The Hindu : Sport / Olympic Games : What sets Phelps apart

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Friday, Aug 15, 2008
ePaper | Mobile/PDA Version

Sport

Sport - Olympic Games

What sets Phelps apart

The 100m butterfly final is going to be very interesting, writes Mark Spitz

I am not surprised that Michael Phelps has been winning medals and breaking World records. He is in very good form, he is swimming very well and smashing the records that he did not do in the trials. He has arrived in Beijing well rested.

What is the physical difference between him and the rest?

There is not one. There are a lot of guys swimming who have legs and arms just as long as him and feet just as big. What sets him apart is his power of mind, his determination, his capacity to dominate his emotions and block out physical necessities such as pain and fatigue.

He is capable of regulating himself in the heats and not qualifying with the fastest times. And then he wins the final in a World record time.

Unstoppable

He appears unstoppable. He is preparing perfectly. I think, definitely, this is his moment in history.

He is going to be capable of winning the 200m medley because team-mate Ryan Lochte will only have 25 minutes between the backstroke final and the medley final. Tomorrow Michael will win his sixth gold of the Beijing Games.

The 100m butterfly is going to be very interesting. I don’t know what kind of shape team-mate Ian Crocker is in or how he is swimming because nobody has seen him, so we will have to wait for the heats and the semifinals to see how he is. Whenever Michael has competed in the 100m butterfly he has come from behind to win. It is a question of strategy because Crocker is very quick in the first 50 metres.

Jason Lezak beat his personal best by one and a half seconds in the 4x100m freestyle relay. If Crocker is capable of swimming a new personal best at exactly the right moment in the final and taking a second off of his own World record then it is going to be a very tight race.

In Athens Michael won by one hundredth of a centimetre and in the worlds in Melbourne by three hundredths of a centimetre. The margins are very small.

The fact that he does not have the record for the 100m butterfly is a great motivation for him. It is the only one left for him. But what really interests him is the gold. If before the games you had told him to write on a piece of paper which gold he wanted the most I think he would have said the 100m butterfly because he knows that he has a certain disadvantage. He knows there is someone out there faster than him. Crocker has the World record. In the other races he is the fastest.

The final of the backstroke between Lochte and Aaron Peirsol is also going to be very interesting. The two of them share the World record so this one is not to be missed.

Everybody is asking why so many World records are being broken. Nobody had competed in this pool before. It is deeper than the pools that the competitors have been used to. Because it is deeper the perception psychologically is that the wall is much closer. From under the water it seems that the pool is shorter and that makes a swimmer want to swim faster. The suits? Technically perhaps they have something to do with the faster times but I don’t think it is something that any expert would be able to prove. Perhaps it is a factor with a percentage but it varies from swimmer to swimmer. Everyone swims in the same suit, so there is no special advantage for one swimmer over another.

I was watching the 100m freestyle final between Alain Bernard and Eamon Sullivan. It is strange. I am going to let you in to a secret.

It always works. In a tight final, the first swimmer to look up at the scoreboard is the one who has won the race.

The scoreboard does not show automatically who has won the race. Even if it be a matter of milliseconds that sequence of who looks up at the screen first tells you who has finished first. — Distributed by Asia Features

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Sport