EIGHT FOR PHELPS
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The United Sates' team, from left, Jason Lezak, Michael Phelps, Aaron Peirsol and Brendan Hansen celebrate winning the gold medal after the men's 4x100-meter medley relay final.
BEIJING — It was so surreal to be Michael Phelps here, to listen to people debate whether he is the greatest athlete in Olympic history after he passed a group of athletes including Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi to become the one with the most gold medals.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Michael Phelps after winning his eighth gold medal in Beijing. At left is Aaron Peirsol.
Phelps is a self-described klutz, a real fish out of water on land, with a surgical scar on his right wrist to prove it. The 23-year-old Phelps took a nasty stumble last October that imperiled his pursuit of Mark Spitz’s single Games record of seven gold medals. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell while climbing into a friend’s car in Michigan and broke his right wrist.
It made for a tough start to the training cycle that carried him through these Beijing Games, but the climax was perfect: On Sunday morning, Phelps was on the United States’ 4x100-meter medley relay that held off Australia for the victory, giving Phelps his eighth gold medal of these Games and his 14th over all. Winning in 3 minutes 29.34 seconds, the Americans set a world record, Phelps’s seventh of the Games.
Spitz’s record lasted 36 years, and it figures to be even longer before the world sees Phelps’s successor. In 1972, Spitz swam two strokes, the freestyle and the butterfly, and none of his swims covered more than 200 meters. Phelps swam all four strokes, at distances ranging from 100 to 400 meters, and was faced with three swims in each individual event, one more than Spitz had.
“It’s mind-boggling," said Keith Beavers of Canada, who finished seventh in one of Phelps’s events, the 200 individual medley. “The depth of the fields and how long this meet is, the things he’s doing are astounding, to say the least.”
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The United Sates' team, from left, Jason Lezak, Michael Phelps, Aaron Peirsol and Brendan Hansen celebrate winning the gold medal after the men's 4x100-meter medley relay final.
BEIJING — It was so surreal to be Michael Phelps here, to listen to people debate whether he is the greatest athlete in Olympic history after he passed a group of athletes including Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi to become the one with the most gold medals.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
Michael Phelps after winning his eighth gold medal in Beijing. At left is Aaron Peirsol.
Phelps is a self-described klutz, a real fish out of water on land, with a surgical scar on his right wrist to prove it. The 23-year-old Phelps took a nasty stumble last October that imperiled his pursuit of Mark Spitz’s single Games record of seven gold medals. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell while climbing into a friend’s car in Michigan and broke his right wrist.
It made for a tough start to the training cycle that carried him through these Beijing Games, but the climax was perfect: On Sunday morning, Phelps was on the United States’ 4x100-meter medley relay that held off Australia for the victory, giving Phelps his eighth gold medal of these Games and his 14th over all. Winning in 3 minutes 29.34 seconds, the Americans set a world record, Phelps’s seventh of the Games.
Spitz’s record lasted 36 years, and it figures to be even longer before the world sees Phelps’s successor. In 1972, Spitz swam two strokes, the freestyle and the butterfly, and none of his swims covered more than 200 meters. Phelps swam all four strokes, at distances ranging from 100 to 400 meters, and was faced with three swims in each individual event, one more than Spitz had.
“It’s mind-boggling," said Keith Beavers of Canada, who finished seventh in one of Phelps’s events, the 200 individual medley. “The depth of the fields and how long this meet is, the things he’s doing are astounding, to say the least.”
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