No Limits (15 page)

It was true.

Ian held a news conference in Sydney to say he simply was no longer motivated to keep swimming.

He had won eleven world titles, set thirteen long-course world records, and won five Olympic gold medals. And, just like that, it was over. He had never really gotten back into the pool after Athens and now he never would.

We issued a statement in which I called Ian “an inspiration and a terrific champion.” The statement said Ian had “elevated the worldwide interest in swimming and was a great ambassador to our sport.” It also said, because this was indisputably the right thing to do, “I wish him the best of luck in the future.”

Which I wholeheartedly did. Even as I wished he were still swimming.

It took a while to sink in: I was never going to get the chance, ever again, to race him like we raced in Athens.

Just once more with the Aussie in the full-length black bodysuit,
the man I considered the world's greatest freestyler. That's what I wanted. Head-to-head, he and I, to see what would happen now if he were at his best and me at mine.

A couple months before the 2007 worlds, I went to Bob and asked him for video of all my swims from Athens. He didn't push this on me; this was me asking. I took those videos and watched them over and over. When I watched the 200 free from the 2004 Olympics, I understood clearly that I had gone out too slowly and that the third turn had left me at an impossible disadvantage. It was abundantly clear what I needed to fix. In Melbourne, I would have to swim the race aggressively from the start. Power through the turns, especially the third. The big mistake I could make would be to let van den Hoogenband get ahead early, then have to reel him in, the way I'd tried to do in Athens, when he and Ian went out ahead.

At least I'd have the satisfaction of racing Hoogie, even if Ian was not going to be in this race.

And then Don Talbot opened his mouth. Again.

“Thorpe is still number one in my opinion, and Phelps doesn't outdo him yet,” Talbot was quoted in Australian newspapers a few days before the meet got underway.

There was more: “…The Americans want to claim they invented Jesus Christ before he came, and the same thing with Phelps—they were saying he was the greatest in the world when Thorpey was the thing.

“I said he was a great swimmer but he's not there yet and they got into me about it…Certainly he's on the right track. If he wins at this meet what he's planning to do, then there is no doubt he'll be the best male swimmer of all time. He will supersede Thorpe.

“…He doesn't want to be one of the greatest, he wants to be the greatest, and regardless of what I think, I think he has to outdo Spitz next year at the Olympics. Whether he can do that, I don't know.”

I said nothing.

The day of the 200 free final, dipping into the warm-up pool, I felt it. My freestyle had never, ever felt that smooth. Right then and there, I thought, something special might happen here. Something really special.

No time on the books was even within a half-second of Ian's world-record 1:44.06, the swim from Fukuoka in 2001. The only other person to even break 1:45 had been van den Hoogenband.

Hoogie lined up for the finals in Melbourne in Lane 4; he'd had the fastest semifinal swim. I drew Lane 5. I turned first at the first wall, at 24.47, and again at the second, at 51-flat. Hoogie seemed to still be there with me, just off my shoulder, but, as I had planned, I was ahead. That third leg, I opened it up a bit, and after I turned and finally surfaced, I could hear the crowd noise getting louder and louder. The big video board in Melbourne was showing the race and, through a superimposed red line, it was also showing where I was in relationship to world-record pace. Obviously I was ahead, or at least close. In the water, I had no idea how far ahead. I just knew I had lost sight of Hoogie.

That last lap, Bob would say later, was perhaps the best lap he had ever seen. At least at the time. He knew the race was over at 50 meters, when I'd beaten everyone to that first wall. He had turned to Mark Schubert, the U.S. national coach, and said, this one's done. Mark would say later it looked like I was racing Ian even though Ian wasn't in the pool.

Bob had been hoping for 1:44-something.

I touched, turned, and looked at the clock. It read 1:43.86.

Not just a world record. A world record by two-tenths of a second. And better than I had ever done before in the 200 free by nearly a second and a half. I had erased Thorpe's name from the record books, in his own country.

I was so far ahead that I had time not only to touch but to spin to see the board, jam my left index finger into the air and grab the
lane rope with my right arm before Hoogie, in the next lane over, touched the wall. He then turned, saw the board, which said that he was more than two seconds behind at 1:46.28, and came over to the lane line to exchange a handshake.

By then, I'd even had time to duck down, drink water, and spray some around in front of me. I have no idea why I do this. Just a quirk after big races.

Hoogie said to me, “Where did that come from?”

I answered honestly. “I don't know.”

“What was your best time before that?”

“1:45.2.”

“Off every wall,” he said, “the only thing I could look at was your underwaters. I couldn't focus on any part of my race.” And then he said, “I won't swim that next year,” meaning in Beijing.

•   •   •

Ian arrived in Beijing on the eve of the Games, declared he admired my tenacity, and called me one of the greatest athletes in the world. And: “I have said before that I don't think he can do the eight, and still believe that. Mind you, if there is any person on the planet who is capable, it is him. It's sad, but I just don't think it will happen.”

I said nothing.

Hoogie had been good to his word. He did not compete in the 200 free in Beijing. That meant the two swimmers most likely to chase after me were Peter Vanderkaay, one of my training partners in Ann Arbor, and Park Tae-Hwan of South Korea. Park was an excellent closer who, by the day of the 200 free final, had already won the 400 free; Peter hails from a family of top-notch University of Michigan swimmers and had, predictably, gotten even better under Bob and Jon's direction. He also was the centerpiece of what became one of Bob's favorite stories. Bob named a horse after the Vanderkaay family. The Vanderkaays instead of me?
Well, Bob would say, first of all that's a lot of pressure to put on a horse. Second, and here came the punch line, this horse is too nice.

The one that bites, he said, that one I'll name Michael.

The 200 free prelims went down the night of the 400 IM final; the semifinals the morning of the 400 relay finals. I went an easy 1:46.48 in the prelims, 1:46.28 in the semis. I didn't care what time I got in the semifinal, really, as long as it got me a lane in the finals. The way the schedule worked, I had to swim the 200 semi at 10:13 Monday morning; the relay final took place just 71 minutes later. That Monday night, I swam in the prelims of the 200 fly.

The 200 free final, then, was the seventh of what was planned to be seventeen swims. Heading out to the deck, walking to Lane 6, where my semifinal time had placed me, I was already more than a third of the way done.

I was more than satisfied to be in Lane 6. It was not important to come in first in the preliminary or semifinal heats. If those times were, for me, ordinary, no worries, at least not on my part. Those were races to get into the final, that's all.

On my goal sheet, after that 1:43.86 in Melbourne, I had put down 1:43.5 as my target for 2008 and Beijing.

That turned out to be conservative. I felt good on the blocks that Tuesday morning. Very good.

I had thought the 200 free in Melbourne was pretty close to perfect.

This one: better.

The plan, as it was in Melbourne, was to go all out. No easy speed in the front half. Hard speed. Take it out and, in essence, dare the others to catch me. I wanted to be at 100 meters in a fraction over 50 seconds. Not 51. 50 point-something.

Immediately after the beep, I surged to the lead. When I popped up after the first turn, I could see I was already half a body length ahead. By the second of the four laps, I could tell I was way
out in front. Studying the stat sheets later, I saw I hit the 100 wall in 50.29.

In this race, the weight work I'd done really showed. I had more endurance. I could hold a stronger kick longer. The dolphin kick had become more or less a fifth stroke. I now had developed incredible power off the turns and, in particular, that third turn. What once had been a vulnerability was now a killer asset, 12 or 13 meters underwater, enough to help reshape the contours of what was possible in the 200 free.

I hit that third turn in 1:16.84, almost two full seconds ahead of Peter.

I drove home. Four years before, in the Race of the Century, I was third, the one individual race in Athens I did not win. Now, in Beijing, untold hours of work in the pool and weight room later, I was going to take first.

In world-record time: 1:42.96.

Park finished second, in 1:44.85; Peter got bronze, in 1:45.14. Park had indeed closed fast, 26.17 over the final 50; I had gone even faster, 26.12.

“Phelps swims so fast,” Park would say later. “It is my honor to compete with him.”

A roar of applause and sound washed over me. My left elbow resting on the deck, I raised my right arm and pointed up, a number-one sign, a tribute to everyone who had helped me get to that moment.

This was history.

Indeed, so much history was made at the instant I touched that last wall in the 200 free.

Park finished 1.89 seconds behind me. That was by far the biggest margin of victory in an Olympic 200 free. West Germany's Gross had won by 1.66 seconds in 1984.

In 1972, the 200 free was the race after which Spitz had exuberantly raised his shoes. Four years later, in Montreal, Bruce Furniss, John Naber, and Jim Montgomery went one-two-three in the
200 free; I had become the first American since then to win the event.

And, of course, I was three-for-three in Beijing; this third gold was the ninth of my Olympic career. I had just tied four legends of the Olympics: Spitz; another American, track star Carl Lewis; Paavo Nurmi of Finland, a distance-running star; and Larissa Latynina, a Soviet gymnast. Each of them had won nine Olympics golds.

I am honored to be in their company. To be listed in the same sentence is just incredible.

At the time, though, I didn't have time to contemplate history. Looking at the clock, I knew I was barely going to have time to get ready for the semifinals of the 200 fly, which would start in forty-six minutes from the instant I had made that number-one sign. That's mostly what I was thinking about. The 200 fly semis would be my eighth race of seventeen. None of the rest of it mattered, none of it would matter, unless I kept my focus on what was immediately at hand.

I warmed down for as many minutes as I could. I changed into my red, white, and blue warm-up gear for the medal ceremony. On my way back to the backstage pool, intending to sneak in just a few minutes of warm-up for the 200 fly semis, my mind already thinking ahead to that race, seeing the ready room, the blocks, the dive into the water, I stopped for just a moment to reach into the stands and give the flowers presented to medal winners to my sister Hilary.

As I started to hustle off, she reached her hands up to her face. And wiped away tears.

One thing that separates Michael from other swimmers, Bob likes to say, is that if they don't feel good they don't swim good.

That's not the way it is for Michael.

Michael, he says, performs no matter how he's feeling. He has practiced it a long time. He knows exactly what he wants to get done, and he's able to compartmentalize what's important.

Bob, with his seemingly endless collection of sayings, naturally has an acronym to describe the mental aspect to my racing. It's “W.I.N.: What's Important Now?”

It's true. When it comes down to it, when the time comes to focus and be mentally prepared, I can do whatever it takes to get there, in any situation.

I can because I know this, too: At the highest level of sports, and especially at the Olympics, you have to expect that everyone competing against you has physical talent. So: How do you chan
nel peak performance into championship performance? You have to be mentally tough, that's how.

How do you get to be mentally tough? You have to train your mind just like you train the body.

Unleash your imagination. Work hard. Embrace obstacles, difficulties, and mistakes.

Nothing in life is easy. You can't wake up one day, announce you're going to go do something, and expect it to be a success. At least not consistently. You have to put time and energy and whatever you've got into it. You have to want to do it, want it badly.

That's the point that perhaps some people who say they want something, whatever that something is, don't fully understand. A lot of swimmers I trained with said they wanted to achieve something great but didn't truly put time, energy, dedication, and heart into it.

I put time, energy, dedication, heart, and soul into it.

If I wasn't in the right mood to practice, I got myself into that right mood. I'm not saying that Bob and I didn't disagree, even argue with each other—of course we did—but I got myself into the place I needed to be to get the work done that I needed to get done.

When you're challenged: What's important now?

When it gets to be race day: What's important right now?

And when things don't go right on race day, and you absolutely have to take action: What's important this very instant? Sometimes there simply is no time to think. The situation demands action: What's it going to be?

As I lined up on the blocks for the finals of the 200 fly on Wednesday morning, the 13th of August, the first of two finals I would swim that morning—the second would be the leadoff leg of the 800 freestyle relay not even an hour later—I could not have been more ready to rock. The 200 fly was my race. This was the event in which I had first set a world record seven years before.

Thousands of miles away in Norway, Fernando Canales, an
assistant Michigan swimming coach, and his wife, Mona Nyheim-Canales, were watching on television. Fernando is a former All-American swimmer at Michigan who represented his native Puerto Rico in three Olympics; Mona is a Norwegian swim champ, a swim coach in her own right, and a sports psychologist with an incredible eye for detail.

The television camera zoomed in on me during introductions. Watching in Norway, Mona turned to Fernando. She said, you know what? His cap and goggles look really weird.

•   •   •

The back problems I had after Athens, the broken bone in 2005, and the broken wrist in 2007 were just some of the obstacles that had confronted me, and that I had to overcome, if I were to reach my goals at the 2008 Olympics.

Everyone has obstacles to overcome.

I learned that early in life.

But I also learned another essential truth early. Dedication, grit, and willpower could go a long way in meeting, and beating, whatever challenges I would face.

As a very little boy, I was not just always on the go; I simply could not sit still. I would twirl pens and pencils between my fingers. I made faces at cameras. I climbed on everything. I never shut up. Never. I had a question for everything, and wouldn't stop asking questions until I got the answer. If then. My energy level, my talkative nature, my restlessness; all this came as a complete surprise to a mother with two girls. Mom's girlfriends who were the mothers of boys would tell her all these stories about these young boys and she'd be confounded. “My girls don't do that,” she would say.

And then I came along.

The baby brother in a house full of strong women. Even as little girls, Hilary and Whitney had dynamic personalities. Of course. They took after their mother.

Early in my elementary school years, my mom kept getting phone calls about what was routinely described as my “negative” behavior.

“Michael is not paying attention in class.”

“Michael is having difficulty focusing in class.”

“Michael is not doing his work the way he needs to be doing his work.”

“Michael always hurries.”

“Michael is agitating other children in the class.”

Finally, my mom and the teacher held a meeting.

“Michael just can't focus,” the teacher said.

“Well,” Mom said, “maybe it's because Michael is bored with what he's being taught.”

“Mrs. Phelps, are you saying that Michael is gifted? Michael is not gifted,” the teacher said.

I was just seven when my parents split up. I didn't understand.

I had big ears. I was scrawny. I got picked on, a lot. Still in elementary school, I had a Mickey Mouse baseball hat. One day I got on the bus with the hat. I got off the bus without it. A bunch of older kids would pick on me and throw my hat around; one of them threw the hat out the window.

Another encounter: I was about eleven or twelve. We were at a swim meet. The older boys were about to dump my head in the toilet, give me a swirlie, as it was called, until someone came in, maybe Bob, maybe another group of kids, I don't remember, and I escaped. I do remember this: I ran out of that bathroom in tears.

My anger would build up inside and, while I wouldn't say anything about it to anyone, I would use that anger as motivation, especially at the pool.

At a swim meet in Princeton, New Jersey, a kid from Delaware beat me in a 200-yard freestyle race. This would have been just
the sort of thing that typically would have sparked a first-class, goggles-throwing tantrum. Instead, I felt the burn inside, then let the emotion carry me through my next swims. At that meet, I had five more events. I won all five.

Looking back, I firmly believe these episodes taught me not just how to manage my emotions to my advantage. I also learned what was worth getting worked up about, what was meaningful and important in my life. And, it follows naturally, what was not.

I also saw firsthand, watching my mother, what family values and work ethic truly meant.

When I was in sixth grade, our family physician, Dr. Charles Wax, diagnosed me with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder. ADHD is a relatively common childhood disorder; it can make it difficult for a child to do well in school or behave at home. The doctor prescribed the stimulant Ritalin.

Initially, the Ritalin program was three times a day during the school week: morning, lunchtime, dinner. I did not take Ritalin on weekends. Staying busy with sports, increasingly swimming, would burn off my energy. At school, the lunchtime dose meant I had to go to the school nurse's office. If I didn't remember, the nurse would come call me out of my next class. For a kid who was already being picked on, this was another reason to stand out. Why was the nurse coming to get me? Where was I going with the nurse all the time? What was going on?

Mom did not tell me at first what Ritalin was or what it was supposed to do. In class, I noticed I did seem less jumpy.

For her part, my mother, raising three kids by herself, pursuing her own career goals, just worked harder to make sure I was, indeed, not only focusing in class but was doing my homework.

So many times, it seemed, I would do my homework and bring it to her for a review, and she'd say, “Michael, your handwriting is so small, I can't read this.” She'd rip it up, then and there.

“Mom!”

“You can't read this, Michael. You need to go back and do this again. And it has to be legible.”

Doing it until I learned to do it right was one of my mom's many important lessons.

As I got into middle school, another teacher told mom in one of those parent-teacher conferences that I would never be successful at anything I did because I couldn't concentrate.

“So,” my mom told this teacher right back, “what are you doing about it?”

At home, this was what she and I were doing about it. Okay, my mom would say, what's your topic?

I'd say, the Louisiana Purchase, or whatever it was, and she would say, okay, give me four main facts about your topic that you want to say.

I'd do that, and she'd say, great, now tell me about the first of those four points. It happened in 1803, I might say. And then the second. Lewis and Clark were assigned to explore the territory. And so on, until she had helped me work my way through the entire assignment.

There was no slacking off just because it might be difficult or because I didn't want to do it. I was expected to do the right thing.

Which is why, in seventh grade, I went to my mom and said, I wanted to stop taking Ritalin.

She said, “Are you sure?”

And, “How do you think you're going to be able to control yourself in the classroom?”

“Do you think you can get through your schoolwork without it?”

“Will you be able to accomplish everything you want to accomplish without the Ritalin?”

“Do you think you can get through not just your academics but manage your swim schedule, too?”

Yes, I said. I don't know if it was that I didn't want to go to the
nurse's office, or that I thought I had beaten it. But I knew I didn't want to take Ritalin anymore. I viewed it as an unnecessary crutch. I was mentally tough enough to go without it, I was sure.

Okay, she said, Let's try it. Let's go talk to Dr. Wax, but let's not go cold turkey.

The doctor gradually weaned me off the medicine. The first to be cut out was that lunchtime dose. In short order, the frequency of the other doses was reduced, then eliminated entirely.

This was big. And not just because I was off the medicine. I had proven to myself that I could set a goal and, through willpower and being mentally tough, not only meet that goal but beat it.

And so: If I dedicated myself to my goals, if I worked as hard as I could—I could accomplish anything.

•   •   •

It was Dr. Wax who had suggested years before that Hilary and Whitney learn to swim. Every child should be water safe, he said.

Hilary turned out to be a very good swimmer. She set three school records at the University of Richmond.

Whitney turned out to be a very, very good swimmer, even though, a lot like me, she didn't want to get in the water at first. She had to be bribed with a Snickers bar. Once she got in, though, she didn't want to get out. And once she started to get better, she got really, really good. From 1990 to 1993, she was named Maryland's outstanding swimmer. The next year, when she was just thirteen, she finished second in the 200 fly at the spring nationals; that earned her a spot on her first world championship team. She went to Rome—she was fourteen by then—and finished ninth, and came back with all kinds of stories about being there. And a bunch of free stuff.

It was impossible not to hear the buzz: Whitney would be the next great American swim star. The gold medals were all but hers.

Of course everyone we knew was getting excited. The Christmas before those 1996 Games, an uncle, my mom's brother, B.J., gave Whitney a 1996 Atlanta mug. She said, I'm going to be there!

Whitney loved the routine, the discipline, the challenge of swimming. Up before dawn. If a coach told her to do ten laps, she would do twelve. If there was a blizzard and it wasn't safe to drive to practice, on went the parka and the boots, because it was time to walk there.

The pool was Whitney's passion, her outlet, her comfort. Even now, with a husband, two small children, and a job, she goes to the gym at five in the morning because it is what she has always done and is still a major part of who she is.

When Whitney was ten or eleven, her back started hurting. Halfway through her swim practices, her back would start feeling sore.

Whitney is not a quitter. She kept at it.

At thirteen, her back would hurt each time she'd do a flip turn. Her arms and legs would tingle. One day after practice, she bent down in the kitchen to pick up some fruit. She couldn't get back up.

Eventually, she did get back up, and at practice kept pushing through the stabbing pain. She was swimming in an elite NBAC group, seven girls, and the unspoken rule was: You don't get out.

Whitney is not the sort to show her emotions. For her to cry, she's got to be really hurting. She would swim through many a practice crying during the sets. No one knew because, after all, she was in a pool. Later, she would find out that two of the discs in her lower back had herniated; another disc in her neck was bulging.

If she couldn't actually gut out the swimming itself, Whitney still showed up at the pool. While the other girls were doing their sets, Whitney would hang in an outside lane, jogging in the water. She was not going to miss practice.

At the same time Whitney was confronted with all this back
pain, she was also wrestling with food-related issues. She was already doing all she could in the pool. Was there something else she could to make herself go faster? Lose weight, she thought. If she were skinnier, she'd have to go faster, right?

Whitney stopped eating snacks. Then she began to eat less at meals. Mom noticed and, every now and then, asked Whitney about it. Nothing's wrong, Mom, Whitney would say. Mom took Whitney to a nutritionist, who instructed her to keep a food diary and to post that diary on our mom's door. The entries went up; Whitney may or may not have been eating what she had written down she had eaten. The nutritionist gave our mother tips like this: Put butter in Whitney's potatoes. Whitney was too clever for that. She would come home from these grueling swim practices and do sit-ups in front of the TV.