No Limits (13 page)

On September 11, 2001, I reported to afternoon practice at Meadowbrook. Bob began the session, which ultimately ended early, with a defiant pep talk. We don't stop for snow, for rain, for a flood, and we for sure aren't going to stop for terrorists, he declared. Terrorists might kill innocent Americans but not our dreams. They want us to sit home and be scared. That, he said, is not us.

During those years, Bob figured, counting meets, that I could work in the pool about 550 times each year. In all, between Sydney and Athens, about 2,200 times, enough to swim somewhere around 9,000 miles.

I loved it when people who have no clue—mostly guys I knew from high school who had played other sports—would say to me, swimming can't be that hard. Okay, I would say, why don't you come do our workout for a day?

I knew I could get by in whatever workout anyone else might have. I could run. I could catch. I could play defense in football or lacrosse. I could kick a soccer ball, hit a baseball.

I guarantee you, I would say, there is not a chance you would make it through even my warm-up.

Yeah, right, dude, they'd say.

Then come, I'd say.

No one ever did.

To understand how much more difficult it is to move through water than it is through air, consider the time differences between world-class times in swimming events on one hand, track and field on the other. The difference is roughly four or five to one. In the pool, it takes about 47 seconds for the best swimmers now to cover 100 meters; it's under 10 on the track. In the water, it's
about 1:43 now for 200 meters, under 20 seconds on the track. The Olympic 1500-meter champion goes about 14:45 in the pool, about 3:30 on the track.

In my workouts, I was determined not only to sustain versatility but to emphasize it. I thus had to develop both speed and endurance.

An endurance block of training might last for six or seven months. I would swim nearly 50 miles each week, about 80,000 meters. Each day's workouts would come in segments, those segments based on a particular base distance (50, 100, 200 meters) as well as on the number and intensity of repetitions of the distance, the stroke, and the interval, meaning the time I'd get to rest before starting the next repetition.

The speed block could mean roughly 37 miles each week, about 60,000 meters, but with 600 to 800 meters each day at race pace.

There were times when Bob pushed me even harder.

In the winter of 2002, after the success I'd had in Fort Lauderdale, pointing toward those 2003 Worlds in Barcelona, I averaged 85,000 meters per week in the pool. The next spring, Bob ratcheted it down to 75,000. Clearly, I was going to be in outlandishly good condition.

A few years beforehand, Bob had started using another saying, one that has come to define the way he and I approach these grueling blocks of training. When we practice long and hard, he would say, we're depositing money into the bank. We need to deposit enough so that, when we make a large withdrawal, we have enough funds to do so.

In April, we went to Indianapolis for back-to-back meets, first the spring nationals, which ran over several days, the latter a one-day event called “Duel in the Pool,” Americans versus Australians. At the nationals, I became the first American swimmer to win races in three different strokes: in order, the 200 back, 200
free, and 100 fly. The anticipation for the duel, intense at first, had been considerably reduced when most of the Aussies declined to take part, among them Ian. Though I wished he and the others had come, I was nevertheless on a mission; in one afternoon, I would swim four races. In the first, I lowered the world record in the 400 IM to 4:10.73; forty minutes later, I just missed the chance to become the first male swimmer to set two individual world records in a single day, finishing outside the record in the 100 fly by three-hundredths of a second; ninety minutes after that I touched out Malchow to win the 200 fly; and then, in the last race of the day, went 51.61 on the butterfly leg as we beat the Aussies in the medley relay.

I had proven to myself that I could swim multiple events against a first-rate field. In the stands, my mom held up a sign. It read: “Actions Speak Louder than Words.”

Three weeks before Barcelona, we went out to California, to Santa Clara. A Finnish journalist started pestering me about whether I really thought I could break the world record in the 200 IM, 1:58.16. It had been held since 1994, nine years, by Jani Sievinen of Finland.

I told him what I typically say, that anything is possible.

“Yes,” the reporter said, “but then maybe you think it is too difficult. Nobody has done this for nine years so maybe it will not happen? Why do you think you can do it?”

Here was another doubter.

I love doubters. I love all doubters. I welcome all comments.

As much as I wanted that record, however, conditions did not seem optimal. I hadn't shaved and, with Barcelona still out there, hadn't tapered. Before the race, Bob and I ran over some projected split times; those splits had me just under Sievenen's time.

I said to Bob, you're thinking I should break a world record?

He said, why not?

With each stroke, I could hear the crowd going crazy. I could
tell I was swimming hard. After I finished, I saw the board and threw my hands way, way up: 1:57.94. Too difficult? Nine years? Maybe it won't happen? Why do you think you can do it?

Because I believe in myself, because I reach for my goals, and because I work to get there.

To see just what I am, truly, capable of.

Barcelona and the 2003 Worlds would be unlike anything I had ever done before. In Sydney, I had only the one race. At the 2001 Worlds in Fukuoka, I had only the one race. In Barcelona, I was looking at multiple events.

Bob, meanwhile, unearthed a story that had run in the Australian papers. The article quoted Don Talbot, the former head coach of the Australian swim team who was then a team consultant. He said I had done “nothing in the world” and still had to prove myself on the world stage.

“We know that Phelps is a good boy, but people trying to say he's a greater swimmer than Ian—absolute nonsense,” Talbot said. “He has showed promise in minor meets, no pressure. When he gets under the pressure with all the great swimmers around him, and each event he gets up will be a different one, he's got to master that.

“Ian Thorpe has got all the runs on the board right now. The promise with Phelps is there, but for people saying he's going to outdo Thorpie, I live to see that day.”

I read that and hoped Don was going to keep living.

Ian weighed in, too. “I think he's one of the most talented swimmers in the world,” he told an Australian newspaper reporter, talking about me, “and it's obvious from his results that he has to be up there on the list of the best swimmers. But he still has a lot more things that he needs to achieve before you put him in the category of being the best.”

For my part, I made sure in talking to reporters to offer nothing about Ian but praise.

“In my opinion,” I said, “Ian Thorpe is the number-one swim
mer in the world. People have him on a pedestal and everyone is trying to get to him.

“But we will see who is the world's number-one swimmer after the world championships.”

In Barcelona, I won six medals, four gold. I became the first swimmer to break five world records at a world championship as well as the first to break world records in two individual events on the same day. I became just the third swimmer—Spitz and West Germany's Michael Gross the others—to simultaneously hold world records in four individual events, and, in our first head-to-head matchup in a world or Olympic final, I defeated Ian by nearly two body lengths in the 200 IM.

Ian, meanwhile, won the 200 free. In Barcelona, I did not take part in that race. Maybe in Athens.

At the end of the Worlds, Talbot told an Australian reporter, “Greatness comes from longevity. Michael Phelps' potential is tremendous and he may come out as the most successful at this competition. He has hit that wave and he's going.

“And if he can do it at the Olympic Games and then the next world titles, and then the next Olympic Games, he will earn the mantle of greatness.”

•   •   •

That December, Ian was honored at the Australian Swimmer of the Year Awards. The Speedo $1 million incentive had just been announced a few weeks before. Naturally, Ian was asked if he thought anyone could go seven or better.

“I think it is unattainable for me and unattainable for anyone,” he said.

Nothing is unattainable.

Bob and I set about trying to fix some of my technical glitches. My turns needed work, my chin had to stay down when I was swimming the fly, my breathing during the free needed to come back farther to the left. We also tried during those months to fig
ure out which events I would swim at the Trials and thus, if all went well, at the Games. The two flys, the two IMs, three relays if the coaches would let me, all that was easy enough to figure out. But between the 200 free and the 200 back, which? Just one? Or both? Or maybe the 100 free as well?

Before the 2004 spring nationals in Orlando, Bob and I were leaning toward the 200 free. There, though, I swam the 200 back in 1:55.30. Aaron Peirsol's world record at the time was 1:55.15. That same night, I won the 100 free in 49.05.

During the spring nationals, meantime, Bob struck up a conversation with Jon Urbanchek, the University of Michigan coach who had first seen me at the pool in Baltimore when I was eleven, and who had accurately predicted when I was fifteen that I would make the Sydney Olympic team. Jon had announced in January that after twenty-two years as Michigan coach he was planning to step aside. Would Bob have any interest in the job? Curious, Bob agreed to meet with Bill Martin, the Michigan athletic director who, at the time, was also the acting president of the U.S. Olympic Committee.

Jon was widely regarded as one of the premier coaches not just in the United States but the world. A star distance swimmer for Michigan in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he spent twenty years coaching in Southern California, then returned to Ann Arbor as the Michigan coach. His teams won thirteen Big Ten championships, ten straight from 1986 to 1995; the 1995 team won the NCAA title. Jon took good swimmers and made them great: Dolan and Malchow and, before them, Mike Barrowman. And others.

The culture Jon had created in Ann Arbor, that of a demanding pursuit of excellence, was Bob's culture. Michigan, with one of the nation's most successful athletic departments, with resources vastly different than those of a club team, even a highly successful club team, could be a dream job.

The more Bob thought about it, the more, indeed, it seemed like a dream job.

Even so, he told the people at Michigan, don't hire me thinking you're going to get Michael.

Bob and I reconnected in the Bahamas, where I'd gone to shoot a commercial, swimming next to a dolphin. Relax, the crew kept saying as the dolphin would bump up against me, swim away, come back a few minutes later, and pop up again. Just don't panic. Feel free to pet her.

On the flight home to Baltimore, Bob told me the Michigan job was his. If I go there, he said, what would you do?

I knew this had to be coming one day. Here it was. I'm going with you, I said.

After Athens, Bob knew, I would have to leave Baltimore for my own personal growth. Maybe, at some level, I knew, too, hard as it would be to leave my mother and sisters. There was no way I was leaving Bob. He was my coach, yes. But he was also much, much more. A friend, yes, but still more than that. Bob had changed not only how I swam but who I was as a person, reminding me constantly how much love and dedication he has for the sport and everyone in it. I don't think either one of us, to be honest, could do without the other for any length of time. I certainly wasn't about to try.

Bob accepted the Michigan job late in March of 2004. The news broke on April 1, as we—Bob, me, some others from North Baltimore—flew to Indianapolis. As soon as we landed, reporters from all over the world—even Xinhua, the Chinese news service—knew they had a story.

Of course, in a way, this was what I was after, drawing major attention to swimming. There had been stories in the run-up to the Trials about the Olympic tattoo I had gotten on my right hip after Sydney, a cover story on
ESPN The Magazine
(as an answer to the
Sports Illustrated
swimsuit issue, I was described as “The
Hottest Thing in a Swimsuit”), a photo on the cover of David Wallechinsky's
The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics,
and more.

The crush carried on all the way through the Trials, where I qualified for the team in six individual events, including both the 200 free and the 200 back. The night of the 200 free, the finals were moved up ten minutes so that the races could air on NBC, the network's first live prime-time broadcast of the swimming Trials since it had gotten the U.S. rights to broadcast the Games way back in 1988.

Having qualified for six, how much did I want to try to take on at the Games? Once the Trials wrapped, we had all of twenty-four hours to decide; USA Swimming needed to finalize its roster. The 200 back or 200 free?

The 200 free. I wanted a shot at Ian Thorpe.

•   •   •

There were days, perhaps even weeks, during the seven years after the IOC awarded the 2004 Olympics to Athens, when it wasn't at all clear that Athens was going to be ready.

Athens had lobbied for the 1996 Games, the centennial anniversary of the modern Olympics, but those went to Atlanta. In 1997, as something of a makeup, the IOC gave the 2004 Games to Greece despite very real economic and political concerns.

In 2000, the IOC said preparations in Athens were coming along so slowly that it was seriously considering its options, including the possibility of moving the Games somewhere else. Six months before the Games, the main Olympic park, which was called OAKA, remained a dusty construction zone. The Olympic pool, inside the OAKA zone, was going to go without a roof, officials finally announced. If it was hot and humid during the competitions, well, it was, after all, a pool.