ATHENS – He made certain the last glimpse would be the most unforgettable one, the way the great ones always do. He left the whole world wanting for more, panting for more, and then he gave them an encore outside of the pool that was even more astonishing than anything he could have done in it.
Go ahead and say these aren’t Michael Phelps’ Olympics now. Try and talk about how he leaves these Games a failure because he didn’t pull a Spitz out of his Speedos, because he didn’t get to seven golds, because his marketing people set him up to fail.
Fail?
Did you see him cover those last 15 meters in the pool last night? Did you watch him blaze a path through the Olympic Aquatic Center’s waters, gaining on the field in astonishing chunks and splashes? Did you see him reach for the wall? And did you see his reaction when the scores went up, when the results were official, and when all the world could see he’d won the race by four-hundredths of a second?
Fail?
Did you see what he did when race was over, the way he made eye contact with Mark Spitz, the way Spitz flashed him four fingers – for four individual golds, one Spitz record Phelps [ital] did [ital] manage to equal – and the way Phelps returned the gesture? Did you see the way he consoled his chief rival, Ian Crocker, in the pool, on the medal stand, during their glorious victory lap around the deck?
And then, in a stunning show of sportsmanship, in the press conference later on, when he announced he’d be giving up his butterfly spot in today’s 400-meter medley relay, one he won fairly and squarely and by four-hundredths of a second, so that Crocker could get a chance to win gold?
If anything, on one remarkable evening, in the space of two remarkable hours, Michael Phelps proved that he was worthy of all of the Olympic ideals this country placed in his 19-year-old hands at the start of the Games.
Think about the impossible burden strapped to his shoulders a week ago, and look at him now: unless something goes terribly wrong tonight, Phelps will take six gold medals away from Greece. He will take eight medals overall, and only one man in history in any sport has ever hoarded as many. And then, improbably, impossibly, he gave us more.
He gave us a 100-meter butterfly race for the ages, finishing off one of the greatest comebacks of our sporting time, making like a combination of Bobby Thomson and Bucky Dent as he slithered past Crocker, who’d beaten him in this race a year ago and whose image had been taped to Phelps’ bedroom wall ever since.
“I thought it was over,” Phelps’ coach, Bob Bowman, said. “I’d already turned away.”
But the great ones grab you by the collar, they insist that you sit and watch them to the very end, no matter what. So it is with Phelps. The great ones also know how to surprise you, how to add a twist to the storyline. So that is with Phelps, too.
Sure, you can be cynical. You can wonder aloud if Phelps would ever have been as magnanimous if he’d still had a chance to tie or surpass Spitz, or if he hadn’t already helped the relay team qualify, and of course the answer is no. But that’s beside the point. This could have been one last victory lap for Phelps, one last night when it all would have been about him.
Instead, he wanted it to be about the team.
Fail?
Name another athlete who ever got more out of the Olympic experience than Michael Phelps. Ever.
