Next I went to Indianapolis for our World trials, not knowing what to expect in my new events. I swam the 400 free on the first day and by the end of the night I was in as much pain as I had experienced in a race. None of the top swimmers were in my morning heat, so I reacted to the lead I had and almost didn’t qualify for finals. Unfortunately, I overreacted at night and did the opposite. I didn’t mean to take it out as fast as I did, but I was ahead of world-record pace at 50, 100, and 150. That was too fast. It felt like knives were digging into my arms on the last lap. I finished in 3:55.70 and qualified for Worlds, but I was whupped.
The next night I won the more familiar 200 free in 1:46.44 at a much more comfortable pace. Bob said he was happy with it because I hadn’t been able to train at a hundred percent after the Olympics, but I wasn’t satisfied with being a second off my PR. I was warming down when I heard that Aaron had lowered his world record in the 100 back from 53.45 to 53.17. I gave him a high-five and realized how far away I felt from being able to break them myself.
On the third day, I raced Ian again in the 100 fly final. It started out as a typical contest between the two of us. Ian took a strong lead at the first wall and I came back on him at the end. Either of us could have won the race easily if we had hit the wall right, but we both jammed at the finish, causing us to lose time. I barely out-touched him in 51.34. I still didn’t have a PR in Indy, but it was the first time since I returned to racing that I didn’t think about my back injury.
I was feeling more like myself, really gunning for a best time in one of my last few races. On Day 4, I finally got it in the 100 free, holding off Jason Lezak at the wall in 49.00. To be fair, Jason had been away from training, too, for most of the winter and wasn’t in shape to challenge his American record, 48.17, but even a PR of .05 for me felt like a mile. I came back an hour later and won the 200 IM in 1:57.44. The time was okay, but I felt I could have gone faster. Afterward, Bob told me he thought I should drop the 200 back on the last night. I sort of felt I wanted to swim it because things were starting to go well again, but with the 100 and 400 frees on the program, we felt I’d be better off skipping it.
Sometimes I get invited to strange events: pool parties, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, Eagle Scout ceremonies, even a Halloween party at the Playboy Mansion (I didn’t go). But in 2005 I was invited to be a judge at the Miss USA pageant at the Hippodrome Theater in Baltimore. Well, let’s see, April 11? I just happened to be free on that day. The judging panel included fashion designer Pamela Dennis; model Ksenia Maksimova; beauty expert Frederic Fekkai; fellow Olympian Sugar Ray Leonard, host of The Contender; Brody Hutzler from Days of Our Lives; supermodel Molly Sims; and Raj Bhakta, a contestant on The Apprentice. We judged the contestants in three categories: evening gown, interview, and swimsuit, with the winner going on to the Miss Universe pageant in Bangkok. When you swim every day, it usually gets pretty routine hanging out with people in swimsuits, but, well, this wasn’t so bad. I gave my highest marks to North Carolina’s Chelsea Cooley, who ended up winning the contest. She came off as very composed and confident and I felt better after the announcement, because many of the other judges knew this world better than I did. So I was relieved that I wasn’t alone in my selection. We weren’t allowed to talk to the women before the competition, but I did meet a few of them afterward and have stayed in touch with one of them. (No rumors, please. We’re just email pals.)
I was back in Indianapolis in early June for six events in three days at the Counsilman Classic. I was six-for-six in two frees (100 and 200), two IMs, and two butterflys, but I really wasn’t satisfied. Then in late June, I won six races at the Santa Clara Grand Prix meet. I got smoked by both Jason and Canada’s Brent Hayden in the 100 free and didn’t feel good about the lead-in to the World Championships in Montreal. I was feeling more tired at the ends of races and meets, I wasn’t turning any better than I was the years earlier, and I went through another multi-race meet without a best time. My biggest meet of the season was just a month away.
In the meantime, I was fortunate enough to win an ESPY Award for Best Male Olympic Performance. I love going to the ESPYs, even if only to mingle. One year I met Shaquille O’Neal at the ESPYs and I have never felt so short in my life. It’s been a long time since I stood next to someone nearly a foot taller. I also remember the year LaDainian Tomlinson, the great Chargers running back, told me, “Seriously, dude, I can’t even swim.”
Of all the other athletes I’ve met in other sports, I don’t think I’ve ever talked to anyone more down to Earth than Peyton Manning, the Indianapolis Colts’ quarterback. We talked for 90 minutes about everything from our sports to our families. Years before Peyton led the Colts to a Super Bowl championship, the team used to play in Baltimore. So we talked about some of the old Colts players and about some of the current Ravens. He told me the Ravens have one of the toughest defenses to play against. “I do nothing but watch tape for a week before we play you guys,” he told me.
At the World Championships, I was looking forward to facing Ian Thorpe and Grant Hackett in the longer freestyles. Ian was still the man in the 400 free, but I was convinced I could do another best time in the 200 and test myself against the best again. I was disappointed to find out that Ian was planning to skip the meet and take the year off. Not only that, but Pieter van den Hoogenband, who finished second to Ian, had to miss the meet because he was recovering from hernia surgery. The 200 free in Athens was a very satisfying race for me, even though I didn’t win it. I managed to swim a best time and I really think having Ian and Pieter there to pull the rest of the field through helped me get that best time.
Then again it was pretty clear from the first day that I wasn’t prepared for the 400 free. I was able to fight through that race at trials, but not in Montreal. I had never failed to make the final of an individual race since I had started swimming at the elite level, but I fell apart at the end of the qualifying heat. I wasn’t in pain, so much as I just wasn’t moving. My back was fine, but I wasn’t sure about my brain. I had never just shut down the jets at the end of a race, so this might have been the worst race of my career. Bob stared at me after I got out of the pool. He didn’t say much—“Well, that wasn’t too good, was it?”—probably because he knew I had to swim a leg in the 4x100 free final later that evening.
Between sessions, I went over to wish Grant well in the final, which I figured he’d win. He wished me luck in the relay, but joked that his “mates” would need it more. By that he meant that he knew I’d be pretty fired up for the next race. Sure enough, the relay went much better. We got some revenge from our third-place showing at the Olympics. I led off, followed by Neil Walker, Nate Dusing, and Jason Lezak. We ended up winning pretty easily with Canada nearly three seconds behind in second. Without Ian to swim a great anchor like he had in Sydney, the Australians finished another second back in third place.
The newspapers let me have it the next day. One headline read: “Phelps Flop.” David Stubbs, a columnist for the Montreal Gazette, swung the hardest. “Visitors to the World Aquatics Championships the past week have been wondering why the city of Montreal has lifeguards posted around the pool,” he said. “Any chance you saw Michael Phelps struggle home over the final two laps of his 400-meter freestyle heat yesterday? The U.S. superstar was breathtaking in the worst way imaginable, failing to make the eight-man final, while looking like a weary age-grouper.”
Of course, when I started winning races later in the week, I was either out of the headlines or the headlines were smaller, but that’s how the media business works sometimes. It’s news when somebody who isn’t expected to win does, and it’s news when someone who is expected to win doesn’t. You get more credit for being on the way up and near the top than you do for actually staying at the top if people expect to see you there. It’s like you get extra credit for being the underdog.
I wanted to get back to swimming finals right away, but that day I had only the semis of the 200 free and posted the fastest tim
e. I was really proud of the way Katie bounced back and handled her second big meet. A year earlier, she came to Athens with big expectations, missed the 400 IM final (and got sick after the race), and finished seventh in the 200 IM. This time, she swam an almost perfect 200 IM, leading wire-to-wire and breaking an American record. You could tell Katie had learned from her experience in Athens.
Katie has really become one of my better friends on the team, almost like a little sister, and, well, who can you pick on if you can’t pick on your little sister? We like to play what we call the dollar game. One of us will challenge the other about some random fact and if that person can’t answer, we’ll say, okay, cough up a buck. The question I ask if I want to stump her is an odd one. I’ll wait until she sits down, then ask her what the color of the wall behind her is. Works every time.
We actually first met when she was 10 and I was 14. I had just swum a national qualifying time and she came up to ask for an autograph, “because you’ll be the best.” I was kind of stunned, so I scribbled MIKE PHELPS on a program and told her, “You too, someday.” We have a lot in common besides our backgrounds at NBAC. We both made our first Olympic teams at 15 and we both swim the IMs and butterflys. She was once afraid of the water just as I was, so much that her mother even washed her hair as little as possible. Katie’s mom had been a great basketball player at Stanford and maybe that’s where she picked up that critical ingredient to success: a total disdain for losing. There’s a good story about the time Katie hosted a party for some teammates. Afterward, Paul Yetter, Katie’s coach who’s done a great job with her, asked a general question about the party. She said the party had gone horribly wrong, because she had lost at cards all night. Never mind that the rest of the party was fine. Katie just didn’t like to lose.
Neither did I. The next day, Dave Salo, our team’s head coach, was using a poker analogy to help me forget about the 400. Just think about having an ace-king in Texas Hold ’Em and losing to a guy who has an eight-three. For those not familiar with the game, a player with an ace-king has a huge advantage over a player with an eight-three. But the night of the 200 free final, I swear I didn’t see anyone or hear anything. The phrase “tunnel vision” is way overused, especially in sports, but I was concentrating so clearly on what I had to do. I still made mistakes in the race. My start wasn’t great and I jammed my last turn, as usual, but I was ahead of world-record pace at 100 meters and I finished first in a PR 1:45.20, a second ahead of Grant.
I had a tough double a day later, with finals in both the 100 free and 200 IM. I wanted to get my freestyle under 49 seconds, but I knew I’d have to be a lot faster to be anywhere near the lead. If I could just get off to a good start, I felt I could stay out of the wake of the other swimmers and not eat their splashes that came off the wall. So much for Plan A. I got out too slow and was last at the turn. I came back okay, but passed only one guy. Italy’s Filippo Magnini won the race in 48.12 seconds. I finished seventh in 48.99.
In the ready room afterward, Ryan was pumping me up for the IM by saying, “let’s go one-two, just like Athens.” I didn’t get out as well as I wanted. Laszlo Cseh was slightly ahead of me at the hundred. I swam a good breaststroke, which is not one of Laszlo’s strengths and grabbed the lead heading into the freestyle. If I could point to one area that had improved during the year, it was definitely the free, and I was able to extend my lead into the final wall, winning the race in 1:56.68. I pumped my fist after the race, but it was as much from relief as elation. I was still seven-tenths off my record. Laszlo was a second back, just touching out Ryan for silver.
I had another quick turnaround the next day, with just 30 minutes between the semis of the hundred fly and the final of the 800 free relay. My fly time (52.02) was second best in the field, but it was almost a full second behind Ian (51.08), who looked like he was heading for another world record. We had the exact four guys on the relay who rocked the house in Athens (me, Ryan, Peter, and Klete) and it was our first chance to swim together since the Olympics. Even with our victory in Athens, the Aussies had owned this event for many years, winning every world title since 1982; so I really wanted to take it on my shoulders to get us off to a good start. My leadoff split was 1:45.51 and kept us ahead of the field. Ryan and Peter kept us ahead of record pace and Klete shook off the rust from his layoff to bring us home in 7:06.58. It wasn’t a world record, but it was three seconds faster than the Canadians, four seconds faster than the Australians, and a satisfying way to end a long day. I slept during the whole ride back to the hotel.
Of course when I woke up, I was already thinking about racing Ian in the fly the next day. He was swimming so well, in top form, and I should have known this wouldn’t be like the final in Athens. Ian killed it, just nailed it. He swam a 50.40 and beat me by more than a second. Typical of Ian, he didn’t react much after he hit the wall. Then again, the rest of us were still busy swimming. I knew this was Ian’s best race, but the improvements he made during the year really highlighted to me the improvements I hadn’t made. I tried to be positive when I talked to the press after the race, but when I saw Bob afterward, I told him, “I want to put a bag over my head.” Bob then looked at me and said: “Me, too.” It was a wake-up call, a slap in the face. I had a lot of work to do. Ian was on another planet in the fly, Ryan was getting better every day in the IM, my two new races turned up two bad results, and I honestly felt that after setting records every year, I had practically stood still for 12 months.
I came back the last morning to swim in a prelim for the evening’s medley relay. Because I swam in the heats and because we won the final, I received a fifth gold medal for the meet. But watching the team win felt nothing like watching in Athens. I felt like my mind was in quicksand, along with my swimming. In my head, I kept replaying the meet and everything that had happened since Athens. It was far from a highlight reel. I needed something to take my mind away and, fortunately, that’s where family comes in.
30
NEW FAMILY, NEW PLACES
I hadn’t seen much of my mom during the week, because, as usual, my focus remained on the pool. She and Hilary were acting a little strange and I knew it wasn’t just my fatigue that was making me think so. It turned out Whitney had gotten engaged and the wedding wasn’t far off. There is a pattern here of me learning about engagements and weddings right after major swim meets. Anyway, this news made me feel much better than the bombshell in Sydney. Whitney was marrying Bob, a manager with Enterprise Rent-a-Car and a great guy who I could talk football with. Bob, repeat after me: “Go Ravens.” Okay, welcome to the family.
For several months leading up to Worlds, cameras followed the Phelps and Crocker camps intensely for a DVD about our rivalry called Unfiltered. The DVD looked at both of our lives in and out of the pool. You see Ian fixing cars and playing Bob Dylan songs on his guitar and you see me playing a lot of video games. You see the somewhat neglected pool where Ian first started swimming, and grow to appreciate the dedication it took for him to get to where he is now. There are even interviews with my sisters, my mom, my prom date, and my dad, who gets emotional about the way our relationship dissolved over the years. The film appeared at a special screening in Montreal before the championships and later at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York. It was weird looking up at the screen in a big theater and seeing … myself.
We had our summer nationals in Irvine a week after Worlds and I really wanted to salvage the year by breaking a world record. I pretty much knew the 400 free was history—at least at a future Worlds or Olympics—and I was eager to get back to swimming the 200 fly. I was on record pace until the last 30 meters, then faded at the end. My time, 1:55.26, was second-fastest in the world in 2005, but to me it was just another effort that fell short, this time by more than a second. I took off my cap, flung it in front of me, turned around, and slapped the wall in disgust. I don’t usually do that and it isn’t something Bob approves of, but I was ticked. I remember thinking: Bob is going to drop a bomb on me.
He’s going to put a hurt on me in training. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I knew I needed it. I was still only 20 and I refused to believe that my best wasn’t still ahead of me.
With the Beijing Games still three years away, I went on my first trip to China with the Octagon team in September. I had signed a contract with Matsunichi, a Hong Kong-based electronics company that was gaining momentum in the marketplace by coming up with a lot of cool products like cameras and MP3 players that could probably keep me occupied for a week straight without sleep. I went to the Olympic city and also made a detour to Hong Kong during the visit. I definitely wasn’t prepared for the initial reception. Almost as soon as I left the plane, people presented me with flowers and gifts. It was extremely hot, but very dry. I felt as if I should be sweating, but I couldn’t because of the dry air. In Hong Kong, I got out of a taxi and saw this giant billboard featuring me in an ad for Omega.
We were welcomed at a reception dinner with the chairman of Matsunichi. The menu went a little beyond franks and burgers: heads of jellyfish, gills of eel, soup of bamboo shoots, and a salad made of flower petals. You know the familiar feeling of facing unfamiliar food? This was new territory, although I have to say I could have eaten about six helpings of Peking duck.
Beneath the Surface Page 24