Olympic history: Phelps wins eighth gold medal

Eight gold medals, and nobody’s wondering why. Phelps has been breaking records and a few competitors’ hearts, but he’s earned his medals. As an Aussie, I could wish he’d spend more time on other planets, but you can’t deny the guy’s guts.

The New York Times

It was so surreal to be Michael Phelps here, to listen to people debate whether he is the greatest athlete in Olympic history after he passed a group of athletes including Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi to become the one with the most gold medals.

Phelps is a self-described klutz, a real fish out of water on land, with a surgical scar on his right wrist to prove it. The 23-year-old Phelps took a nasty stumble last October that imperiled his pursuit of Mark Spitz’s single Games record of seven gold medals. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell while climbing into a friend’s car in Michigan and broke his right wrist.

Nobody would have known. The New York Times has eight gold medals proudly perched on its front page, and more coverage than a tarpaulin on an ant, but you’d have to say it’s justified. Phelps took up swimming as part of a cure for hyperactivity. Doesn’t seem to have entirely worked, does it? One thing Phelps has done is also break down the resentment of America’s dominant performances. Nobody doubts he’s that good. He’s a sort of Lance Armstrong of the pool: Impossible, but great. Nobody could say it’s been easy:

As the meet went on, the otherworldliness of Phelps’s performance found expression in other swimmers’ tales. In the men’s 50 freestyle final, the goggles of Eamon Sullivan, the Australian world-record holder, filled with water on his dive and he never recovered, finishing sixth.

In the third of Phelps’s five individual events, the 200-meter butterfly, his goggles were leaking so badly he could not see the ends of the pool. Counting his strokes to gauge where the walls were, he won and shaved six-hundredths of a second off his 17-month-old world record.

The level of expectation Phelps brought with him to Beijing could have killed a horse. Who else was “expected” to win eight gold medals? I think we can say he’s survived not only the hard work but the perils of success, too. Good luck to him.