He did, however, have a talent for getting noticed.
In the prelims at big meets, the fastest swimmers are seeded into the last three heats. The early heats, and at a meet like the 2007 worlds there are sixteen heats, are for swimmers who are expected to go much slower. In heat number one of the sixteen 100 fly heats in Melbourne, however, there was Cavic; the start list didn’t show a qualifying time next to his name. The only two others due to swim in that heat were a guy from Ghana and another from Malaysia. And then the guy from Ghana didn’t go. So, Cavic essentially had open water, which is always an advantage. The three fastest times from all 16 heats in those prelims: Crocker, 51.44; Cavic, 51.7; me, 51.95.
At the European swimming championships in March 2008, Cavic was suspended for wearing a T-shirt that proclaimed, in the Serbian language, “Kosovo is Serbia,” as he was awarded his gold medal for winning the 50-meter butterfly. After that, he went to Belgrade, where he was greeted by hundreds of fans and met with the prime minister, who called him a “hero.”
Because of that suspension, Cavic didn’t get to swim the 100 fly at the European championships. Thus he came to Beijing slightly under the radar.
After setting the top time in the semifinals in Beijing, Cavic did not simply allow the time to speak for itself. Instead, he said:
“I’ve got nothing against Michael Phelps. The guy’s the king. Do I want to make a rivalry of this? Of course. Why not?”
And: “It would be kind of nice that one day, historically, we’ll speak of Michael Phelps maybe winning seven gold medals, and having lost an opportunity to win eight gold medals. When they talk about that, they’ll talk about whoever that guy is that took it away from him. I’d love to be that guy.
“I think it’d be good for the sport, and it’d be good for him if he lost once. Just once.
“Let’s be honest about that. It’s true. It’s good to lose sometimes. I know because I’ve lost a lot. For him, what would it mean? I would hope that he would cut down on his events for the next year and start training more for the 100 fly. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s the best. Will he be the best here? I don’t know. He’s got a lot on his plate. Hopefully, that will work out for me.”
Gary Hall, Jr.—the same Gary Hall, Jr., who made so much noise in 2004 about me being on the relay—predicted in the Los Angeles Times that Cavic would beat me. After training with Cavic at The Race Club for a year and a half, Gary said, Cavic had “worked harder than anyone,” had “endured taunt and torment from his teammates, myself included, for being overzealous with his training,” adding, “We caught him sneaking in extra workouts.”
Gary also said in that article that Cavic had “matured a lot, had somehow mellowed in the right ways and matured in others,” had “become something of a champion and a team leader,” adding, “He never faltered.”
Gary closed his piece by recounting a toast he had made in Cavic’s honor: “‘Here’s to the guy that is going to upset Michael Phelps in the 100-meter butterfly,’ I said, handing him his Race Club–embroidered terry cloth robe at the team dinner at the end of the season before heading off to the Olympic Trials.
“It looks like for once I might be right.”
During the heats, Cavic made a shooting motion, as though his hand were a gun. He was asked if he had been “shooting” at me over in the next lane. “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “If you were there, you would have seen I was firing above him, at my manager.”
I had no idea at the time that any of this was going on. I didn’t know the first thing about it until, at breakfast the morning of the final, Bob said to me, hey, Cavic says it would be good for swimming if you got beat and he’d love to be the guy who took the gold medal away from you.
I perked right up. What?!
• • •
We walked out onto the deck with the Water Cube roaring with noise. In the stands, just up off the blocks, my mom sat between my sisters, Hilary on her right, Whitney on her left. They were holding hands, tense.
I was in Lane 5, Crocker 6, Cavic 4. As I went through my pre-race routine, stretching, I turned in Cavic’s direction; he was turned to face me. It looked to a lot of people, including Bob, as if he was trying to stare me down, which, later, Cavic denied, saying of me, “Maybe he was able to see to see the reflection of himself and he’s like, ‘Hey, I look pretty good.’ I saw myself in his reflection and was keeping things under control.”
Bob absolutely, positively thought Cavic was trying to play mind games with me. I had no idea. I saw him looking in my direction, and looked away. I was looking out through my metallic goggles in his direction, but not at him. I was paying no attention to what he was doing. Why would I? Bob had always instilled in me this notion: What does Tiger Woods do? What did Michael Jordan do? The great champions—there’s nobody on their level, he used to tell me, and so when they’re competing they’re competing against themselves, and only themselves. You hear Woods talk after a great round, Bob would say, and what does he say? Something like, “I had good control of my game today,” or, “I managed the last five holes really well.” Never anything like, “Gee, I was really worried whether I was going to beat Vijay, or Ernie, or Phil.” You be like that, Michael, Bob would say.
The goal in this Olympic final that Bob and I had sketched out was for me to turn at 50 meters at 23-point-something seconds. If you turn at 24.2, Bob said, you’re dead. At 24-flat, he made plain, well, you’d be making it very difficult on yourself but you might still have a chance.
My goal sheet for this race had me finishing at 49.5. No one had ever gone under 50 seconds. Crock’s world record had been at 50.4 since 2005.
The goal sheet, it turned out, was perhaps too aggressive. Everything else about this race, though, was unbelievable.
“Take your marks,” the big voice boomed out over the Cube.
Beep!
The dive. The underwater. Just as I had visualized it.
I popped up and launched into the fly. Fluid, strong, easy. Cavic, I knew, would be going out faster than I was. Crocker, too. I wasn’t particularly worried. They had their style, going out harder on the front half; I had mine.
Hilary couldn’t stand it any longer. She stood up on her chair. Behind her was a woman from Holland; the Dutch woman kept pulling at her shirt and yelling, “Sit down! Sit down!” Hilary turned and yelled back “I’m watching my brother and I’m going to stand. He’s a good swimmer and you’re going to have to tackle me if you want me to sit down!”
Bob, over on the other side of the stands, was imploring me to go faster: “Come on! Come on!”
At 50, I wanted to be half a body length back. I looked at the turn and saw Crocker and thought, okay, Cavic’s not too far ahead.
What I didn’t know was that I was seventh at the turn, in 24.04.
Cavic had turned first, at 23.42; Crock was right behind him, at 23.7.
Halfway down the backstretch, as I passed Crock to my right, I moved up on Cavic, to my left.
The Dutch woman was still pulling on Hilary’s shirt: “Sit down!” Mom was fretting out loud, talking to Hilary, to Whitney, to no one and everyone, hoping against hope that what she was saying wasn’t really going to come true, that just saying it might make it not happen: “He’s going to get second. He’s going to get second.”
With 15 to go, Cavic knew I was coming hard. He said later he saw “kind of a shadow by the side of my goggle,” adding, “The last 15 meters, the last eight meters, I just put my head down. I did not breathe the last eight meters. I was just hoping for the best.”
In the coach’s box, Bob was swaying like he was at a church service. Left, right, left, right.
In the water, Cavic and I hurtled toward the wall together.
Cavic opted to glide in.
I chopped my last stroke. It was short and fast, a half-stroke, really. I still can’t fully explain why. Maybe it was experience. Absolutely competitive will. There wasn’t time, really, to form a complete thoug
ht. It was an impulse. I knew I had to do something. The situation demanded action. Gliding was not going to win gold. It didn’t for Matt Biondi and it for sure wasn’t going to for me.
The Omega timing pads take roughly 6.5 pounds of pressure—3 kilograms—to trigger. Anything less and the pad thinks it’s just waves and won’t respond. Anything that much or more, you turn off the clock.
Both Cavic and I touched, turned, and looked at the scoreboard.
Next to my name, it said: 1.
I looked over to where Bob had to be, pointed that way with my left hand, slapped the water with both hands and roared in victory, Olympic champion again, four years ago by four-hundredths of a second, now by one-hundredth, the smallest margin there was or ever could be. Mark Spitz had won seven medals at a single Olympics; now, with stupendously hard work, ferocious willpower, and a little luck, so had I.
In that instant, I had just matched the great Spitz.
At the finish, Bob initially thought I had lost. He muttered, a note of dejection in his voice, referring first to Cavic, then to me, “Oh, he got him.” Then Bob swiveled to his right, to take in the board. In that instant he went from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs: “Oh! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”
As Cavic and I had driven toward the wall, my mom had put up two fingers, for second. As we hit the wall, Hilary, still standing, still screaming, had her left arm around Mom. The two of them looked up at the board and Hilary started shouting, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He won, he won, he won!” Mom just stared in disbelief. Hilary said, again, “He won!”
Mom sunk down into the chair as if she didn’t have any bones. She was numb. Stunned.
Hilary and Whitney and everyone around them were going nuts, jumping up and down, shaking, freaking out, Hilary yelling over and again, “I can’t believe it!”
In the pool, I said to Cavic, “Nice job.”
Then I turned to Crocker. He and I shook hands and hugged. I leaned back, right elbow on the deck and lifted my left hand in the air, wagging just one finger high above me.
First, in 50.58 seconds, a flash of history in the present tense and proof that no matter what you set your imagination to, anything can happen if you dream as big as you can dream.
Cavic touched in 50.59. Lauterstein was third, in 51.12. Crocker was fourth, out of the medals, in 51.13, by one-hundredth of a second.
• • •
The close finish drew a formal protest from the Serbian team. Officials from FINA, the international swimming federation, said video replay confirmed what the scoreboard said.
The issue was never going to be whether Cavic ought to be the winner and me the runner-up, according to Cornel Marculescu, executive director of FINA. It was, he told reporters afterward, whether the race ought to be called a tie. FINA officials reviewed the video evidence frame by frame, and the race referee, Ben Ekumbo of Kenya, said, “It was very clear the Serbian swimmer had second, after Michael Phelps. It is evident from the video that it was an issue of stroking. One was stroking, the other was gliding.” To make sure everyone was on the same page, FINA officials shared with the Serbian team the video evidence; if the Serbs had not been satisfied, they could have taken the protest to an appeal jury. Instead, Marculescu said, they were satisfied that I’d won and Cavic had come in second.
Cavic wore his silver medal to a news conference and said, referring to the race, “I’m stoked with what happened. I’m very, very happy.”
Before the race, as Bob told me, Cavic had a lot to say. Afterward, Cavic had a lot more to say. At that news conference, he said, “Perhaps I was the only guy at this competition who had a real shot at beating Phelps one-on-one. This is completely new to me; I’ve never been in such a position with so much pressure, and I am very proud of how I handled that whole race and how I was able to keep myself under control emotionally and the stress level. It is a frightening thing to know that you’re racing Michael Phelps, but I think that it’s even more frightening to know that it’s going to be a very, very close race and that nobody knows the outcome.
“…I read a lot of articles online. I like to read—it encourages me and I knew a lot of people had their money against me. That was totally understandable. Michael has been breaking world records here by seconds. This is something that no other swimmer in swimming really does, so what do you expect from a man who breaks world records by seconds in the 100 fly? You know, I expected that he’d go a world-record time—maybe something close, like 50.2. But it was a real honor for me to be able to race with Michael Phelps and be in this situation where all eyes were on me as the one man that would possibly be able to do it. It was just great.
“Pieter van den Hoogenband talked to me yesterday and I told him, ‘Pieter, this is pretty stressful. I’m scared. I don’t know what to expect.’ And he just said, ‘Just enjoy the experience, just have fun, and don’t get too nervous. This is a beautiful thing.’ Just hearing this from a legend such as Pieter—it really kind of calmed me down and I was like, ‘He was right, the best races I’ve swum, I’ve swum when I was relaxed.’
“I believe I just did that here.”
Asked about the appeal, he said, “You know, people will be asking me this for years, and I am sure people will be bringing this up for years, saying that, ‘You won that race.’ Well, you know, this is just what the results showed. This is what the electronic board showed. I guess I kind of have mixed emotions about it, you know. This could be kind of the where—if I had lost by a tenth of a second or two-tenths of a second, I could probably be a lot cooler about this but with a hundredth of a second I’ll have a lot more people really saying that, ‘You know, you won that race.’ That kind of makes me feel good, but I’m gonna be happy with where I am.”
The very last question of Cavic’s news conference went like this:
“In your mind, was Michael Phelps the gold-medal winner?”
“Uh, is Michael Phelps the gold-medal winner? He—I think if we got to do this again, I’d win.”
My style, as ever, was to let my swimming do the talking for me. Besides, there would never, ever be an “again.” The time to seize that moment was right then, right there.
When I chopped the last stroke, I thought at first that it cost me the race. But it turned out to be just the exact opposite. If I had glided, I would have been way too long, caught in what swimmers call just that, a long finish, the way Cavic was. Instead, I turned a long finish into a short finish. I knew that little extra half stroke had to be a quick stroke, fast as I could do it.
I did some highly technical little things right at the very end, too, which Cavic did not, and those bought me time and made a difference. My head was down; his came up. My feet were straight; his, again, came up. Swimming fast is, generally speaking, a horizontal proposition; vertical movements slow you down. It typically pays to be in as straight and horizontal a line as possible. I was. He wasn’t.
After the race, my mom and my sisters got to come on deck for just a moment.
“We’re so proud of you!” came the chorus. Mom had that glowing, adoring look that only mothers looking at their children can have. That look doesn’t change when the kids get to be big kids.
I let them in on a secret: “I didn’t realize I was that far behind.”
Still on the deck, I was put on the phone with Spitz, who was back in the States. “Epic,” he told me. “What you did tonight was epic. It was epic for the whole world to see how great you are.” He also said, “When I look at Michael and I think of the lore of what he has done over the last four years—it’s more remarkable than myself.” The two others with nine gold medals over an Olympic career were, as it turned out, in Beijing. Carl Lewis said, “The reality is, congratulations.” Larisa Latynina, the Soviet-era gymnast, wrote me a note that said, “You have shattered all sort of records with truly inspiring Olympic character.” It also said, “In ceding my record for most Olympic gold medals, I do it with little regret. I am sure we share the joy of
competition and a timeless joy for excellence.”
Earlier in the week, I had said when asked about being “the greatest athlete in Olympic history,” that I was “kind of at a loss for words.” I explained, “Growing up, I always wanted to be an Olympian, and now to be the most decorated Olympian of all time, it just sounds weird saying it. I have absolutely nothing to say. I’m speechless.” Now I had won seven and, no matter how many times I was asked, I still felt as if I was at a loss for just the right thing to say. I tried to explain my feelings this way: “I knew that in my dreams I always wanted it, and thought that under perfect circumstances I could do it. Just believing all along that you can do it goes a long way.”
Maybe a little something extra helps, too—what Crock told me after the race. I’ll never forget it. He said, marveling that I had somehow pulled it off, “You have to have angels with you, or something.”
8
COMMITMENT: THE MEDLEY RELAY
No one could have been more supportive of my swimming for Mark Spitz’s records than Mark Spitz.
Mark showed up in Omaha near the end of the 2008 Trials to take in the scene, and to tell anyone who would listen his emphatic prediction: I would win eight gold medals in Beijing.
“This is going to be history,” he declared. “He’s going to do—what we say—a little schooling to the rest of the world, and it’s going to be exciting for those that will see it in person and for those who watch it on TV.”
Mark also said that he had only good feelings about the possibility of seeing someone else in the record books on the line that says, “Most Golds Won at One Edition of Olympic Games, Individual.” He said, “Records are made to be broken,” adding, “Thirty-six years is a long time.”
He also said, sitting at the head table in a room off the warm-down pool in the Qwest Center, dozens of journalists scribbling down everything he had to say, “It just dawned on me that it was forty years ago that I was at training camp, and I was going, wow, that is almost twice as old as Michael Phelps is now! Wow, I swam a long time ago and, it’s okay, it’s okay.”
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