SBNation.com - Over And Out: Michael Phelps Leads USA To Gold In Final Race

Slave To The Black Line: How The Greatest Swimmer Became Human

2012-08-06T16:37:12Z

Two months after his 15th birthday, Michael Phelps finished fifth in the 200 butterfly at the Sydney Olympics. In the ensuing 12 years, he flirted with history in Athens, got arrested for DUI at 19, won a $1 million bonus from Speedo for sweeping eight golds in Beijing, and earned a three-month ban from the sport for taking a hit from a bong.

But he was never human until London.

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It starts as a way to get you out of the house. Soccer doesn't start until September, and tee-ball ends in June, so Mom and Dad send you to the pool for the summer. As a kid, swim practice doesn't seem so bad. You learn the strokes, you go back and forth, you goof off. On Fridays you play Sharks and Minnows, trying to cross the pool underwater while your lungs burn for air.

Of course, Phelps was always a person -- human in the sense that he is made of flesh and blood, human in that he has always been beatable. Even in 2008, he achieved the epic sweep of gold medals only by the slimmest of margins: he needed Jason Lezak's brilliant final leg of the 4x100 freestyle relay to beat the French by less than a tenth of a second, and his gold in the 100 fly was by the thinnest 100th of a second. Nevertheless, prior to London, the myth of Michael Phelps overshadowed the person.

That came crashing down last week in the 400 IM.

How did Michael Phelps feel after his 400 IM heat? "Pretty terrible, actually," he told NBC's Andrea Kremer.
— SB Nation Olympics (@SBNOlympics) July 28, 2012

Phelps barely qualified for the final, and it wasn't because he was coasting. "That one didn't feel too good," he said after edging Laszlo Cseh by .07 seconds for the last spot in the final. Banished to the nether waters of Lane 8 for the final, Phelps finished fourth, his first Olympic race that didn't net a medal since he was 15.

The pool becomes a second home, the lifeguards your babysitters. No bath or shower can remove the scent of chlorine from your bronze skin or sun-lightened hair. Once a week, you go to a meet, either in your home pool or in a nearby town that seems impossibly far away, Accokeek or Collinsville or Wildwood, something off the map of your tiny world. Meets last forever: you swim your warm-up in the afternoon heat to the rhythmic buzz of cicadas, compete in your individual events under darkening skies, and shout yourself hoarse during the relays, well after your normal bedtime. After the adrenaline spike wears off, muscles exhausted, you fall asleep during the car ride home. Your unconsciousness isn't sleep as much as a mechanical OFF, batteries charging for the next day's practice.

Phelps has always hated the 400 IM; he declared that he would never swim it again four years ago after winning consecutive golds in the event. So why did he enter the race in London? It's likely that he figured dropping the 200 free from his list of events would buy him enough energy to excel in the event, but I think that part of him bought into his own mystique. He is, after all, the greatest Olympic swimmer in history, a human being freakishly shaped -- long build, even longer arms -- for the particular demands of the pool. But the scoreboard tells hard truths, and a face that's new to disappointment doesn't lie.

"Just a crappy race," Phelps said, offering no excuses while dodging the shovelfuls of dirt the media tossed on his grave. Ryan Lochte had taken gold in the 400 IM, and the story was written: Lochte had been flipping tires in Gainesville as part of a grueling regimen to unseat the best in the world, while Phelps, by his own admission, hadn't felt the same desire after his record-breaking performance in Beijing. "You have four years to build up, and you're at this peak, and then you just kind of roll down the hill," Phelps told Matt Lauer. "I literally didn't do anything for six months."

It was chum for aging white sports columnists who prefer snap judgments about effort to perspective or patience. Why, Phelps didn't even apologize to the American people for being only the fourth-best in the world at swimming's most difficult race from the hardest lane to swim in! What a fraud!

You join the year-round club team and swim every day after school. You practice harder for fewer meets and higher stakes. You swim faster and have less fun. Your schedule is four things on loop: school, practice, homework, sleep. Food is inhaled in the car between school and practice, between sleep and school, less a meal than the fuel you need to power through the day's silent wet miles.

The "Lochte as king of American swimming" story line started showing cracks the next night, when Phelps swam the fastest split for the American team in the 4x100 relay, while Lochte, the U.S. anchor, was chased down by Yannick Agnel of France, leaving the Americans with silver.

Lochte and Phelps would next team up to win gold in the 4x200 free relay; it would prove to be Lochte's final win of the Games -- and the first of Phelps's four. Lochte finished fourth in the 200 free, took bronze in the 200 backstroke, then -- just 30 minutes after the back final -- took the silver behind Phelps in the 200 IM for the third consecutive Olympics. As Lochte faded under the physical toll of so many races, Phelps grew stronger.

NBC's Andrea Kremer cornered Phelps poolside: "We've seen how hard it is to repeat; how daunting is the three-peat?"

Phelps began with a drawn-out "Uhhh" as he reflected on the two individual events in which he'd fallen short -- the disastrous 400 IM and the 200 fly, where he earned silver after getting out-touched -- then let out an exhale that was almost a chuckle. "Well, I mean, I already failed twice at the beginning of the meet, so... definitely something that's very challenging."

Practice is terrible -- just you and the black line beneath you, back and forth, flip turn to flip turn to flip turn to rest. Swim-kick-pull warm-up, then pyramids or ladders or fartleks or some awful interval training that punishes lack of effort. But in the end, it's all just back and forth. No scenery, no music, nothing but your stroke and your breath and whatever fills your mind to pass the time until the next chance to rest. You never play Sharks and Minnows any more.

Throughout that Kremer interview and those that would follow his next two races -- gold in both the 100 fly and 4x100 relay -- Phelps's smile revealed something deeper and more meaningful than we saw in '04 or '08. In Beijing, guided by the mission for eight golds, every victory whoop felt like a step towards a magnificent and inevitable greatness. There was no past or future, only his invincible present.

Not so in London. Phelps left whatever disappointment or failure he experienced during the 400 IM in the water when he climbed out of the pool. And what emerged from Lane 8 wasn't Michael Phelps: Unfeeling Swimming Machine, but Michael Phelps: Grateful Human. If Beijing was a present absent of past or future, Phelps's final races in London combined all three tenses. With every additional gold, Phelps seemed caught between several desires: to reminisce about his career, to savor the fleeting moment, and to dismantle the suspicion that he'd return for the 2016 Games in Rio de Janeiro.

After his final Olympic race, 100 meters of butterfly that gave Team USA a lead it wouldn't relinquish in the medley relay, NBC's cameras caught Phelps looking at the pool as he walked away a final time.

A second later, his teammates embraced him, and the moment ended. But for a few frames on my television, Michael Phelps's face showed everything: wistfulness, satisfaction, remembrance... He looked like a man giving one last look to a loved one, acknowledging a final goodbye.

School's out, but you're waking up two hours earlier for the outdoor season. Practice starts in early June, at dawn, in a pool filled with tens of thousands of gallons of water fresh from a spout with only one setting: cold. On the first day, no one wants to get in. Shivering in a Speedo in the cool morning air is preferable to the icy misery and wet exhaustion that awaits you. Eventually, you take a running start and dive in and wonder why you do this.

It gets harder to dive in every year.

Michael Phelps has a life to live. "I wanna go all over the place and visit cool cities," the 18-time gold medalist tells Bob Costas, as if he hadn't been to Sydney as a high school student or conquered Athens while still a teenager or made history in Beijing. As if he wasn't giving the interview in a modern metropolis where you can visit a castle that served as a prison 1,000 years ago.

But this is different. This is the life of Michael Phelps, Human. His travels will no longer involve pools or the Olympic Village. He wants to improve his golf game. He wants to dive alongside great white sharks in South Africa with Chad le Clos, the "beautiful boy" who out-touched him in the 200 fly. He wants to go to Rio in 2016 with his mother -- as a spectator.

For the last two decades, Michael Phelps has lived flip turn to flip turn, anchored to the black line below, alone with his thoughts or whatever OCD chant kept his stroke regular. He won 18 Olympic gold medals thanks to biology, talent, and years of hard work. "I don't care what the headlines are. I don't care what anyone else says," he told Lauer. "If I can say my career has been a success, that's all that matters."

He's half-right. His career was a success, but that isn't what matters. The important part begins now.

2012 Olympics, Men's 400m Medley Relay Results: Michael Phelps Gets Gold In Storybook Ending

2012-08-05T01:00:13Z

You'll probably hear something about how Saturday's 4x100m medley relay was the final swim of Michael Phelps' preposterously illustrious career. But lost in the narrative was a very intriguing race for the United States -- thanks in large part to a spectacular leg by Phelps himself.

The United States had pretty much everything going for them on paper before the event. Matt Grevers, Nathan Adrian and Phelps had each won individual golds in the 10- meter versions of their strokes while Brendan Hansen was the black sheep of the team with only an individual bronze in London.

Grevers did his part, by giving the United States a lead both at the 50m and 100m marks, with his 52.58 split putting him .34 seconds up on Japan's Ryosuke Irie -- although it wasn't quite on the pace of the 52.16 that won Grevers gold earlier in the week. However, Hansen was tested by Kosuke Kitajima who turned in a 58.64 second split, which would have been good for silver in the 100m breaststroke event, where Kitajima took fifth. That left Japan by in the lead by .21 seconds with half of the race in the books.

But Phelps was having none of it in his last race. He had nearly caught up to Japan's Takeshi Matsuda by the turn of the fly, and blew past him underwater. He gave the United States a .26-second lead. Yes, in his final race, it was Phelps that gave his team the decisive leg, putting them in first with a leg to go. It just makes sense.

Adrian followed that up with a ridiculous 46.85 split in the race's final leg. (For comparison, his gold-medal winning swim in the 100m freestyle took 47.52 seconds.) Phelps gave him a lead of a tad over a quarter of a second, he touched to finish the race with a 1.91-second lead, body lengths ahead of the competition.

Phelps took the moment to look back on his career, as FINA head Julio Maglione gave him a nice silver trophy to commemorate his career, apparently thinking his 22 medals and 18 golds meant he didn't have enough shiny stuff on his mantle. (He probably has several mantles at this point.)

“I could probably sum it up in a couple words,” Phelps said of his career accomplishments. “I did it.”

“I’ve been able to do everything I’ve wanted,” Phelps said. “I’ve been able to put my mind to the goals that I wanted to achieve. ... If you can say that about your career, there’s no need to move foward.”

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics Hub.

Olympics 2012, Women's 400m Medley Relay Results: Golden Team USA Sets World Record

2012-08-05T00:35:05Z

The United States women's squad weren't going to leave the pool in London without one final gold, so they went out and set a world record in the 4x100 medley relay.

There was no conceivable way to imagine the United States squad wouldn't get gold in the event: MIssy Franklin, Rebecca Soni, Allison Schmitt, and Dana Vollmer had all won gold in their respective 100m individual events, including three world record performances, and here they were on the same relay team. Sure enough, the team's 3:52.05 set a three-year-old record set by a bodysuit-clad Chinese team in the 2009 Worlds by .14 seconds.

The United States trailed -- briefly -- after 50 meters, as Australia's Emily Seebohm beat Franklin across the first length of the pool in the backstroke. But Franklin turned the jets on to take a .49-second lead after 100 meters. Her 58.50 second split wasn't quite as fast as the 58.33 that set a world record in her gold-medal victory, but not bad. The medley was Franklin's fourth gold of the Olympics -- she seems pretty pleased about that:

"I honestly couldn't think of a better way to end it," Franklin said. "It was so perfect in absolutely every way."

Next up was Rebecca Soni in the breaststroke, who extended USA's lead to .79 seconds.

"Tonight it was really special to share it with Dana and with Allison and Missy," said Soni, who won gold and silver in the 200 and 100 breaststroke events. "It was just incredible. I know we were so close last year in Shanghai and to finally get it this year. It just kind of wrapped up the meet so perfectly for the U.S. women’s team."

Vollmer broke the race open after setting the world record in the 100m breaststroke. When she left the pool, the United States led by 2.68 seconds, and could coast to the medal. That left Schmitt -- the last swimmer named to the team -- with the world record as much on her mind as a win.

"I knew the other three girls already had their own world records and I wanted to join the club too," said Schmitt, who will return to school at the University of Georgia this fall after taking a year off to train for the Olympics. "On the last 50 (meters) I was actually kind of thinking about it. I could see we were ahead and I was like, ‘OK, come on, let's go.'"

Schmitt actually lost time against Australia's Melanie Schlanger, who cut the deficit to 1.97 seconds, but the United States had a sure gold, leaving the pool in London on a good note.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics hub. For more on Olympic swimming, follow the 2012 Olympic swimming section.

Michael Phelps, Team USA Win Gold In 4x100m Medley Relay

2012-08-04T19:56:33Z

Michael Phelps went out a winner in the Olympics.

In what he says will be his last-ever Olympic swim, Phelps helped the United States rally to win a gold medal in the men's 4x100m medley relay Saturday night in London. The Americans finished in 3:29.35, beating Japan by almost two full seconds (1.91). Australia won the bronze medal in 3:31.58.

For Phelps, the win just added to his already staggering records: gold medal No. 18, and 22 career medals overall. Perhaps the most amazing stat to put Phelps' dominance into perspective: he now has twice as many gold medals as any other Olympian, ever.

Matt Grevers started for the U.S. in backstroke and gave the Americans a slim 0.43-second lead over Japan after the first 100 meters, turning it over to Brendan Hansen for the breaststroke. Hansen was passed by Kosuke Kitajima, meaning Phelps would have some work to do.

Phelps took to the water for the third leg, butterfly, with a 0.21-second gap to make up -- he wasted little time in making up that deficit, passing Takeshi Matsuda on the turn and giving the Americans a 0.26-lead heading int the final 100 meters.

The fourth and final leg, freestyle, was swam by Nathan Adrian, the 100m freestyle champion at London, and he absolutely blew away the field, swimming an astonishing 46.85 split. By the time he made the turn, the race was no longer a race, but rather just a question of by how much the U.S. would win (the answer was 1.91 seconds).

For the U.S., it's their eighth consecutive win in the event; they haven't lost the medley relay since 1980.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics Hub.

Women's 4x100m Medley Relay: United States Sets One Last World Record In Swimming

2012-08-04T19:39:37Z

In the final women's pool swimming event at the 2012 Olympic Games in London, the United States was once again golden. The U.S. women not only grabbed the gold in the 4x100m medley relay, but set a new world record in the process.

Missy Franklin, Rebecca Soni, Dana Vollmer and Allison Schmitt set the new all-time mark with a time of 3:52.05, beating out second-place Australia by nearly two full seconds to put the exclamation point on yet another dominant Olympiad for American swimmers. Japan finished 3.68 seconds off the pace to claim the bronze in the event.

All told, this was the eighth gold medal for the U.S. women's swim team in the 2012 Olympic Games and makes 14 swimming medals total for the women in London.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics hub. For more on Olympic swimming, follow the 2012 Olympic swimming section.

Men's 1500m Freestyle Final: Sun Yang Sets New World Record For China

2012-08-04T19:06:05Z

Saturday's final of the men's 1500m freestyle was an enthralling 14 minutes and change. In the end, Sun Yang smashed his own world record by over three seconds to take home the gold medal for China. Connor Jaeger of the United States came in sixth and failed to medal.

The overwhelming favorite in the longest pool swimming event at the Olympic Games nearly got disqualified before the race even began. Just before the starting buzzer, when the swimmers were up on their blocks, Yang dove into the pool early. The scare only lasted a few moments, as the officials determined the false start was a result of crowd noise and not the fault of the swimmer, thus not necessitating a disqualification.

As the race began, Canadian swimmer Ryan Cochrane and Taehwan Park of Korea both kept pace with Yang, but Yang opened up a lead in short order and remained under the world record split for the duration of the grueling race. Yang held a lead of several lengths and sprinted the last two lengths of the pool to capture the gold and set the new world record at 14:31.02. Cochrane took the silver, finishing nearly nine seconds behind Yang. Oussama Mellouli of Tunisia captured the bronze.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics hub. For more on Olympic swimming, follow the 2012 Olympic swimming section.

Michael Phelps To Swim Butterfly For Men's 4x100m Medley Relay

2012-08-04T19:00:05Z

Saturday's men's 4x100m medley relay will provide a bit of Olympic history: it marks the final swim ever from Michael Phelps. And if all goes according to plan, he'll further his records with medal No. 22, and his 18th gold.

For the United States, here's the relay order they'll go with: Matt Grevers (back), the 100m backstroke winner, Brendan Hansen (breast), bronze medalist in 100m breaststroke, Phelps (fly) and Nathan Adrian (free), the 100m winner. Team USA, which had the fastest qualifying time (3:32.65) will likely be pushed by Great Britain, Japan and longtime rivals Australia.

It may not be much of a challenge for the Americans. After all, they have won this event in seven consecutive Olympics (their last time not getting gold was 1980).

The men's 4x100m medley relay is set to start at 8:27 p.m. in London, 3:27 p.m. ET.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics Hub.

2012 Summer Olympics: Ranomi Kromowidjojo Wins Gold In Women's 50m Freestyle Final, Sets Olympic Record

2012-08-04T18:52:54Z

The 2012 Summer Olympics continue on Day 8 with the swimming events winding down to a close. On Saturday afternoon, the women took the blocks to compete in the Women's 50m Free. The Netherlands' Ranomi Kromowidjojo was able to best the competition and take home a gold medal with a time of 24.05 for a new Olympic record. Kromowidjojo was part of the gold medal winning 4x100m Relay in the 2008 Games in Beijing, but takes home her first individual medal.

Behind Kromowidjojo, Aliaksandra Herasimenia from Belarus took home a silver medal finishing +0.23 behind Kromowidjojo. Marleen Veldhuis of the Netherlands finished up in third place, taking home the bronze medal and also winning her first ever individual medal in the Olympics.

Kromowidjojo wasn't really challenged in the event, dominating the rest of the field on the way to her first ever Gold.

For more on the Olympics, check out SB Nation's London 2012 Olympics Hub.