No Limits (12 page)

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.”

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 com
mercial; 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 that 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.

At those 2002 summer nationals in Fort Lauderdale, I saw for the first time at a big meet what a weapon that dolphin kick could be. A month beforehand, Vendt had beaten me in a 400 IM; that would be the last time I would lose, a streak I carried into and through the Olympics in Athens and Beijing. In Fort Lauderdale, Erik turned first at 350; I stayed under for another 12 meters before breaking the surface. Watching a video of the race after
ward, I could see that Erik had taken five full strokes before I even broke the surface. At the finish, I got the touch. Both of us finished in under world-record time, me in 4:11.09, Erik in 4:11.27.

Because I was naturally a butterflyer, the dolphin kick was relatively easy to pick up. In the IMs, it became an equalizer; even if other guys had a better breaststroke, I could use the dolphin on the turns. If they were getting tired on that final leg, I still had something to unleash.

Just three days after that meet ended, we went to the Pan Pacs, back in Japan, this time in Yokohama. I finished with three gold medals and two silvers. After the last race, I got on a bus, and there was Ian. We talked about this and that and, at one point, he said, if you ever want to train together, I'd be more than happy to have you in Australia. I was pumped. To be able to train with Ian Thorpe—cool. Think of what I'd learn. Hey, I said, and you can train with me in Baltimore, too.

When we got off the bus that night, no one paid any attention to me; those who had been waiting pushed by me to get a glimpse of Ian.

Bob spent a fair amount of time over the next six months trying to coordinate flights, pool times, training schedules, even an appearance at a training clinic in Australia. A week before we were to go, Ian's new coach, Tracy Menzies, e-mailed to say they were backing out. Something had come up, we were told.

This was a major disappointment.

There were other disappointments along the way as well.

We still went to Australia, where I trained with Hackett. Trained hard. For example, we raced each other over 50 meters, with and without fins, thirty times. We raced each other with pulleys. We raced freestyle; no wonder the Aussies were such great freestylers.

While there, Bob and I agreed to speak to what we were told would be a couple of reporters; there ended up being more than three dozen. We mentioned in passing that our morning practice
the next day would be open to anyone who wanted to watch. We got to the pool at five-thirty in the morning. It was raining. We didn't expect to see a soul. The deck was jammed, a mass of people end to end. This was what swimming was all about in Australia. Why couldn't it be like this in the United States?

Grant, and Ian, and others had taken a sport that was already at the top in their country and moved it even farther along. As a sign of my profound respect, I wanted to measure myself against them even more after the trip Down Under than before. It was unlikely I would ever race against Grant; he was pursuing distance events, I was not. But to compete against Ian would be the ultimate. The 2003 Worlds in Barcelona would be coming up soon enough.

•   •   •

Bob's coaching philosophy can be distilled as follows:

Set your goals high. Work conscientiously, every day, to achieve them.

Among the many authors Bob has read, he likes to cite the motivational speaker Earl Nightingale, who survived the attack on Pearl Harbor on the USS
Arizona,
then went on to a career in broadcasting. The way Bob tells it, Nightingale's work revealed the one thing that's common to all successful people: They make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people don't like to do.

That's it. That's Bob's game. His drill, while sometimes fabulously complex, is really quite simple—make a habit of doing things others weren't willing to do.

There are plenty of people with some amount of talent. Are you willing to go farther, work harder, be more committed and dedicated than anyone else?

If others were inclined to take Sunday off, well, that just meant we might be one-seventh better.

For five years, from 1998 to 2003, we did not believe in days
off. I had one because of a snowstorm, two more due to the removal of wisdom teeth. Christmas? See you at the pool. Thanksgiving? Pool. Birthdays? Pool. Sponsor obligations? Work them out around practice time.