“… thinking the same thing?”
This wasn’t your typical teenage guy talk. It’s true that good friends listen to everything you say, but best friends also hear what you don’t say. I didn’t really want to be thinking too much about anything that could distract me from swimming, but I missed Amanda. Time for another text message. Or five.
I was still going to be well represented in Athens. My mom was going with both of my sisters and my dad was going, too. I was really pumped to have Whitney there, because she hadn’t been to too many meets. She had been planning to travel to Barcelona, but she had just started a new job and it would have been hard for her to request time off. I was psyched to have everyone there. They had always been there to help create any success I might have in my future. Now, in Athens, they’d get a chance to share in it, too.
23
BAD THIRD, GOOD THIRD
If things seemed surprisingly quiet during the previous trip to Athens a week earlier, it didn’t take long after I returned for me to realize that the Greeks were in full Games mode. I was talking to my Mom on the phone when I looked out of my window and saw a snarling policeman. “Mom, this guy in front of me has an Uzi.” I guess the Games were on.
Things were also noticeably livelier when we got back to the village. The first few days at the dining hall, I ate at McDonald’s. One afternoon, the people working in there asked me for pins, which are the golden currency at an Olympics. Everyone from athletes to coaches to volunteers to fans trades them. Everyone designs their own, from National Olympic Committees to Olympic teams to sponsors and media outlets. We’re talking about thousands of different pins each year, so it is impossible to collect them all. Each of us on the team received a bag of about 50 pins available for trading. As soon as I got to the village, I became a two-time Olympian making a rookie mistake. I gave my bag to one of the ladies at the register. She gave me one pin and then started passing my bag back to other people working in the McDonald’s. I ordered a yogurt parfait and waited for my bag to come back to me. By the time it did, there were two pins left in the bag. I had gotten the worst of the trade. From that point on, every time I walked into or even passed, a shop in the village (post office, barber shop, music store, photo shop), people always asked me for pins and didn’t believe me when I told them I was already out.
The dining hall was a great equalizer for coach and swimmer. Whenever I passed Bob as he was eating, I’d tap him on one shoulder and walk off in the opposite direction. He hates that. Sometimes I’ll make a sudden motion in front of him to see if he’ll flinch. Bob is so wound up, he’s easy prey. Every time I tap him on the shoulder, he looks in the wrong direction; every time I flinch, he flinches. If he drives me nuts for three hours in the pool, I can exact a measure of revenge in about five seconds at lunchtime.
I was rooming with Lenny on this trip and I couldn’t have asked for a better roommate. In fact I did ask for him. Lenny was a team captain and a veteran who won three gold medals in Sydney. More than that, he’s a very positive person and a great teammate who is all ears whenever someone needs anything. He hurt his shoulder after the last Olympics and I think some people doubted whether he’d be able to return to form. When he made the team in Long Beach, you could see the cheers shoot up not only from the stands, but especially from the athletes’ section. I wanted someone around who had a very positive energy about him. Apart from our smackdown games of Madden Football, Lenny was the perfect choice.
When we needed to relax away from the pool, he and I watched DVDs. I watched the four Rocky films and recommended Miracle. I bought some U.S. newspapers to catch up on the exhibition football scores, but I skipped over any stories about me. I’m tired of reading about that guy.
We had a blast with rookie initiation skits. All the first-time Olympians performed imitations of someone, and some of the skits were a riot. Larsen Jensen played Richard Quick, the Stanford coach who always wore his hat a certain way. Carly Piper was Amy Van Dyken, a U.S. swimmer who was on three Olympic teams and made a few enemies by spitting in the lanes of other swimmers. Carly spent the entire skit spitting in different directions. Ryan Lochte played himself, a surfer dude, during a game of Jeopardy, answering some questions right and others wrong, but always answering very slowly. Scott Usher did a takeoff on my VISA commercial, when I swam across the ocean and said, “One” as if I had just completed the first round-the-world lap. The other swimmers asked Scott questions and he always had the same response:
“Michael, how many gold medals do you want to win?”
“One.”
“What number is Team USA?”
“One.”
Katie Hoff, who had recently turned 15, pretended to be a young Amanda Beard. At the 1996 Olympics, when she was just 14, Amanda carried a teddy bear onto the victory podium when she received her medals. Katie carried a mascot with her during the skit.
Katie reminded me a bit of myself four years earlier. She swam at one of NBAC’s satellite pools, so we both represented the same club at national meets. She was also making her Olympic debut at 15, just as I had and she was a great IM swimmer whose best stroke was the butterfly. We were also similar in that we were easy targets for some razzing by older swimmers. I had often been sarcastic with Katie, teasing her about one thing or another, as many veterans did, but in Athens, I saw her at lunch and I think she was surprised when I said to her, “If you ever need anything on this trip, please ask me.”
Katie wanted to stay around after the swimming to see the rest of the Olympics. She could have had fun at the events, but I remember Bob’s warning about the second week at an Olympic village, where people who live like monks for most of the year turn into monkeys. I told her that there would be noise, music, alcohol, and a lot of what we could call room swapping. That isn’t easy for athletes who still have to compete and are trying to get to bed by nine or ten. And it really isn’t a great environment for a 15-year-old. “I don’t want to hold you back from closing ceremonies,” I said, “but going back and getting in the water again after Sydney was the best thing I ever did.” The next day, Katie told her coach, Paul Yetter, that she wanted to go home after she was done swimming.
My family joined me shortly before the Games opened. They didn’t get stuck at the airport for two days, but Whitney did get married (sort of) while she, Hilary and Mom were on a cruise before the Games began. One of the men performing Greek dances came up to her and began doing a wedding dance. He then filled a glass with ouzo and had her sip it, before tilting her arm back so she chugged the drink. Then he placed a towel down on the floor, placed her glass on top of it and spun her around on top of the glass while she squatted down. He asked if she was married, she told him she wasn’t, so he took a string from his shoe and tied it around her finger. Welcome to the family, sir. And what’s your name?
Then on the connecting flight from Frankfurt, a German journalist, sitting next to my mom, asked her if she had any family at the Games. “Yes,” she told him cautiously.
“What sport?
“Aquatics.”
“Which sport in aquatics?
“Swimming.”
“You wouldn’t be Michael Phelps’ mother, would you?
“Yes, I am.”
After that, the man started yelling to someone in the back of the plane, “Hey, this is Michael Phelps’ mother.”
She grabbed his arm and tried to get him to pipe down, but she was kind of trapped at that point. It isn’t the sort of place where you can step outside.
We didn’t have much room, ourselves, once we arrived at the pool. We had a practice that was open to reporters, and the place was loaded with cameras. Tommy Roy, an NBC producer, pulled Bob aside and told him, “This reminds me of when Tiger Woods would do practice rounds before majors. They’re following Michael’s every move.” Later, Bob conducted some mock interviews with me, going over talking points and making me say the answers back to him. “There is a reason,” he told me, “why people can think
twice as fast as they can speak.” Back home, the Baltimore Sun began running a Phelps Fever meter with an arrow that ran from normal to delirious. And to think this was still pretty close to normal.
I was still on a high from my first gold medal, still leaning towards delirious on the Michael Scale when we got ready for the 4x100 free relay on the second day of competition. We had already had two meetings about the race. Gary’s dad, a three-time Olympian like Gary Jr., was reported as saying that he knew who would swim on the relay a week before the race. Eddie called us together four days before to tell us that the people who would swim it would be the ones who could swim the fastest and that he hadn’t determined yet who that was.
Jason was certainly going to be one of the swimmers. Ian, second at Trials, was an obvious choice for another spot. I was there based on performances during the year. But the guy who rocked in the morning was Neil Walker. He swam a 48.16, the fastest of any swimmer from any country during the prelims and faster than Gary’s 48.73 on the morning anchor. Eddie was in a tough spot. He was open for criticism no matter what he did. He decided to go with Ian, me, Neil and Jason in that order. Gary was not happy to be the odd man out, but we four swimmers thought we had a chance to win. It wouldn’t be easy, considering the competition. The Russians were the defending world champions and they had Alex Popov, a great veteran, anchoring their team. The Australians were the defending Olympic champions and they had Ian Thorpe anchoring their team. The Dutch had Pieter van den Hoogenband, the fastest man in the field, anchoring theirs. The South Africans had two of the fastest swimmers in race in Roland Schoeman and Ryk Neethling and were due for a great race.
We had no idea Ian Crocker was sick, that he had been fighting post-nasal drip for the past 24 hours. His first 25 looked okay, but then as he headed for the wall at the 50, it was clear he wasn’t himself. In the lane next to us, Schoeman of South Africa was way ahead of the field coming off the first turn. The problem when you get off the wall behind the other swimmer, is that you end up swimming into the waves they leave behind that bounce off the wall. When Ian fell behind, he not only gave himself some ground to make up, but he also made it harder for himself to get a good push off the wall because he’d have more turbulence splashing back at him as he made the turn. As Ian headed toward me, I was still hoping we would have a chance to get a medal. We were last of the eight teams after 100 meters and our chances to win gold were pretty much gone. I swam into the waves and thought about staying positive. My first 50 was almost a second slower than I had hoped, but I rallied in the last 50. All in all, my relay leg (48.74 seconds) wasn’t great, but it moved us up to sixth. Neil picked off three more teams and Jason kept us in third, behind South Africa and the Netherlands.
We took the relay loss pretty hard, staring at the water with stunned looks on our faces. Ian was talking to himself: “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. It’s my fault.” Ian is very dedicated, but he also gets down on himself very easily. That’s part of being driven to be your best, but sometimes, he doesn’t give himself enough credit. “It’s my fault, guys.” I put my arm around him and tried to cheer him up. “Dude, this is one race,” I told him. “We still have a lot of swimming to go. Remember what happened in Sydney when the Aussies beat us in the relay. Our team came back so strong. We’ll bounce back.” Each of us talked to Ian at some point. We’re a team and we didn’t want one race to affect other races. Ian is very humble and quiet. It’s a testament to how hard he worked that when he was small, he couldn’t get out of the guppy group with his youth club in Maine in the same way that I couldn’t swim unless I was on my back. He has four guitars and knows every song Bob Dylan ever wrote. He thinks a lot, and I was hoping he wouldn’t think too long about this race.
I hated standing on that third-place podium. Hated it, hated it. It wasn’t the fact that we finished third that bothered us, but the fact that we could have done much better.
Third-place finishes aren’t all bad. The next evening we had the finals of the 200 free, the race some people said I shouldn’t try to swim. Why take on something like this with an easier option available? See, if I could be really good at other sports, I’d want to pitch to Barry Bonds, guard Michael Jordan, sidestep Ray Lewis, or stop Wayne Gretzky when they were at their best. I might not succeed, but I wouldn’t want to spend my career training every day without measuring myself against the best. That’s why I wanted to swim this race. I wanted to leave that pool knowing I had swum my best race against my own expectations and against someone I respect as much as Ian Thorpe. The point of competition isn’t always to take the easiest way out, but to meet the biggest challenge. I love it when people tell me I can’t do something, because it fires me up to prove them wrong. I wanted to race Ian in a freestyle event before either of us retired.
I hit the first turn in third place from Lane 3 with Pieter in front from Lane 4, as expected, and Ian second, in Lane 5. I figured Ian would have a better kick than Pieter, who is the fastest at 100 meters. The order was the same after 100 and 150. By then I was a second off the pace, but I could feel myself closing. As Ian passed Pieter in the last 50 meters, Klete Keller started moving on me from Lane 6. I finished the race with the fastest last hundred of the medalists, but as looked up at the board, I knew that I hadn’t been able to catch Ian, in first, or Pieter, in second. My time, 1:45.32, was an American record, faster than I had ever swum it by half a second. Unlike the race in Long Beach, where I felt I could have swum faster, I left it all in the pool against a great field. I went over to Ian right away to congratulate him. He didn’t have much to say, but Bob did once I got out of the pool. “You know that was a great swim,” he said, half asking me and half telling me. I was more than happy to stand on the same podium that bothered me so much the night before. This challenge was personal, and I met it no matter what color my medal was. Honestly I’ll remember that race with as much pride as any individual race I’ve ever swum.
It was hard to get back into the water an hour later to swim the semis of the 200 fly. Stephen Parry of Great Britain touched me out at the wall and was pumping his fists as he left the pool. Okay, I thought, those were the semis. See you tomorrow night.
Try telling reporters that I felt good about my performances.
“Michael how do you feel now that you can’t win seven gold medals?”
“I feel great about my last race.”
“Michael, why aren’t you swimming that well at the Olympics?”
“I think I am swimming well at the Olympics.”
“Why didn’t you go fast tonight?”
“I was happy to set a PR by half a second and break the American record.”
It’s hard to convince people of something if they don’t want to be convinced. Up in the stands, a reporter approached my mom and told her: “The world has left your son tonight.” My mom was taken aback. “Excuse me?” she said. “Well, now that he won’t be able to match Spitz’s record, there won’t be as many people around him. I mean, I’ll still be there, but he won’t have as many reporters to deal with. The hype is over.” Of course my mom had the last word. “Well, the swimming isn’t over,” she said. “Michael isn’t even halfway through his platform. He has a lot to show the world.”
24
A TEAM EFFORT
The day after the 200 free was my only time during the Games when I had to swim two finals on the same evening: the 200 fly and the 4x200 free relay. I went back to the village that night and I was looking straight past the fly to the race our team hadn’t won in eight years. I started talking to Lenny about the splits we needed, and he couldn’t have been more positive. “Mike, I think we can beat these guys,” he said. It was the encouraging voice of a veteran, and I was really starting to believe it.
I didn’t swim in the morning prelims, so I slept in until nine. I went over to the pool, swam an easy thousand, got a massage and kept thinking about the relay.
Bob wanted to see me break the 200 fly world record, but I went out too fast. He
didn’t want me holding back, and he felt the only way to get beat was to let guys get ahead of me, but I was really too aggressive in the first 50. When I had broken the world record in Barcelona, I had gone out in 25.95 seconds; this time I was out in 25.55. I pushed the lead to seven-tenths of a second over Parry, with Japan’s Takashi Yamamoto just behind him. By the time I hit the third wall, both Parry and Yamamoto were starting to gain on me, and I had another bad turn at that wall. The outcome was still in doubt at 170 meters, although I never lost the lead. Over the last half lap, I finally pulled away to finish in 1:54.04, .11 seconds off my world record, but half a second ahead of Yamamoto in second.
Afterwards, I saw Tom Malchow waiting for me at the end of the pool in Lane 8. He had qualified eighth and placed eighth. Typical of Tom, win or lose, he was all class at the finish. The scene was similar to the one we had four years earlier when he told me my time would come. This time, he congratulated me and told me to go spank the Aussies in the relay. Outside the stands, my mom went over to Mr. and Mrs. Malchow to ask them to thank Tom for being a good role model for me.
Bob and I didn’t say much as I rushed through the mixed zone to the warm-down area to get ready for the relay. I swam down for almost 20 minutes, but I couldn’t do much more since we only had 40 minutes between races. Our order for the relay was me, Ryan Lochte, Peter Vanderkaay and Klete Keller as the anchor. I liked the order, because I like swimming from a flat start, which only the leadoff swimmer actually does. We expected the race to come down to a clash between the U.S. and the Aussies, who put together a formidable team of Grant Hackett, Michael Klim, Nick Sprenger and Ian Thorpe.
Before the race, Eddie showed us a tape of the 800 relay final at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. The U.S. had led the dramatic race up until the last leg. In the last 200 meters, Germany’s Michael Gross, the Olympic champ in the open 200 free, spent all his energy to catch American Bruce Hayes in the first 50 meters. At that point, everyone had assumed the race was over. Instead, Hayes stayed with Gross until the last few strokes and passed him back just at the end of the race to give the U.S. team the victory by .04 seconds, about the length of a toe. All of us knew about that race; none of us knew how we would see a modern-day version of it happen before our eyes.
Beneath the Surface Page 20