In the months (really, the entire year) leading up to the US Olympic swim trials, much ado was made about the state of Michael Phelps.
None of it was particularly positive.
He was not in peak physical condition.
The world had caught him.
American swimming phenom Ryan Lochte, in particular, had caught and passed him, a hysteria that only grew after Lochte beat Phelps somewhat handily in the 400-meter individual medley on the first day of trials.
“And here we are.”
My guess is Tiger Woods certainly was not looking to speak for Phelps after winning at Congressional earlier this month. And yet he summed up perfectly why it is that great athletes like Phelps and him rarely go down as easily as predicted, or in a timely fashion.
“I remember there was a time when people were saying I could never win again,” Woods somewhat gloated after winning the AT&T National.
“That was, I think, what, six months ago?
“Four months ago.
“Here we are.”
Here we are, indeed. A week removed from the conclusion of US Olympic swim trials and just 18 days until the 2012 London Olympics, and the greatest swimmer in the world is still Michael Phelps.
He qualified in every single event he swam at trials. He beat Lochte head-to-head in three of their four common events.
He stayed in the 400-meter individual medley (which many had predicted him to drop) and gutted his way to a second-place finish.
By the time all was said and done in Omaha, Neb., he had set himself up to win eight gold medals in London or exactly how many he won in Beijing.
Phelps ended up withdrawing from the 200-meter freestyle because doing so means fewer swims and gives him a better chance for gold in the 100 and 200 butterfly and 200 and 400 IMs.
Three are Lochte events, also.
Can you imagine spending four years training harder than you ever have (as Lochte did), getting up every morning with the intent of beating Phelps (as Lochte did), of hearing how Phelps was only kind of training and then losing (as Lochte did)?
Of having him out-touch you at the wall twice?
This must have been what it was like to play basketball in the time of Jordan – to have him beaten, to watch him slowing down, to have him cornered in a no-win situation, only to be done in by The Shot, by The Air, by him just being him. There was no easy path in the time of Jordan, and so it is with Phelps.
This is not to say Lochte will lose, merely to note that he will have to earn it.
At a meet in Indianapolis back in March, I was talking with USA Swimming types about this idea of Phelps being vulnerable and a really smart voice made this point:
“If he’s training at all, Lochte is in trouble.”
Phelps may not be as good as he was years ago, but he is still damn good and better than almost everybody else. And everybody who predicted Phelps’ struggles must now backtrack and admit: We were wrong.
There are no better stories in sports than these, the tales of athletes who do what they are told they cannot because the dream is too big or they are too small. Woods and Phelps, and now Oscar Pistorius are why we watch.
Pistorius is the double-amputee runner who was added to South Africa’s Olympic track team Wednesday, not the paralympic version but the real deal. He had fought for years for this. I can only imagine over his lifetime how many times people had told him to shrink his dream to fit what they believed to be possible.
Be OK with being a paralympian. Accept there are limits on you because of being a double amputee. Being the first is hard, if not impossible.
You can’t, you can’t, you can’t, Pistorius was told.
“Today is truly one of the proudest days of my life,” Pistorius said in a statement after he just did.
This is why we love sports. Because sports remind us that can’t is a question not a statement, limits placed on us by others carry no weight and, sometimes, everybody is just flat-out wrong.
It was wrong to write off Woods after his flameout at the US Open in June. And it was wrong to write off Phelps because he had his butt handed to him by Lochte in Shanghai at the Worlds more than a year ago.
There is a reason why. They have something we cannot understand, that something that makes them great, that something that refuses to let them quit, that something that will not let them go down easily.
And here we are.
