In Michael Phelps’ telling, one of the greatest Olympic careers almost began with a skinny dip. It was his first trip out of the country, and he gawked like a tourist — not at monuments or museums — but at the famous swimmers competing in Sydney.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that’s this person, that’s that person, there he is, there she is. This is really cool,’ ” Phelps said in a recent interview, channeling his wide-eyed 15-year-old self at the 2000 Games. “So I was not really focused on what I was there to do.”
He was so distracted, he forgot to tie his suit before the semifinals. While he escaped without a wardrobe malfuction, he also failed to medal.
But Phelps didn’t return to Baltimore empty-handed. Twelve years later, the innocent abroad is now a veritable living legend heading to a fourth and final Olympics and having figured this out: To go big, you have to go small.
“That was something I learned,” Phelps said, “having to prepare myself, make sure I did all the right things and pay attention to all the small things because, in the end, that’s what made the big difference.”
On Saturday, a day after the opening ceremony for the London Games, Phelps, 27, will enter the Aquatic Centre for the first of his seven events. The crowd likely will go insane, fully aware it is bearing witness to the final flourish atop something already quite extraordinary.
Phelps, though, will be somewhere inside his head, in a place walled off by his headphones, the unreadable mask that is his game face and his singular focus. After a bit of housekeeping, toweling off his starting block and making sure the angled push-off segment isn’t loose, he’ll climb aboard.
In the stillness that falls as swimmers and spectators alike anticipate the starting buzzer, Phelps will loosen up by swinging his arms, crossing them first in front, then in back. They are so long and hyperextended that he slaps his own back, a self-flagellation that cracks like a whip in the soon-to-be-broken silence.
And then he’ll take off, slicing through the air — and then the water.
Phelps is an older swimmer now but also a smarter one. Competitors have started to catch and even surpass him, particularly his main rival, Ryan Lochte, determined that London will host swimming’s version of the changing of the guard.
But if Phelps is swimming in vastly different waters these days, it’s because he changed their course. No swimmer has brought more attention, or more big-money sponsorships, to the sport, nor has set the bar as high on what is possible.
As the opportunities to see him race dwindle, each rises in significance for those who collect them like baseball cards in the shoeboxes of their memories.
There are aficionados, for example, of his 200-meter freestyle in Beijing — his coach, Bob Bowman, first among them — who consider it his most technically perfect race. The most recent entry to the pantheon is the 200-meter individual medley in the U.S. trials in Omaha, Neb., where he and Lochte matched stroke for stroke and seemingly breath for breath until Phelps out-fingernailed him to the wall.
“Time slows down for him,” Lenny Krayzelburg said.
Krayzelburg, a four-time gold medalist in the 2000 and 2004 Games, will be in London for his former teammate’s farewell to the sport. Phelps rises to the occasion better than any other athlete he has seen, Krayzelburg said, seizing the moment and controlling rather than submitting to the pressure-cooker atmosphere.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone perform better on the biggest stage of the world than Michael,” he said. “Maybe he has an extra gear.”
Improving with age
Indeed, the wonder of Phelps these days is no longer that of the raw talent who seemed to break world records as a matter of course. It is that, even as an older swimmer who has many more distractions and fewer things left to prove, he still finds a way to win.
Phelps arrived in Omaha last month feeling what he called less “peppy” after six weeks of altitude training in Colorado, and he had gone there directly from a Grand Prix race in Charlotte, N.C., and an Olympic media event in Dallas. In news conference after news conference, he talked about getting off to a slow start in one race, not hitting his turns as powerfully in another, popping up to check out the scoreboard instead of pouncing to a fast finish in yet another.
“It was a pretty crappy first 50” meters, went a typical self-assessment after one race, “and a pretty terrible finish.”
Yet he won that race, the 100-meter butterfly, in which he was sixth in the first lap. In fact, he won every race but one, the 400 IM, and even then, his second-place finish was all he needed to qualify for the event in London.
He always has been a great closer, but now the world is watching to see how Phelps will finish his competitive career. The fact he is opting for a fourth Games, when he could have ridden off into the sunset at the peak of his record-breaking eight-gold-medal sweep in Beijing, both impresses and baffles. What possibly could be left for him?
“I just want to be able to look at it five years, 10 years down the road and say I did everything that I wanted to do,” Phelps said after the trials. “I have goals and things that I want to accomplish. That’s the only thing I’m after right now.”
What those goals are, Phelps refuses to specify. The Phelps of today is something of a cypher — or, at least, a political consultant’s dream. He invariably stays on message, returning repeatedly to the same set of mostly bland generalities. It is no doubt a soul-preserving measure when you’re asked some variant of the same question over and over again, but it also reflects a certain discipline and wariness that Phelps has developed.
After years in the spotlight, whether during his Olympic highs or his personal lows — most notoriously, the tabloid photo of him hitting a marijuana bong — Phelps now tends to deflect personal questions and guards what privacy he can.
But his friends say he is happier these days, compared with when he was more single-minded.
“In the past four years he has mellowed a lot more,” said Allison Schmitt, 22, who has trained with Phelps since she was a high school student in Michigan, where Phelps had moved with Bowman in the years before the Beijing Games. “He already has experienced every possible situation, so he knows how to react to whatever happens.”
“He’s pretty normal outside the pool,” agreed Chris Brady, Phelps’ roommate this past year in Baltimore. “If you came to the house, we would be watching sports or playing video games like any other guys.”
Brady watched from afar, but with particular insight, the brouhaha over swimmer Tyler Clary’s recent takedown of Phelps. Like most, Brady, who trained with both swimmers at the University of Michigan, was baffled that Clary could tell a newspaper columnist Phelps didn’t work very hard and could have accomplished so much more.
Still, Brady said he could see what was behind the remarks.
“It was probably frustration,” Brady said. “I don’t think it’s wrong for Tyler to think he works harder than Michael. Then you mix in not being able to beat him, and the frustration boils over.”
His biggest rival
This year, swim fans have a particularly engaging rivalry to follow between Phelps and Lochte.
Lochte is coming off of a series of wins in international competitions over Phelps, who admittedly lost his focus and drive in the wake of the Beijing Games. But Phelps bested him at the trials, beating him in all but one final, making their two rematches in London, in the 400 and 200 IMs, can’t-miss events.
But if Lochte poses a threat to Phelps’ supremacy, he also seems to have energized him. There is a sense that Phelps might feel the loneliness of being on top and relishes some company, even in the form of a rival.
Neither is much for trash-talking. The closest Lochte gets is saying London is “his” time, and Phelps won’t even go that far.
“Michael doesn’t need to say anything,” Krayzelburg said. “They know they’re racing the best swimmer in the world.”
Phelps will indicate, though, that Lochte made a strategic misstep in the trials by swimming three races in one day. Although Phelps emerged from the trials on track to swim the same eight events in London that he swept in Beijing, he dropped the 200 freestyle in favor of more rest time between the grueling 400 IM on the first day of competition and the 400 free relay on the second.
By now, he has sweated all the details, studying videos of his races to find ways to shave a fraction of a second off a turn or buy one with a faster start. He has swum with his goggles blackened out to make sure he can swim through darkness — which is what happened in the 200 butterfly in Beijing, where water flooded in and blinded him during the final laps.
Still, the Phelps of today is less the single-minded Phelps of the past; they are “like two different people,” Bowman said.
“One was like a machine — well, half-man, half-machine,” Bowman said earlier this year, “and one is like a man.”
The machine didn’t take a single day off from the pool between the ages of 13 and 18, a glutton for the punishing workouts that produced his record gold-medal haul and shattered world records. The man is the one who after 2008 blew off practices for the golf course or the poker table.
The hard-driving Bowman jokes that he liked the machine better. But even he views these final Games as not so much for the record books — Phelps already has filled more than his share of pages — but for the swimmer himself.
“He has worked so hard,” Bowman said. “I’d like him to just enjoy it more.”
