No Limits (5 page)

He said nothing.

I said nothing.

If I had told him how I was truly feeling, he would have freaked.

My heart was racing. Like an out-of-control freight train barreling down a set of tracks, that kind of racing.

This had been a problem for me dating back at least eight years, to the first time I'd had one of these episodes. Then it was at a practice. My heart rate elevated and, for what seemed an eternity, wouldn't come down. Ultimately, the pounding subsided and we didn't think anything of it until it happened again. Then we went for a battery of tests, including for Marfan syndrome, a disease
that affects connective tissues and can be fatal if there is leaking in the vessels that lead to the heart. Flo Hyman, one of the best volleyball players of all time, a silver medalist at the 1984 Los Angeles Summer Games, who died suddenly during a match, had Marfan, though nobody knew that until an autopsy revealed the disorder.

As it turned out, I did not have Marfan. Instead, the doctors said, I was a salty sweater, meaning, simply, I lost high amounts of salt in my sweat. When I got below a certain sodium level, I got dehydrated easily.

The easy fix to this was to supplement my diet with salt pills.

For all the years since I first went to the doctors about this, Bob's concern—make that his out-and-out fear—had been that I would have one of these incidents at a meet.

And here it was happening in Omaha, just moments before the first race of the Trials was to be broadcast live on NBC.

I knew that if I'd told Bob, it might have sent him over the edge. Just imagine: Live from Omaha! Here he is, Michael Phelps! And he's clutching his chest!

Which is why I didn't say anything.

I just had to go out there and swim.

Once that first swim is over, if it's good, I have momentum. Then the meet feels as if it's all going downhill. It's just getting past that first swim. Four years of work, dedication, drive, and commitment all distilled into four minutes of racing. This was going to be the gateway, the first race in answering what I was going to be doing in Beijing, and how I was likely to do it.

In track they have a starter's pistol that signals the start of a race. In swimming it's a beep.

Beep!

After the opening butterfly leg, I had a lead of about a body length on Lochte.

In the back, he closed to half a length.

In the breast, he pulled even.

With 50 meters to go, the question was clear: Who had enough left?

As I turned, I glanced over at Lochte. I saw where he was. As Lochte rose to the surface, I was still underwater, surging, dolphin-kicking. When I finally broke the surface—the rules are 15 meters underwater, no more—I had left Lochte behind.

I touched in 4:05.25. A new world record.

Lochte finished in 4:06.08. Both of us had gone under the prior record, my 4:06.22. And he was supposed to have a banged-up ankle that was bothering him?

The two of us were far, far ahead of the rest of the field. Robert Margalis, who finished third, was more than seven seconds behind Ryan, eight behind me.

“Nice job, Doggy,” I said to him after it was over.

“That hurt,” he said.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I said. Then I told him, “We got this in Beijing. Let's go for it. Let's go get gold and silver in Beijing.”

All smiles, I saw Bob a few moments later. That's when I let him in on how my heart had been galloping along beforehand. I didn't tell you because I knew it would turn you catatonic, I said.

Lochte's time that night was three seconds better than he had ever gone before. At this level, that's an incredible amount of time to knock off. If I was planning on me getting gold in the 400 IM in Beijing, Lochte silver—for sure, Lochte obviously had other plans. But the question Lochte would now have swirling around inside his head was: Could he get better still, or had he already maxed out?

“Going into the race, I thought I could beat him. I hate to lose. I don't like it at all,” Lochte said afterward.

He also said—and this is why after the Trials, heading toward Beijing, I thought the 400 IM could be the toughest individual race on my schedule—“I know there are a lot of places where I can improve.”

•   •   •

Though I respect Lochte immensely, love to race him, understand—I was not afraid of him, concerned about him, worried about him.

Whatever he was doing to get himself ready for the Olympics was out of my control.

I don't worry about other guys when I'm training, not even Lochte. I get myself ready. Of course I'm racing at the Olympics, or anywhere, against other guys. But I'm also racing against the clock. And, maybe mostly, against myself, to see how good I can be.

That said, I want to be clear: I have the utmost respect for my competitors. I love to race them. Those guys help me. The faster they get, the faster I get, because I don't want to lose.

If I could do 4:05 at Trials, I thought, maybe I really could do 4:03. My lactate response after the 4:05 proved perfectly normal. Which made me think: I'd had a racing heartbeat beforehand yet had thrown down a world record, and immediately afterward the blood work showed I was completely back to normal.

Which made me also think that it's all in how you respond to pressure.

I also knew there were things I could fix to get me to 4:03. I knew my breaststroke could be faster. I knew I could go out harder in the fly and still be relaxed. That's one of the biggest things I have in the medley; I can go out so much faster than other guys in the fly, that first leg, yet be more relaxed and comfortable. It's called easy speed. I have it.

3:07.

The dream kept visiting me throughout my week in Omaha, as I went on to qualify to represent the United States at the Beijing Games in five individual events: the 400 IM, 200 free, 200 fly, 200 IM, and 100 fly.

I also swam 47.92 in the preliminaries of the 100 free, the
tenth-fastest time ever. The point of that swim was to be in the pool for the 400 free relay, nothing more. I didn't even swim the semifinals or finals of the 100 free.

After the Trials, then, it seemed all but certain I would swim at the Games in three relays: the 400 free, the 800 free, and the 400 medley.

All in, eight chances for gold.

All in, including preliminary and semifinal swims, 17 races in just nine days.

After the Trials, all of us on the U.S. team went off to Palo Alto, California, for a training camp; then to Singapore, for more practice but in the same time zone as Beijing; then, finally, on to Beijing.

In Palo Alto, I was on my game. Bob said it felt like every day in Palo Alto for him, watching me, was like Christmas. However, Lochte was on, too.

Lochte and I don't do a lot of head-to-head sets because, as Bob figures, somebody's likely to learn something about the other guy. One morning, however, we lined up for a complicated set, four of each stroke, that ended with fast 50s of each stroke—fast meaning race pace. On the fly, Lochte was close to me; on the back, dead even; on the breast, he was perhaps a full second ahead, a huge difference; we were dead even again on the free.

I was happy with the set. Bob was happy, too, but you could almost see him thinking, hmmm. I knew he had noticed how fast Lochte had gone during the breast.

If I never once imagined Ryan beating me, Bob probably thought about it every day. Maybe that's the way we have to go.

The Singapore camp was mostly about resting and recovering, not hard training. I did do one butterfly set that undeniably hinted at what kind of shape I was in: three 100 flys, with easy 200s in between, each 100 faster than the other. I did the last one in 51.6. It was maybe the best practice I had ever done, and just to put it in perspective: A week before the 2007 Worlds in
Melbourne, I pushed a 53.8, which Bob and I both thought was terrific.

So, a 51.6. Bob walked over to another one of the American coaches and said with a big smile, well, my work is done, I'm officially on vacation.

Hardly. But we were both feeling good about where I was.

When swimmers are gearing up for a big meet, we go through a cycle that's called “shave and taper.” As the meet draws near, the idea is to keep training but include more rest, drawing on the weeks and months of hard training beforehand, the objective being to peak at the meet itself. That's called the taper. The challenge is in getting the timing right, complicated by the fact that what works for one swimmer might not—indeed probably won't—work for another. There's no one-size-fits-all. Bob puts it this way: When you taper swimmers, it's like a haircut. You never know if it's any good until it's too late.

That 51.6 also suggested my taper was dead-on where it needed to be.

As for the shave, swimmers shave their bodies before a major competition on the theory that body hair creates resistance. You have to shave everywhere; well, everywhere that isn't covered by your suit. It makes you feel clean and smooth. Super-clean and super-smooth.

For most of the winter, in Ann Arbor, I had let my beard grow. As the year went on, I showed up at most pre-Olympic events with facial hair, sometimes a goatee, other times an excellent Fu Manchu. I'm just messing around with it a little bit, I told everyone after we got to Beijing, sporting the Fu.

When the facial hair goes away, that's how you know I'm getting serious.

I showed up for my first Olympic swim in Beijing, the prelims of the 400 IM, clean shaven. Even the hair on the back of my neck was neatly trimmed. Courtesy of Lochte.

He didn't have me trim his; he likes to keep his hair long and
shaggy. Besides, no one would trust me with clippers. Or at least no one should.

If it seems just a little weird that Lochte would be trimming my hair one day and then we'd be racing each other two days after that for Olympic gold—well, that's both the way swimming is and the way he and I get along. Someone's got to trim the hair on the back of your neck if you want it done, right?

During one of the media scrums before the Olympics started, Lochte had said, “When me and Michael talk, it's strictly anything but swimming. We don't talk about swimming at all. That's—I guess that's good for both of us. We're not always getting wound up in this whole Olympic thing. I mean, we have down time to relax.”

The day before the 400 medley prelims, Friday, August 8, was the day of the opening ceremony. Much as I would have loved to have gone to the ceremony, there was just no way; I had to swim the next day and couldn't run the risk of marching and then standing in the heat and humidity.

I didn't want to get up and worry about shaving the morning of the prelims, which were the following night, so I decided to shave down then. In our little suite in the Olympic Village, there was nothing on the floor to keep the water from the shower inside the shower itself; we were forever, it seemed, dealing with a small flood. I was in the shower, with my music on, shaving, and Lochte yelled out, hey, why are you shaving now?

When I explained to him what was up, he decided he would shave then, too.

While we were in the midst of shaving down, I said, referring to the 400 IM, let's finish this. One-two again. Erik and I did it in Athens. Dolan and Erik did it in Sydney. Dolan and Namesnik in Atlanta.

Let's get after it, I said.

Let's get after it, he said.

I knew I had to have a good first race, and that was a very
good thing. I can't emphasize it enough: A good first race sets the tone.

Laszlo Cseh, the Hungarian who had won the bronze in Athens, was in the first of the three seeded heats. He went 4:09.26. I watched that and thought, I'm going to have to go faster if I want to be in the middle lane in the final. And I definitely wanted to be in the middle in this race.

Lochte went in the next heat. 4:10.33. At this point, with my heat still to go, five guys had already gone 4:12 or better. I was thinking, okay, get after it.

At 150 meters, my butterfly leg already over, halfway through the backstroke, I realized I was going fast. I was, in fact, under world-record pace. I thought to myself, not so fast, not tonight. The last 200 meters, I put it on cruise control. I hit the wall, took my goggles off, looked at the clock, and saw 4:07.82.

An Olympic record.

I did not expect that at all.

My prelim time was a full 44-hundredths better than my winning time in the finals in Athens.

And honestly, while this prelim race didn't hurt that bad, my strokes didn't feel the way I quite wanted them to. I could do better.

Cseh was asked after the prelims if he could win. “That will be hard,” he told the reporter. “I'll try everything but that will be hard. If somebody wants to win this race, they need a 4:05.” His personal best, as I knew well, was 4:07.96.

Lochte said, “If I'm right there with him, then there's pressure. We'll see what happens.”

I felt no pressure. My plan was to get some sleep and be ready to go in the morning.

Amid dreams of 3:07.

•   •   •

In the summer of 2001, Jacques Rogge, who at that time was the newly elected president of the International Olympic Committee, had a conversation with Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports. NBC, as it had since 1988, would be broadcasting the Summer Games. Beijing is twelve hours ahead of New York. The 2000 Olympics from Sydney, fifteen hours ahead of New York, had largely been shown on tape delay. That had rubbed some critics entirely the wrong way. Now, Ebersol wanted to know, was it possible for certain events in Beijing—swimming and gymnastics, mostly—to be moved around, switched so the finals took place in the morning, Beijing time? If so, they could be shown live in prime time on the East Coast on NBC, which was paying the IOC nearly $900 million for the right to broadcast the Beijing Olympics.

Rogge said he'd have to get back to Ebersol. The IOC president would have to check with the heads of the international swimming and gymnastics federations. At an Olympics, even though most people think the IOC is in charge of everything, those federations are actually still in charge of running the sports themselves.