No Limits (7 page)

Eddie Reese, our U.S. men's head coach, told reporters, “We just don't know how good that is. If somebody ten or fifteen years ago would have said the 400 IM will be won in 2008 in 4:03.8, I'd have bet everything I had or would ever get that it wouldn't happen.”

As soon as Bob finished telling me the swim was awesome, he reverted to coach mode. He actually had visualized himself how he would coach at this exact moment, not getting overly excited over any one race.

Even though, as we talked about later, he was also thinking to himself that it may really be hard for Michael to get beat.

On the medals stand a little while after the race, the American flags, along with the Hungarian one, went up, just like in Athens. But no wreath this time.

As the flags were lifted up into the rafters, as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, my eyes started watering. For me, this was a rare public show of emotion. I couldn't help it, didn't want to help it. I was thinking of all the ups and downs I had weathered since Athens, how hard I had worked, the sacrifices that had been made by so many to help get me to just this moment.

I so appreciated all of it.

I thought to myself: Sing. Sing out the national anthem there on the podium. But I couldn't stop crying.

Bob got teary-eyed, too, glad there was no camera on him.

Just when it looked like I might start sobbing or something, as the anthem reached “…the home of the brave,” the music accidentally cut off.

All I could do was laugh.

And think: seven more chances, maybe, for the Chinese to get the American anthem right.

Bob is not the most technologically advanced individual. He has, however, discovered a little something on the Internet called Google. This was, for him, a major advance. Now he could read almost anything and everything written about me, and us, and about swimming in general.

I don't bother reading much, if any, of it. It can seem overwhelming.

Bob is not overwhelmed. He loves fishing for stories. And he not only reads but remembers what was said.

I won the 400 IM on Sunday morning, the 10th. Because the schedule was flipped—finals in the morning, prelims and heats often at night—the Sunday night schedule included the heats of the 400 free relay. I didn't swim in those heats; instead, I raced in the prelims of the 200 freestyle.

At major swim meets such as the Olympics, the guys who swim the prelims for the American team are not the same four
guys who swim the final. There are good reasons for that. One, the prelim saves the guys in the finals lineup from the exertion of an added race. And, two, the prelims give more guys a chance to make the Olympic team, with the bonus that if the finals guys win a medal, the prelim swimmers get that medal, too. So, for instance, a winning swim in the finals means a gold medal not just for those four guys but for each of the prelim swimmers, too. It works the same way in track and field. The prelim guys get a medal if the finals guys do.

At the U.S. Olympic Trials, the prospect of being on the relays makes the 100 and 200 freestyle races that much more exciting. The top two finishers earn the right to swim in the individual event at the Games as well as the relay; for example, the 100 winner gets to swim in the 100 at the Games and the 400 relay. But the third-through sixth-place guys get to go to the Olympics, too, at the very least for the relay prelims, in some cases, the relay final.

Garrett had won the 100 at the Trials. Jason had come in second.

Cullen finished third.

Then came Nathan Adrian, Matt Grevers, and Ben Wildman-Tobriner.

For the finals, Garrett and Jason were locks, and so was I, because of the 47.92 I had produced at the Trials.

Cullen, Nathan, Matt, and Ben would be swimming the prelims with extra incentive. The one who swam the fastest split in the prelims would get to swim in the finals, too.

Each of them was fully deserving.

Cullen is, in a family sense, somewhat like me. He's very close to his mother. In his case, his dad died of lung cancer when Cullen was sixteen; his mother is invariably at our meets and you can tell that he has a very, very good relationship with her. Cullen was born in New York City and nearly drowned as a child when the inner tube he was riding at a water park flipped over. He
didn't know how to swim. It took CPR, oxygen, paramedics, all of it to save his life. After that, his parents put him in swim class. In 2006, at the Pan Pacific Swimming Championships, one of the major meets of that year, he set a meet record in winning the 50 free. Cullen, Jason, Neil Walker, and I won the 400 free relay and set a world record, which made Cullen the first African-American swimmer to hold or share a long-course record. Making the Beijing team meant he was the third African-American to make the U.S. Olympic swim team, after Anthony Ervin and Maritza Correia. Cullen was a big part of a USA Swimming program called “Make a Splash,” which is based on chilling statistics: Nearly six of every ten black Americans can't swim and African-American kids ages five to fourteen are nearly three times as likely to die of drowning as their white counterparts. One of the reasons that's cited for the dismal figures on minority swimmers—Hispanic-Americans are also far more likely to drown at a young age—is a lack of role models. His message is obvious, so simple, so common-sense: Hey, black kids can swim, too.

Nathan, who's from Washington state and took off what would have been his sophomore year at Berkeley to train for the Olympics, is one of those guys who's poised to be in the next great wave of top American swimmers. He was nineteen in the summer of 2008. “I think Nathan Adrian is a phenomenal talent and you can expect great things from him,” Gary Hall, Jr., with whom Nathan had been training, said at the Trials. Mark Schubert, the USA Swimming head coach, said that Nathan “reminds me of Matt Biondi in 1984,” which is high praise, no doubt. Matt, who also went to Cal, won five gold medals at the Olympics in 1988 in Seoul. Nathan's story was great because it's not just that he finished fourth in the 100 at the Trials; it's how he got there. In the semifinals, he had finished in 48.89. That was good enough only for a tie in ninth place, with Alex Righi. Only the top eight go on to the finals. Then, though, Lochte scratched from the 100 final to concentrate on other events, the 200 back and the 200 IM. So
Nathan and Alex had a swim-off. Just the two of them in the pool. Nathan won. That got him to the finals and then, in the finals, swimming in an outside lane, he got that fourth-place finish.

Of all the guys on the American team, Matt is the one Bob had been watching with particular interest. Both of Matt's parents are Dutch; thus, he could have swum for Holland. He said, nope, I'm an American. President Bush liked that story so much he told it, with Matt among those looking on, at a ceremony in the Rose Garden in July, before the Olympics. Matt grew up in Lake Forest, Illinois, north of Chicago, and swam in college for Northwestern, where he was a four-time NCAA champion and earned twenty-seven All-America citations. As good as he was there, he got even better when he moved after graduating in 2007 to Tucson, Arizona, to train with Frank Busch and Rick DeMont.

Ben, like Matt, is a phenomenally smart guy. He was a Rhodes Scholar finalist in the fall of 2007, after graduating from Stanford with a degree in biomechanical engineering, and was bound for medical school after the Olympics. His grandfather was a justice on the California Supreme Court. All this, and Ben had won the 50 free at the 2007 Worlds in Melbourne.

When Nathan, Cullen, Ben, and Matt lined up in that order on the blocks on Sunday night in the first of the two relay heats, the world-record still stood at 3:12.46, the time that Cullen and I had helped set in 2006 at the Pan Pacs.

So much for that. When Matt, swimming the anchor leg, touched, the scoreboard said, 3:12.23.

In that heat, the Australians finished second, in 3:12.41, under the 2006 mark, too.

In the next heat, the French finished in 3:12.36, again under what had been the record time.

Afterward, one of the French swimmers, Frederick Bousquet, said, “I talked to my coach, and he said the ideal position was to
finish second behind the United States, and they beat the world record and they come in as favorites tomorrow, and tomorrow morning we take all that they have.”

He also said he had looked at the four Americans in the ready room just before the prelims and saw uncertainty. “They didn't look at us, although they usually do,” he said. “We could sense that they were a little bit afraid.”

These remarks followed those of another French swimmer, Alain Bernard, who at the European championships in March had set a world record in the 100 free: 47.5, same as my goal time for 2008. Amid his arrival in Beijing, he uncorked some trash talking.

“The Americans? We're going to smash them. That's what we came here for.

“I'll start my Games in the 4x100 meters freestyle relay final, confident that my pals will have qualified easily.

“If the relay goes according to plans, then we'll be on a roll.”

The next morning, Monday the 11th, Bob and I were at the village dining hall, along with Jason and maybe one or two others. Bob, the Internet sleuth, had found the French comments. He said, hey, guess what I read, then proceeded to describe what he had found.

Bob added, and here came a loaded code phrase that he knew would carry extra zing, it says here they think they're pretty much going to smash you like guitars.

Comments like that just make me more fired up.

I said, that's nice; this is going to be fun.

•   •   •

There's no point in talking smack, absolutely no need to talk beforehand about what you're going to do. It's not worth it, not worth playing the mind games. Just get in the water and swim. People who talk about what they're going to do, nine times out of ten don't back it up. It's always better, and a whole lot smarter, not to say anything, to simply let the swimming do the talking.

There's a saying that goes precisely to the point, of course: Actions speak louder than words.

That saying is 100 percent true.

That saying is one of Bob Bowman's all-time favorites.

I learned that early on.

Every summer, the North Baltimore club holds a long-course meet. It's one of the major events on the NBAC calendar. The night before the meet—this was when I was maybe twelve, not all that long after Bob and I had started working together—he was overseeing what was, for him, a pretty easy practice. At the end of it, he asked our group to swim four 50s. Give me a little effort, he said. Well, of all the kids in the group, there was only one who was not giving Bob that little effort. One of the girls in the group even said, Michael, you'd better get going or we're going to have to do this all over.

Everybody got out of the pool, and Bob said, okay, everybody, that'll be it, except, and now he looked right at me, for you.

I uncorked one of the great twelve-year-old tantrums of all time. I screamed, you can't make me do it! And so on. A huge, horrible, public scene, a direct challenge to Bob's authority in front of everyone.

Bob said to me, you can do what you want, but as of now you're not a member of NBAC, and until you come back and do the set, you never will be.

I went home in tears.

That night, Mom called Bob. He told her, until Michael does the set he can't be in the meet. So what, she said, can we do?

Take a meeting, that's what. At five-thirty the next morning.

The meeting was in the club's aerobics room. Bob had set up a table and four chairs.

Four?

I showed up with a baseball hat on my head. Bob made me take it off. Mom and I sat down on two of the chairs, Bob grabbed a third. And in came my father, a Maryland state trooper,
in full uniform. My eyes got wide. At that point, my father was still much more involved in my life; even so, for him to show up like that, at that hour of the morning, meant this was no-doubt-about-it serious.

Bob said, Michael, there's a triangle here. There's your dad. Your mom. Me. Guess who's in the middle?

Me, I said, very softly.

That's right, he said. You've got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. You have to do what we want you to do.

Bob turned to my parents. Before Michael can swim in the meet, Bob said, he has to do the set.

So I did.

And I had to do it to Bob's satisfaction.

Which I did.

When Bob and I started, he knew of me mostly as Whitney's younger brother. He had been introduced as North Baltimore's new assistant the day after I turned eleven. One day, our team was swimming at Towson State, and two of the kids started throwing towels and soap around the men's bathroom. I walked in; some of the older kids started shouting out my name, as if I'd been the one who started the whole thing. In walked Bob.

“Michael Phelps,” he said, “what did you do?”

“I didn't do anything! It was them!”

“Well, then why are they shouting your name?”

“Ask them.”

“No, Michael. I'm asking you. What did you do?”

Nothing, at least that day. As I walked out there, I thought, it'll really stink if I ever have to work with that guy. As Bob walked away, he was thinking, thank goodness I will never have to coach that kid.

That's how it all began. I thought he was a such a jerk. I thought, no way I'm ever swimming for him.

He soon realized I was just scared out of my mind.

A few months later, the North Baltimore club executed a staff
shake-up. Bob was put in charge of a set of promising swimmers ranging in age from high school to me.

I still remember the first set he gave us: a 400 free, a 400 stroke of any sort, one 400 IM and a 400 free. I did each set three times. I still remember it because it hurt. A lot.

Mostly, Bob wanted to see how we would react.

He watched me finish the final set of four 100 frees with intrigue. I was coming back faster at the end of set—1:05 for each hundred—than at the beginning. He didn't know then what to make of that.

Another early set went like this: a 200 freestyle to start; then a 200 IM; four 50s of each stroke; four 100 frees with a small break in between each one—what's called an interval, the time between depending on any number of things—ending with a 400 IM. We were asked to do this particular set four times. I was twelve, and I just killed it, had a great set. Maybe, Bob thought, this kid really could be something special.

A few months after Bob had been coaching me, he issued orders for a pretty difficult practice, especially for someone my age. When it was over, all the other kids were dragging. They got out of the pool slowly. They got their towels and clothes slowly. I got out but still had a ton of energy, so much that I kept running to the side of the pool, filling up my cap with water and dumping the water on the other kids' heads. Bob ran over to tell me to knock it off. He told me that if I was still this frisky he could for sure make practices a lot harder.

I said, and Bob has never forgotten this, I will never get tired.

We have since dispelled that rumor.

You have to be mentally tough to go through it with Bob. If you're not mentally tough, you're not learning what he's teaching you. Growing up, I used to tell Bob when he would order a set that would make my eyes widen, I can't do that. He would say, there's a difference between “can't” and “won't.” Maybe you won't do that, he would then say. But you can.

If you say “can't,” you're restricting what you can do or ever will do. You can use your imagination to do whatever you want. “Can't,” he would say, that's a tough word.