No Limits (23 page)

In the water, Cavic and I hurtled toward the wall together.

Cavic opted to glide in.

I chopped my last stroke. It was short and fast, a half-stroke, really. I still can't fully explain why. Maybe it was experience. Absolutely competitive will. There wasn't time, really, to form a complete thought. It was an impulse. I knew I had to do something. The situation demanded action. Gliding was not going to
win gold. It didn't for Matt Biondi and it for sure wasn't going to for me.

The Omega timing pads take roughly 6.5 pounds of pressure—3 kilograms—to trigger. Anything less and the pad thinks it's just waves and won't respond. Anything that much or more, you turn off the clock.

Both Cavic and I touched, turned, and looked at the scoreboard.

Next to my name, it said: 1.

I looked over to where Bob had to be, pointed that way with my left hand, slapped the water with both hands and roared in victory, Olympic champion again, four years ago by four-hundredths of a second, now by one-hundredth, the smallest margin there was or ever could be. Mark Spitz had won seven medals at a single Olympics; now, with stupendously hard work, ferocious willpower, and a little luck, so had I.

In that instant, I had just matched the great Spitz.

At the finish, Bob initially thought I had lost. He muttered, a note of dejection in his voice, referring first to Cavic, then to me, “Oh, he got him.” Then Bob swiveled to his right, to take in the board. In that instant he went from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs: “Oh! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!”

As Cavic and I had driven toward the wall, my mom had put up two fingers, for second. As we hit the wall, Hilary, still standing, still screaming, had her left arm around Mom. The two of them looked up at the board and Hilary started shouting, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He won, he won, he won!” Mom just stared in disbelief. Hilary said, again, “He won!”

Mom sunk down into the chair as if she didn't have any bones. She was numb. Stunned.

Hilary and Whitney and everyone around them were going nuts, jumping up and down, shaking, freaking out, Hilary yelling over and again, “I can't believe it!”

In the pool, I said to Cavic, “Nice job.”

Then I turned to Crocker. He and I shook hands and hugged. I leaned back, right elbow on the deck and lifted my left hand in the air, wagging just one finger high above me.

First, in 50.58 seconds, a flash of history in the present tense and proof that no matter what you set your imagination to, anything can happen if you dream as big as you can dream.

Cavic touched in 50.59. Lauterstein was third, in 51.12. Crocker was fourth, out of the medals, in 51.13, by one-hundredth of a second.

•   •   •

The close finish drew a formal protest from the Serbian team. Officials from FINA, the international swimming federation, said video replay confirmed what the scoreboard said.

The issue was never going to be whether Cavic ought to be the winner and me the runner-up, according to Cornel Marculescu, executive director of FINA. It was, he told reporters afterward, whether the race ought to be called a tie. FINA officials reviewed the video evidence frame by frame, and the race referee, Ben Ekumbo of Kenya, said, “It was very clear the Serbian swimmer had second, after Michael Phelps. It is evident from the video that it was an issue of stroking. One was stroking, the other was gliding.” To make sure everyone was on the same page, FINA officials shared with the Serbian team the video evidence; if the Serbs had not been satisfied, they could have taken the protest to an appeal jury. Instead, Marculescu said, they were satisfied that I'd won and Cavic had come in second.

Cavic wore his silver medal to a news conference and said, referring to the race, “I'm stoked with what happened. I'm very, very happy.”

Before the race, as Bob told me, Cavic had a lot to say. Afterward, Cavic had a lot more to say. At that news conference, he said, “Perhaps I was the only guy at this competition who had a
real shot at beating Phelps one-on-one. This is completely new to me; I've never been in such a position with so much pressure, and I am very proud of how I handled that whole race and how I was able to keep myself under control emotionally and the stress level. It is a frightening thing to know that you're racing Michael Phelps, but I think that it's even more frightening to know that it's going to be a very, very close race and that nobody knows the outcome.

“…I read a lot of articles online. I like to read—it encourages me and I knew a lot of people had their money against me. That was totally understandable. Michael has been breaking world records here by seconds. This is something that no other swimmer in swimming really does, so what do you expect from a man who breaks world records by seconds in the 100 fly? You know, I expected that he'd go a world-record time—maybe something close, like 50.2. But it was a real honor for me to be able to race with Michael Phelps and be in this situation where all eyes were on me as the one man that would possibly be able to do it. It was just great.

“Pieter van den Hoogenband talked to me yesterday and I told him, ‘Pieter, this is pretty stressful. I'm scared. I don't know what to expect.' And he just said, ‘Just enjoy the experience, just have fun, and don't get too nervous. This is a beautiful thing.' Just hearing this from a legend such as Pieter—it really kind of calmed me down and I was like, ‘He was right, the best races I've swum, I've swum when I was relaxed.'

“I believe I just did that here.”

Asked about the appeal, he said, “You know, people will be asking me this for years, and I am sure people will be bringing this up for years, saying that, ‘You won that race.' Well, you know, this is just what the results showed. This is what the electronic board showed. I guess I kind of have mixed emotions about it, you know. This could be kind of the where—if I had lost by a tenth of a second or two-tenths of a second, I could probably be
a lot cooler about this but with a hundredth of a second I'll have a lot more people really saying that, ‘You know, you won that race.' That kind of makes me feel good, but I'm gonna be happy with where I am.”

The very last question of Cavic's news conference went like this:

“In your mind, was Michael Phelps the gold-medal winner?”

“Uh, is Michael Phelps the gold-medal winner? He—I think if we got to do this again, I'd win.”

My style, as ever, was to let my swimming do the talking for me. Besides, there would never, ever be an “again.” The time to seize that moment was right then, right there.

When I chopped the last stroke, I thought at first that it cost me the race. But it turned out to be just the exact opposite. If I had glided, I would have been way too long, caught in what swimmers call just that, a long finish, the way Cavic was. Instead, I turned a long finish into a short finish. I knew that little extra half stroke had to be a quick stroke, fast as I could do it.

I did some highly technical little things right at the very end, too, which Cavic did not, and those bought me time and made a difference. My head was down; his came up. My feet were straight; his, again, came up. Swimming fast is, generally speaking, a horizontal proposition; vertical movements slow you down. It typically pays to be in as straight and horizontal a line as possible. I was. He wasn't.

After the race, my mom and my sisters got to come on deck for just a moment.

“We're so proud of you!” came the chorus. Mom had that glowing, adoring look that only mothers looking at their children can have. That look doesn't change when the kids get to be big kids.

I let them in on a secret: “I didn't realize I was that far behind.”

Still on the deck, I was put on the phone with Spitz, who was back in the States. “Epic,” he told me. “What you did tonight was epic. It was epic for the whole world to see how great you are.”
He also said, “When I look at Michael and I think of the lore of what he has done over the last four years—it's more remarkable than myself.” The two others with nine gold medals over an Olympic career were, as it turned out, in Beijing. Carl Lewis said, “The reality is, congratulations.” Larisa Latynina, the Soviet-era gymnast, wrote me a note that said, “You have shattered all sort of records with truly inspiring Olympic character.” It also said, “In ceding my record for most Olympic gold medals, I do it with little regret. I am sure we share the joy of competition and a timeless joy for excellence.”

Earlier in the week, I had said when asked about being “the greatest athlete in Olympic history,” that I was “kind of at a loss for words.” I explained, “Growing up, I always wanted to be an Olympian, and now to be the most decorated Olympian of all time, it just sounds weird saying it. I have absolutely nothing to say. I'm speechless.” Now I had won seven and, no matter how many times I was asked, I still felt as if I was at a loss for just the right thing to say. I tried to explain my feelings this way: “I knew that in my dreams I always wanted it, and thought that under perfect circumstances I could do it. Just believing all along that you can do it goes a long way.”

Maybe a little something extra helps, too—what Crock told me after the race. I'll never forget it. He said, marveling that I had somehow pulled it off, “You have to have angels with you, or something.”

No one could have been more supportive of my swimming for Mark Spitz's records than Mark Spitz.

Mark showed up in Omaha near the end of the 2008 Trials to take in the scene, and to tell anyone who would listen his emphatic prediction: I would win eight gold medals in Beijing.

“This is going to be history,” he declared. “He's going to do—what we say—a little schooling to the rest of the world, and it's going to be exciting for those that will see it in person and for those who watch it on TV.”

Mark also said that he had only good feelings about the possibility of seeing someone else in the record books on the line that says, “Most Golds Won at One Edition of Olympic Games, Individual.” He said, “Records are made to be broken,” adding, “Thirty-six years is a long time.”

He also said, sitting at the head table in a room off the warm-down pool in the Qwest Center, dozens of journalists scribbling
down everything he had to say, “It just dawned on me that it was forty years ago that I was at training camp, and I was going, wow, that is almost twice as old as Michael Phelps is now! Wow, I swam a long time ago and, it's okay, it's okay.”

I first met Mark in 2004, at the Trials in Long Beach, not until then, as improbable as that may seem in hindsight. I knew he was likely to show up at some point at those Trials—Mark is based in Southern California—but didn't know until after I won the 200 fly that Mark would be presenting nineteen-year-old me with the medal for the victory. At the podium, Mark shook my hand and leaned in to say a few words: “I'll be over in Athens to watch you, and I'm behind you all the way. I know what you're going through. I went through it once before. Enjoy it. Have fun with it. Go get 'em.” Mark has always had a gift for the dramatic and at that point he hopped onto the podium, grabbed my right wrist with his left hand and raised both of our arms to the sky. He then pointed to me with his right finger, as if to say, here's your new champion. It was, and is still, one of the most exciting memories swimming could ever have given me.

When I won six golds in Athens, Mark remained steadfastly encouraging. It was hardly a failure to win six gold medals, he would remind anyone who asked. Just wait, he would say. Michael is going to be better in 2008 than he was in 2004.

Through the years, Mark could also not have been more gracious in pointing out how swimming had changed from his time to mine. In 1972, swimming featured a semifinal round only for 100-meter events; in each of Mark's 200-meter events, he had to swim twice for a gold medal. I had to swim three times for each individual gold, with the exception of the 400 IM, an event with no semifinal. Over the course of the meet in Munich, Mark swam thirteen times in eight days, in all about 1,800 meters of racing, just over a mile; in Beijing, I would swim seventeen times over nine days for 3,400 meters, or just over two miles. In Mark's day,
American swimmers had very little international competition, and the relays, in particular, were all but guaranteed United States wins; by 2008, swimming was definitely global. The proof: In Beijing, swimmers from twenty-one countries would ultimately win medals. Moreover, Mark was not only the first to win seven golds; he was the first to win six. Going into Munich, he didn't have to deal with the same sort of media attention—not to mention that the media world in 1972 was not one filled with cable channels, Internet outlets, newspapers, magazines, all of which had a never-ending need for copy and outtakes. “I can unequivocally say he has shown a different type of courage than perhaps I did,” Mark said of me. “I was not chasing Mark Spitz's record.”

In Omaha, it was hardly surprising to see that Mark would show extraordinary insight about what awaited me in Beijing, his remarks almost foretelling the challenges in races such as the 100 fly: “There were so many things that had to go right with my story with each one of my events, and there is something that had to go wrong with someone else. So they didn't get that one flash of the greatest swim of their life to beat me. And it is kind of scary when you think about it, because it could have happened in any of the events.”

He also ticked off three concerns that might stop me from getting to eight:

I obviously had to win the first event, the 400 IM. That I had done.

I had to continue my “winning ways” in the 100 fly, which he, like most observers, had tagged as the single toughest individual event on my calendar, in part because it was the one event in Beijing I would be racing in which I was not the world-record holder.

I had won the 100 fly.

Finally, Mark said, Michael can't control the relays, adding, “Anything can happen.”

•   •   •

On paper, the medley relay, the final race of the Games at the Water Cube, looked like we should—repeat, should—win. But the Aussies had improved enough in their individual 100s to make a lot of people nervous. When you added up their best flat-start times in the four disciplines and compared them to ours, the Aussies were within 43-hundredths of a second, even if their best times had come in the semifinals, ours in the finals. Bob told my mom before the race that he thought our chances of winning were 60–40, maybe 70–30.

This was a relay the United States had never lost at the Olympics (not counting the Games in 1980 in Moscow, when the U.S. team didn't take part). The four of us in the finals—Peirsol, Hansen, me, Lezak—had been swimming medleys together since the 2002 Pan Pacs in Yokohama, when we set a world record. The 2004 team, with Crock swimming the butterfly leg in the finals, had won gold; Crock took the butterfly leg in the prelims of the medley in Beijing, so he stood to win gold again if we won in the finals.

And I was going for an eighth gold.

But that last element was not the be-all, end-all. “We absolutely respect and admire Michael's goals but the feeling on the team is that by no means does one man come first,” Aaron told the
New York Times
before the medley final.

“Honestly, when Lezak pushed out that relay, the next day guys were bringing up the fact that if Lezak didn't touch out, Mike might not have had his eight golds. It's not something Mike talks about. No one here is racing for second place, even the guys racing Mike. The feeling on our team is, we're all racing to win. He's doing exceptionally well; we're all rooting for him. But by no means is he the only one we're rooting for.”

All the U.S. coaches were nervous. Everyone knew how much was at stake.

Safe starts, they kept saying. Safe starts. If we heard it once we heard it a dozen times: If your start is a tenth too slow, you can make it up; if it's a tenth too fast, you're done. It's an awful feeling, we kept hearing, to swim wondering if you'd false-started.

Crock made sure in the preliminary to start safely, if cautiously. “When Phelps is done, I don't want to stand in the way, to do something stupid like '07,” he told a reporter later. “I want him to have every shot he's got.”

Grevers, who swam the backstroke leg in the prelim, acknowledged everyone's anxiety: “I don't think we were going to leave China if anyone DQ'd us,” he said.

The morning of the final, the Cube was so jam-packed, with attendance way past the announced capacity of about 17,000, that people were crammed four and five deep in the aisles. Kobe Bryant and LeBron James came back to root us on. Our teammates and coaches were there. My family, of course—Whitney in a gold-colored top, Hilary a gold jacket, both in gold on purpose. Mom opted for black, nervous as always before the start of the race. On deck, there wasn't much to say; we'd do any talking afterward.

I was more than fired up. I'd gotten a text message that morning from back home, from Troy Pusateri. When I was just starting out at North Baltimore, Troy was one of the older boys; he used to call me “Little Phelps.” Troy was always himself mentally tough, too; he went on to become a Navy SEAL. Of all the messages I got from home during the course of the 2008 Olympics, Troy's is the only one I saved so that I could read it afterward, get fired way, way up time and again. This is what it said:

“All right, brother man!! Last race!! This one is NOT for you…it's for your fans, like me, who you inspire every day for the past six years…it's for Bob and your mom…. for without them none of this would be possible…it's for the United States…the best damn country on the face of the earth…it's for history!! It's for you making this sport what it is today!! It's for all the
people who talked smack and doubted you ever!! It's for being the best Olympic athlete ever to grace this planet!!! Go get 'em!! Don't hold back!! You can do it, buddy!! I'm so damn proud of ya!! Give 'em hellllllllll !!!!!”

On the deck, we got ourselves ready as Aaron and the other backstrokers got into the water and got set to go. The individual medley starts with the butterfly; the medley relay starts with the backstroke, which only makes sense. If backstroke were not first, the starting backstroke swimmer and the finishing previous swimmer might well crash into each other.

Beep! Aaron and the others dove backwards, arms above their heads, and the race was on. The quiet of the start gave way to an immediate wall of sound all around us.

Aaron had won gold in the 100 back in both Athens and Beijing. His backstroke is elegant. And yet still so powerful. He got us off to a solid start, though, as it turned out, he was 62-hundredths of a second slower than his gold-medal swim earlier in the week. Fortunately, Australia's Hayden Stoeckel was 83-hundredths slower than the lifetime best he went in the 100 back semifinals.

Brendan went next. His time was respectable, 59.27, but he was passed by both Kosuke Kitajima of Japan—his 58-flat split the fastest of all time—and by Australia's Brenton Rickard. We were in third when it was my turn. The Japanese didn't have the speed in the third and fourth legs, so they were not much of a worry. So it was now me and Lauterstein—a rematch of sorts from the 100 fly the day before.

My start was deliberately super-slow. It was, in fact, so slow I actually saw Brendan's hands touch the wall. I was taking no chances.

Lauterstein got to the wall first but I just hammered hard on the turn. When I came up from underwater, I was in front. This was my last swim of the Games. I gave it everything I had. Everything.
I drove so hard that my finish was ugly. Caught between strokes again. This time I did glide. Had to.

When I touched, though, Jason had a cushion of 81-hundredths of a second.

In the seventeenth of my seventeen swims, even with that glide slowing me down, I laid down the fastest 100 fly leg in history, 50.15; Lauterstein's split of 51.03 was even faster than his 51.12 flat-swim for bronze the day before—but factoring in a relay flying start, not as fast as we had thought he might go. No way Jason was going to let himself, us, the United States down. He dug hard to the far wall. He turned and dug harder for home.

As soon as I touched, I sprinted out of the pool to watch the race from behind our block. The noise level in the building was now out of control. Except for the guys in the water, it seemed everyone in the building was yelling. I was excited beyond words but also calmly confident. About halfway through Jason's final lap, it became clear, even obvious—we were going to win. Standing there on the deck, I knew it. In the stands, Bob knew it, too. Eamon Sullivan was coming hard, but Jason was holding him off.

With 15 meters to go, Bob thought to himself—you know what, this is actually going to happen. They're going to win and Michael is going to have eight medals. He's not going to have seven; he's really going to have eight.

“Come on, Jason!” Mom was yelling. “Come on, Jason! Come on, Jason! Come on, Jason! Come on, Jason!”

Jason came home strong, and as he touched with his left hand, the roar of history enveloping all of us, my mom yelling, “Yes!” long and loud, holding the note as if she would never let it end, I pumped my fist in triumph, then grabbed Aaron and shouted, “Let's go! Let's go!”

Jason pulled himself up out of the water and we huddled, just the four of us. “We're part of history,” he said. Jason had gone
46.76 to Sullivan's 46.65; we had won by seven-tenths of a second; we had set a new world record, 3:29.34. I said, “Without what you guys just did for me as a team this whole week, none of this would have been possible. We worked as a team and we worked really well together. I want to thank you guys for the opportunity you gave me.”

In the stands, fate had put Ian Thorpe in the row immediately ahead of Mom and my sisters. He turned around and wished them congratulations, saying graciously and sincerely, “Good job. That was great.”

Mom cried and cried, tears of joy and relief and amazement.

We were honored after the race to be able to carry around an American flag that had flown in Iraq; it had been sent to one of our teammates, Larsen Jensen, a bronze medalist in Beijing in the 400 free. It made a special moment that much more special.

When the medals ceremony ended, walking along the side of the pool, I saw Mom and the girls and started climbing through the photographers to get to them. The photographers parted, allowed me to get to my mother and sisters, then, as if on cue, immediately closed in around us. Surrounded there by dozens if not hundreds of cameras, by thousands of fans still packed into the Water Cube, it nonetheless seemed as if we were in our own little bubble.

I said, “I'm so tired.”

•   •   •

Brendan won two breaststroke medals in Athens. In 2006, he set three world records in breaststroke events in three weeks. In Omaha at the 2008 Trials, he won the 100 breast. Then, to the surprise of many of us, he finished fourth in the 200 breast, failing to qualify in that event. What he did thereafter speaks to the kind of guy Brendan is. He immediately said he would try to help the two guys who beat him in the 200, Shanteau and Scott Spann. And then, when he could have begged off, Brendan went to sign
autographs and pose for photos at a session USA Swimming had organized.