as a discrete event (rather than just
part of the medleys), as he may after Athens, he'll quickly be world
class at that.
The strategy of Natalie Coughlin, the most dominant female U.S.
swimmer today, was almost the opposite of Phelps's: she entered just
three events at the Trials, passing up two in which she was top-
ranked in the U.S. Her explanation was that she hoped to ''do really
well in two or three events'' rather than ''be mediocre in four or
five.'' No one seemed to mind.
he U.S. Olympic Swim Trials, where Phelps had to qualify for each
event he wanted to swim in Athens, were contested in a glorious
setting, a temporary pool in Long Beach, constructed just a couple of
hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean and ringed each night by close
to 10,000 screaming fans sitting in bleachers that rose high above
the water. At each session of the eight-day trials, sentimental
favorites filled the competition lanes: Jenny Thompson, 31, the most
decorated American female swimmer in history, on leave from medical
school and trying to make one last Olympic team; Lenny Krayzelburg,
28, a Russian immigrant as handsome as a Hollywood star, back from
two shoulder operations and determined to reclaim his crown as the
world's greatest backstroker; Amanda Beard, 22, a former teenage star
who clutched her teddy bear at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, but now
something of a sex symbol who has been linked romantically to Thorpe,
of all people; Tara and Dana Kirk, trying to become the first sisters
ever to qualify for a U.S. Olympic swim team; even Coughlin,
prevented by injury from making the 2000 team and just now, at 21,
hoping to make her first team.
Michael Phelps was far too good to be anyone's sentimental favorite,
and he had no particular story to tell other than that he is a really
fast swimmer who wants to win as many gold medals as possible. A
palpable but unspoken sense that he needed to be taken down a peg
found its public expression in a column that appeared in The Los
Angeles Times just as the Trials began; Bill Plaschke, the paper's
star sports columnist, took aim at Phelps because he had never sought
Mark Spitz's counsel, had not gone out of his way to meet him and had
even had the audacity to refer to him only by his last name. ''That's
Mr. Spitz to you,'' Plaschke wrote. (Plaschke did write a subsequent
column that was much kinder.) The media seemed to want something from
Phelps that he could not yet give: a worldliness, a complexity of
personality, a better up-close-and-personal life story.
Phelps swam six events at the trials -- 400-meter individual medley,
200-meter freestyle, 200-meter butterfly, 200-meter backstroke, 100-
meter butterfly and 200-meter individual medley. In all, a grueling
17 races. (The 400-meter individual medley has no semifinal round.)
The top two finishers in each qualified for Athens, and Phelps
achieved that in every event he entered. But he did not win them all.
He finished second in two races, to Peirsol in the 200-meter
backstroke, and to Crocker in the 100-meter butterfly -- no shame,
since in both races he was up against world-record holders who, in
beating him, lowered their world marks.
But the outcome of the Trials left Phelps with decisions to make. The
weather in Athens will likely be blisteringly hot. And because the
organizers of the Games ran out of time to finish all the Olympic
sites, the outdoor competition pool, intended to have a roof for
shade, will be exposed to the sun. Relays (which were not contested
at the U.S. Trials) will add to Phelps's fatigue. He always knew that
he would have to drop an individual event, but which one?
Crocker beat him fairly decisively in the 100-meter butterfly -- by
0.39 seconds -- but Phelps kept that on his Athens menu and vowed
that in the four weeks between the Trials and the Summer Games he
would improve his starts. (Crocker established his winning margin in
the first 15 meters, then just held Phelps off the rest of the way.)
That left a choice between the 200-meter backstroke -- an event in
which Phelps is ranked second in the world and one that he has
completed in just a little more than a half-second behind Peirsol's
record -- and the 200-meter freestyle, in which Phelps is the top-
ranked American, but nearly two seconds off the world record.
The 200 free had an additional factor to consider: the king of the
event is Thorpe. ''It would work well with his schedule,'' USA
Swimming's Skinner noted, ''but then he would have to face the big
boy, the Big Kahuna.'' That would send some athletes running in the
other direction, but not Phelps (even if he could run). He sat at the
press center podium each night after the Trials, wearing his baseball
cap, slouching and looking, well, kind of goofy. He kept saying that
he could not yet reveal his plan for Athens, but it seemed clear what
he would do. Each time he was asked if he would stay in the 200 free,
he answered, ''I love to race against the best.''
On the final day of the Trials, Phelps made it official: he dropped
the backstroke. (''Phelps, Thorpe in Race of the Century,'' a
newspaper headline declared in swim-mad Australia.) ''One thing I
always wanted to do was race Thorpe in a freestyle event,'' Phelps
said of his decision. ''It's something I haven't had the opportunity
to do so far in my career. . . . I think it is probably the best
opportunity for me to be able to swim in probably the fastest 200
freestyle heat in history.''
It may not have been the wisest strategy -- even Spitz suggested that
if Phelps was serious about seven golds, he would stay away from
Thorpe -- but the Boy Wonder is a true sportsman. Yes, he wants the
big medal haul. And Spitz's record. But what Michael Phelps really
hungers for is something the ancient Greeks would have approved of --
a good, fast race.
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