No Limits

by Michael Phelps

  At 25 meters, halfway down the first length, I saw that Sullivan was already half a body length ahead of me. If I want to have a good split, I thought at the turn, I have got to win this leg.

  Bang-bang-bang. In the relays, you’re in the water and just that fast, you’re out. I didn’t win the leg. I had put us in second place, behind the Australians, and Sullivan. But I knew I had turned in a good leg. I had no idea about anyone’s times, mine, anyone’s. As soon as I touched I got out of the pool and got back behind our lane. I started cheering like no one has ever cheered before.

  Garrett, in his first Olympic swim, moved us up to first. He overtook Australia’s Andrew Lauterstein; the Aussies slipped back to third. Swimming second for the French was Fabien Gilot, who, going into the race, had put down the sixth-fastest time in the world that year in the 100; he moved France up into second at 200. Less than a second separated all three teams.

  Cullen took off. So did France’s Bousquet. We all knew about Bousquet. He spent four years, from 2001 to 2005, swimming for Auburn. He had an immense tattoo on his left shoulder. He was also no-doubt-about-it fast; with the flying starts the relays allow, he had gone 46.63 in the prelims the night before. That was the fastest relay split in history.

  Bousquet poured it on. He took the lead going toward the far wall.

  Cullen hung tough.

  Bousquet touched. Bernard leaped into the water.

  Cullen touched. Jason dove off after him. When they surfaced, Jason looked to be about half a body length behind.

  Bernard, in his white cap, roared toward the far wall. Jason, to his right, hung to the left lane line. Technically perfect. So smart. He was riding in behind the wave that Bernard, who is 6-feet-5, was making in Lane 5.

  At the final turn, Bernard was 82-hundredths ahead, almost a full length.

  If anyone else was starting to give up hope, Garrett, Cullen, and I were giving up nothing. We believed. Cullen, who had just finished his leg, was jumping up and down by the side of the pool. The noise level inside the Cube by now was furious. Garrett and I started screaming: Get this guy!

  Behind the blocks, we could see that after his turn Bernard had made a stupid, and what would turn out to be colossal, mistake. After the flip, instead of swimming in the middle of his lane, he had drifted to the left. That meant that Jason, now to Bernard’s left, could again tuck in behind him. Bernard was doing the hard work. Jason was cruising, preparing to slingshot by Bernard.

  And Jason was starting to close. Jason would say later that when he turned and saw how far ahead Bernard was, he thought, no way; coming into the race, Bernard was the fastest guy in the world in the 100. But then, Jason said, he immediately thought, you know what, that is ridiculous. I’m here for my guys. I’m here for the United States of America. I don’t care how bad it hurts. I’m just going to go out there and hit it. Jason thought all this in a split second. He got, as he described it, a super-charge, more adrenaline than he’d ever had. It was electric. The moment was electric.

  Jason started swimming as if he were possessed. Bernard began to falter. He was suddenly tight. Overswimming it. Maybe his hellacious first 50 had left him without enough to finish.

  Get this guy!

  Garrett started pounding on the block.

  We both were screaming. Big time.

  Get this guy!

  Jason closed some more. With each stroke, he was gaining. Clearly he was going to catch Bernard, if only he had enough pool left to do it.

  With about 15 meters left, it suddenly looked like Jason would have enough pool.

  Jason and Bernard churned toward the finish.

  I was smacking the block. Smacking that block. Smacking it. Screaming. Garrett, to my right, was screaming.

  Jason lunged toward the wall.

  Garrett and I looked across the pool, at the big board.

  Yes!

  Next to the number 1, it said: United States.

  Jason had touched first, in 3:08.24. The French were second, eight-hundredths behind. U-S-A! Victory!

  I punched the air with my right fist. I threw both my arms up, touchdown style. Garrett put his arm around me for just a moment as I leaned back and screamed with everything I had. Garrett moved just a step away and flexed like he was Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1970s.

  I reached down and slapped Jason’s hands in the water. I turned to the stands to my left, arched my back, and roared again. I had never been so excited in my entire life.

  Cullen came over from the side of the pool. He and I had a fast hug. Jason climbed out of the water and hugged Garrett. All four of us got together and embraced, formed a huddle, like the one just a few minutes before in the hall outside the ready room. Way to go, guys, I said. We did it. That relay is ours again.

  The huddle broke. “That’s what I’m talking about!” I yelled.

  Bernard was still in the pool. He had heaved his elbows onto the deck. He was just hanging there, heaving, exhausted, disappointed.

  One of the French racers, Gilot, said afterward, “C’est le sport,” which means literally, “It’s sport,” but in this context really meant, “That’s why you race the race.”

  Jason had just thrown down the fastest relay split in history, 46.06 seconds. “America,” Jason would say later, “has a great tradition of winning that relay. All of us knew what we’re capable of, but to actually do it, to get that tradition back, it’s a phenomenal feeling. Still, right now, I’m in disbelief.”

  All of us were. Later, when we ran the numbers, all we could say was: unbelievable, and incredible.

  Our time, 3:08.24, was almost exactly four full seconds faster than the world record that Nathan, Cullen, Ben, and Matt had gone in the prelims. It had taken eighteen years, from the Seoul Olympics in 1988 until 2006, for the record to drop four seconds to the 3:12 range. Nathan, Cullen, Ben and Matt had cut another two-tenths of a second off the mark; now we had dropped it, the very next day, nearly four full seconds. Incredible.

  Five of the eight teams in the relay final swam under the mark that Nathan, Cullen, Ben and Matt had set in the prelims. The Australians took bronze. The Swedes and Italians also went under what had been that world record time, and got nothing. No medal. Unbelievable.

  My first-leg split, 47.51, was a new American record, just one-hundredth of a second off what had been the world record going into the race. That time was a personal best by 41-hundredths. It was just one-hundredth off my goal sheet time.

  I had turned the race over to Garrett with us in second only because Sullivan, two lanes over, had set a new world record, 47.24. Two days later, Bernard would go 47.20, only to be out-done again, this time by Sullivan, 47.05.

  The four of us Americans walked over to the NBC broadcast position on the deck. Andrea Kremer, the network’s poolside reporter throughout the Olympics in Beijing, got us all together in front of the camera.

  “Well,” she said, “the French had said we’re gonna smash the Americans. Who’s talking now, guys?”

  “We are,” Garrett said. “United States of America.”

  This relay had loomed as one of the toughest races for me if I were to make it to eight. Thanks to my teammates, maybe, in Beijing in 2008, my dreams really could come true. There was a lot of swimming yet to go, an unforeseeable future. But maybe.

  Jason couldn’t have been more gracious. “I think Michael knows we didn’t do this for him,” he said. “He was just a part of it. We were a part of it.”

  Cullen, too. “He’s on a mission to win eight and we’re happy to be a part of it.”

  And Garrett. “And we wanted one of these, too,” he said, meaning the gold medals they gave us when we had ascended the podium, arms together, to celebrate a race that the president of the United States had watched us win. President Bush had been back in the stands at the Cube.

  The president told reporters that he had been watching me as Jason touched, watched my exuberance and joy. “The whole thing is genuine,” President Bush said. �
�That’s the good thing about the Olympics.”

  I have been asked many, many times since whether, because Jason’s extraordinary effort kept alive my shot at the $1 million bonus, I said something to Jason about it, or his effort. The answer is no. There were no words, except for those Jason said himself: “People always step up and do things out of the ordinary at the Olympics.”

  3

  REDEMPTION: THE 200 FREESTYLE

  When the $1 million bonus play was being studied and weighed, all of us knew that winning seven golds against world-class competition, much less eight, meant everything would have to break the right way.

  That said, it was far from impossible.

  Was I setting myself up for media hype? Absolutely.

  Would I be perceived as a failure in some quarters if I didn’t reach eight or seven? No doubt.

  Would it nonetheless create unprecedented buzz for swimming? For sure, and that made the decision to go forward easy.

  There are two ways to look at the hype and the attention. You can look at it as a negative, as pressure. Or you can look at it as a positive, as support.

  I got those lines from Ian Thorpe. In response to any question about attention, those lines served as his standard response.

  After a while, I learned to make the answer more my own. I’m glad people are interested, I would say. I don’t look at it as pressure, only as expectations, but the only expectations I focus on are those I have for myself, because those are the only ones I can do something about.

  In practice, I sometimes pass the time doing laps by singing in my head the last song I heard in the car on the way to the pool.

  I got that from Ian Thorpe.

  There was a lot I could learn from Ian Thorpe, the least of which had to do with swimming.

  I have always looked up to Michael Jordan, the way he changed his sport, just the way I want to help change swimming. Ian, in Australia, was like Michael Jordan. The man.

  When, in Fukuoka, Japan, in 2001, I won my first world title, in the 200 fly, Ian was in the midst of winning the 200, 400, and 800 freestyles, all in world-record time; he also anchored the Australian team to victory in all three relays. Ian’s three world records came in four days; the six gold medals came in seven events—he finished fourth in the 100 free—and amounted to the most any male had won at a major international meet since Spitz, in 1972. My world record at that meet, in the 200 fly, had actually been the second one set on the night I swam; Ian had broken the record in the 400 free. At the Olympics in Sydney the year before, Ian had won five medals, three of them gold. In Fukuoka, he was even better. The day after I broke that mark in the 200 fly, a newspaper headline screamed, “Teenage Stars Thorpe, Phelps Break Records.” Ian was eighteen, turning nineteen that October. I was barely sixteen. He was the star, the main attraction. And, at first, it was hard to think I had business being in the same headline—in some regards, at least at that point, even in the same pool. One day, warming up, Ian slipped into the water and blew by; he made up what seemed like 20 meters on me in two strokes.

  Of all the records that Ian set in Fukuoka, the one that was without a doubt most impressive came in the 200 free. In Sydney, Ian had lost the 200 free to Pieter van den Hoogenband, Pieter touching in 1:45.35, which tied Pieter’s own world record. At the Australian championships the next March, Ian went 1:44.69. In Fukuoka, he went 1:44.06. That time seemed ungodly fast, a record that might last for years, maybe a decade or more. At least that’s what van den Hoogenband said, and most everyone who knew anything about swimming, and the limits of human performance, agreed.

  While Ian was magnificent in the pool, he was a study in how to behave out of it.

  What composure. At a press conference in Fukuoka, he was asked if he could recite words he had learned in Japanese; he responded with a list of about thirty, the list including words and phrases that weren’t related to each other. The follow-up question came: could he recite the same list in English? Ian did so, just as he had done in Japanese, not making even a single slip in the sequence.

  Bob unabashedly used Ian as a model for my development. That made sense. There were remarkable parallels.

  Ian had started swimming because his big sister did, like me with my older sisters. I didn’t want to put my face in the water at first; he was initially thought to be allergic to chlorine. Ian’s sister, Christina, and mine, Whitney, competed at the 1995 Pan Pacific Championships; neither made the 1996 Olympics. Ian’s mom was a schoolteacher; mine was a teacher, later a principal. Ian was twelve when Doug Frost became his coach; I was eleven when Bob arrived at North Baltimore. He grew to be 6-feet-4; me, too. The 200 fly in Austin in 2001 made me the youngest male to set a world record; Ian had been the youngest before me. Moreover, Ian was the youngest world champion ever, just three months past his fifteenth birthday when he won the 400 free at the 1998 worlds.

  The pressure on Ian at the 2000 Olympics was intense; he was one of the country’s biggest heroes in a nation where the majority of people live within a few miles of the water, seemingly everyone swims, and the Olympic effort in swimming is grossly out of proportion to its population. There are about 20 million people in Australia, compared to more than 300 million in the United States. Even so, going back decades, Australians have been winning swimming medals at the Olympics in bunches. At the 1956 Summer Games in Melbourne, Aussies won every event in freestyle, the Australian crawl. At the Sydney Games, with those five medals, Ian more than delivered; he was chosen to be the Australian flag-bearer in the closing ceremony.

  An explosion of patriotic excitement enveloped Australia when Ian won the 400 at the Sydney Games. He was just seventeen; the 400 final was held on the first night of competition; the place was jammed with his countrymen; he led from start to finish; and he set a world record, 3:40.59. There’s a photo of Ian touching at the finish, so far ahead of everyone, that Bob had framed. The moment was so moving for Bob that, in Ann Arbor, he hung the photo in a place of honor, over his piano.

  Three nights after that 400, Ian came in second in the 200 free, behind van den Hoogenband. To all of Australia, this was a huge surprise. To Ian, too. Backstage at the Sydney Games, Bob had gone into a bathroom moments after that 200 free final; Ian walked in a moment later. For maybe a beat or two after he walked in, Ian looked totally in shock. But that’s why he had gone into the bathroom, to compose himself, away from everyone and everything. It took just a moment. He and Bob saw each other, acknowledged each other’s presence, and Bob said, “Hey, good job.” Ian replied, “Thanks,” and went out to meet the press.

  Ian had been a public figure in Australia since he was fourteen. He was clever enough to copyright his nickname, “Thorpedo.” He was active in charity work. He struck endorsement deals with major corporate interests. At the Sydney Olympics, you couldn’t cross the street, it seemed, without seeing Ian’s face on a billboard, couldn’t watch television without seeing Ian in a commercial; he had contracts with, among others, an airline and a bank. Later, he would have his own underwear line. Ian had interests in fashion and culture and moved easily within those circles everywhere in the world, especially in New York City; he was in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, and had stopped at the World Trade Center on a morning run before going back to his hotel. He went on to help try to promote New York City’s unsuccessful bid for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

  In Australia, Ian was a star among stars. A couple of years after the Worlds in Fukuoka, a Sydney newspaper held a contest: Who would you like to invite to your home for Christmas? Russell Crowe finished fourth, Nicole Kidman third, then-Prime Minister John Howard second. Ian won.

  Like many Aussies, Ian has always had a candor about him. In January 2008, in Beijing for the formal opening of the Water Cube, Ian was asked there by reporters whether that summer I could win eight gold medals.

  “I don’t think he will do it but I’d love to see it,” Ian said. “There’s a thing called competition. It won’t just be one athlete th
at will be competing, and in a lot of events he has a lot of strong competition.”

  Bob, always sleuthing, knew I would be keen to read Ian’s opinion.

  At the Michigan pool, I had a collection of suits, caps, goggles, towels, and water bottles in my locker, all of it stashed around a big hook hanging from the locker top. After reading the sheet of paper with Ian’s remarks, I took that paper and jammed it right onto that hook.

  It stayed there all that winter, all that spring, into the summer, until we went to Omaha and the Trials. Every day when I’d open that locker, it was the first thing I’d see, that article, Ian’s words, dangling there. Every day when I’d close that locker door, that fluttering piece of paper served as a reminder of the many doubters.

  • • •

  One of my early training tools consisted of videotape that Bob had picked up. It was of Ian overtaking Grant Hackett, another Australian, to win that 400 free at the 1998 worlds. Ian’s stokes, so fluid, managed somehow to combine economy and power. His freestyle kick, with his size-17 feet, was like a motor. Unreal. I started trying to make my kick more like his, to make it as powerful as I could. Then there was his dolphin kick, which was nothing less than revolutionary. At turns, instead of pushing off the wall and then surfacing, he would stay underwater, where there was less resistance than up top, for several meters, his feet and legs moving together instead of kicking separately, the motion creating an incredible whip through the water that mimicked the movements of a dolphin.

  The videotape, a grainy VHS thing, veered from the race to a poolside interview that Ian conducted immediately afterward. I also studied the way Ian talked, the way he held his hands, where he looked.

  It was all part of Bob’s effort to get me to be serious. I got serious.

  The rules say you’re allowed to kick underwater off the turn for a full 15 meters. During the summer of 2002, Bob and I resolved to work that dolphin kick into my training, into my IM sets. If we did ten 400 IMs, for instance, I would dolphinkick on the last two, from breast to free; then work my way up to four, six, eight, and, finally, ten.