Phelps deserves way more attention
Posted: Tuesday, November 06, 2007 6:25 AM
Michael Phelps is the Michael Jordan, the Wayne Gretzky, the Hank Aaron, the Tom Brady, the Tiger Woods, the Roger Federer of his sport. But other than once every four years, most Americans are barely aware he exists.
His sport is swimming, and in swimming, as in track and field and gymnastics, the feeling of the public seems to be that if it doesn’t happen in the Olympics, it doesn’t count.
Consider what Phelps did in March in Australia. At swimming’s World Championships, he won seven gold medals and set five world records in the process. Back in the Golden Age of sports in the 1920s, that would have earned him a ticker-tape parade down Broadway. In this era, it earned him a day in the headlines. Most of the stories concentrated on whether he could do that in Beijing next year when it really counts rather than on the victories themselves.
He then returned to relative obscurity in Ann Arbor, Mich., where the 22-year-old hero takes a few classes at the University of Michigan, trains like crazy, and helps his coach, Bob Bowman, coach the university’s swim team.
The reason I’ve brought his name up is because Hilton Hotels, one of the companies that pays his bills and then some, is trying to get a little publicity out of their investment by hosting something called the “Hilton Swim to Beijing Relay.” It’s more than a bit of a misnomer: Instead of actually having a relay across the Pacific, which would be really cool and fun to cover, it’s really regular people swimming 6,250 laps – one for each mile to Beijing – in Hilton Hotel pools in Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Austin, San Francisco and Omaha.
Phelps kicked it off in Los Angeles on Monday, and he worked hard for whatever he’s being paid, giving a poolside seminar and spending a big chunk of his morning doing five-minute phone interviews with people he’ll never remember talking to.
“A goal of mine is to have swimming not an every-four-years sport,” he told me during my five minutes of talking with fame. “We train every day of the year and have competitions around the country and the world all the time. I want to raise the bar, get new faces involved, make it more exciting.”
Phelps really doesn’t get the publicity he deserves. As swimmers go, he’s as famous as anyone since Mark Spitz, but I’m not sure that Americans realize that he’s one of the most extraordinary athletes we’ve ever had the privilege of barely paying attention to.
Spitz won seven gold medals at the 1972 Olympics, when the competition wasn’t nearly as deep as it is today. Phelps was huge in Athens in 2004 when he won eight total medals, the most ever in swimming and tied for the most in any sport in one Olympics. But two of the medals were bronze, so to a lot of people his extraordinary accomplishment of winning six golds was overshadowed by the fact that he didn’t do the Mark Spitz thing and win seven.
He was kind enough not to erupt when I brought up the Spitz business. He’s honored by the comparisons, but, he said, “My goal has always to be the first Michael Phelps, not the second Mark Spitz.”
He said he’s been training for Beijing since the end of the Athens Games. Swimmers peak in their early 20s, and he’ll be 23 next year and at the peak of his powers.
What’s great about swimming is it’s an aerobic, low-impact sport, which allows a super talent like Phelps to swim multiple events and win seven races, including relays, in the course of week to 10 days. If you like winning, n sport offers more opportunities.
For Phelps, that’s the lure of the game – the chance to win and win a lot.
“I’m probably the most competitive person you’ve ever met,” he said.
