Sports - Phelps epic journey

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 that included the runners 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, and he has a surgical scar on his right wrist to prove it.
In October he took a nasty stumble that imperiled his pursuit of Mark Spitz's single Games record of seven gold medals. Phelps, 23, slipped on a patch of ice and fell while climbing into a friend's car in Michigan and broke his right wrist.
It made for a tough start to the training cycle that carried him through these Beijing Games, but the climax was perfect. On Sunday morning, Phelps swam the butterfly leg on the 4x100-meter U.S. medley relay that held off Australia in a world record-setting victory, giving Phelps his eighth gold medal of these Games and his 14th over all.
"I wanted to do something nobody ever did," Phelps said. "This goes hand in hand with my goal of changing swimming."
Spitz's record lasted 36 years, and it figures to be even longer before the world sees Phelps's successor. In 1972, Spitz swam two strokes, the freestyle and the butterfly, and none of his swims covered more than 200 meters. Phelps swam all four strokes, at distances ranging from 100 to 400 meters, and faced three rounds in each of his five individual events, one more round than Spitz had.
"I think it's probably one of the greatest things sport in general has ever seen," said Brendan Hansen, who swam the breaststroke leg in the winning relay Sunday. "The shame of it is other athletes aren't going to realize how hard it is. The world is fast in swimming right now. The world was not fast when Mark Spitz did his seven."
How fabulous was Phelps's feat? At the Sunday's start, the Person's Republic of Michael would have ranked fourth in gold medals and been ahead of all but 14 countries in the medal count.
Phelps's longtime coach, Bob Bowman, has been preparing him for this since Phelps made his first Olympic team, in the 200 butterfly, as a 15-year-old in 2000. In the beginning it seemed foolhardy, sending Phelps out to swim 17 races over nine days.
As time went on, one could see Bowman's vision crystallizing. At the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Phelps won six gold medals and two bronzes. Swimming the same program at the 2007 world championships, he won seven golds, missing a shot at an eighth when a relay he would have raced was disqualified in a preliminary heat.
Every time Phelps dived into the water for a final here, the ripples extended into every corner of the Water Cube. On Saturday, Andrew Lauterstein of Australia won the bronze medal in the 100 butterfly. Standing on the medals podium alongside Phelps, Lauterstein said, he was thrilled to have had a cameo role in this recording of history. "I was saying to myself, 'This is pretty special,"' he said. "'Look around and try to remember this moment."'
These Games produced many unforgettable swims. With Phelps contributing to seven, 25 world records fell, 10 more than were broken at the 2007 world championships in Melbourne, Australia.
Not to be overlooked was the psychological component. When one swimmer achieves what was once unthinkable, be it Phelps breaking 1 minute 43 seconds in the 200-meter freestyle or 4:04 in the 400-meter individual medley, it makes every barrier suddenly look vulnerable.
"When you come out and swim fast times, people realize that it can be done," Grant Hackett, a three-time medalist in the 1,500-meter freestyle, said. "You set that bar a bit high and people are going to come with you."
As the meet went on, the otherworldliness of Phelps's performance found expression in other swimmers' tales. In the men's 50 freestyle final on Saturday, 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 on Wednesday, 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.
Katie Hoff came to Beijing billed as the female Phelps because she, too, had qualified in five individual events at the U.S. Olympic trials. After performing well below expectations and collecting one silver and two bronze medals, Hoff said her program had been too ambitious.
"Michael is doing what he's doing," she said, "and it kind of makes the rest of us look like if we don't win a gold medal..." Hoff's voice trailed off.
The individual medley specialist Stephanie Rice, who became the fifth Australian to win three gold medals in a single Olympics, said, "I don't even know how he does it."
Rice, who, like Phelps, competed in the 200 and 400 individual medleys and the 4x200 freestyle relay, became worn down from the stress and got sick. "I just don't even know how he holds himself together," she said.
There was one night when Phelps's spirit felt weak. On Friday night, after winning the 200 individual medley and racing in the semifinals of the 100 butterfly, he said, "I was absolutely to the point of where I was like, 'Oh my gosh."'
Phelps was absolutely to the point of despair after the fracture was discovered in his wrist last autumn. Bowman said that when they talked immediately after the accident, Phelps was as upset as Bowman had ever seen him.
"He was devastated," Bowman said. "He kept saying, 'It's over. I'm finished."'
The bad circumstance ended up doing Phelps a world of good. For a few weeks after the surgery, Phelps was confined to kicking in the pool with a kickboard while his teammates swam. All that kicking strengthened Phelps's legs, which was like a fish growing more gills.
Phelps was already blessed with a killer kick, but his added strength was evident on the turns in his races here and at the finish of the 100 butterfly, his seventh event. In the last five meters, an exhausted Milorad Cavic was dragging his legs while Phelps used a strong kick to get his hands to the wall first, by a hundredth of a second.
With his victory in the 100 butterfly, Phelps tied Spitz's record. Swimming the third leg of the Sunday relay, Phelps propelled the Americans to first place from third, adding to his legend.
As he did Monday in the winning 4x100 freestyle relay, Jason Lezak clinched Phelps's final gold medal with a strong anchor leg. The Americans finished in 3:29.34, 1.34 seconds faster than the previous world record, set by the winning U.S. team at the Athens Games.
With 16 overall Olympic medals, Phelps is behind only the former Soviet gymnast Laryssa Latynina, who has the most, with 18 over three Games.
"This is all a dream come true," he said. "Doing all best times. Winning every race. Everything was accomplished that I wanted to do. It's been one fun week, that's for sure."
Throughout this journey, Phelps has insisted that he was not following Spitz's footsteps but forging his own path. "I want to be the first Michael Phelps, not the second Mark Spitz," he has said repeatedly.
Before traveling here from Baltimore, Phelps's mother, Debbie, received a letter from Barbara Kines, who had taught Phelps in the third grade.
Before he found an outlet for his abundant energy in swimming, Phelps had immense difficulties concentrating and sitting still, leading one of his grade-school teachers to wonder if he would ever be able to focus on anything.
Kines, recalling those days, wrote about how proud she was of Phelps and how, perhaps, it had never been focus he lacked, but, rather, a goal worthy of his focus.