No Limits (9 page)

I doubt any of them are going to play in the NFL, I said.

Okay, she said. Now, what can you do with swimming?

I did not play football.

We went through much the same drill when I made a play to be on the school's golf team; it was a noncontact sport, I pointed out. Another nonstarter.

Mom calls what she did “planting seeds.” One winter day when I was in high school, it snowed. I suddenly wanted to go sledding. Mom said, oh, are you going to go to the world championships this summer or are you going to break your arm now?

Maybe, I said after I had a second to think, I shouldn't go sledding.

That's a good idea, she said. Because you're the one who'd be calling Bob to tell him you broke your arm, not me.

This was all about learning to weigh options and make decisions. Mom might have asked leading questions to help me get to the smarter choice. But I had to make the decision myself: Did I love swimming enough to push myself to be the very best I could be?

My goals in swimming were set particularly high because they were not—were never—limited to just one stroke. I wanted to do multiple events. I wanted to try everything. Bob simply reinforced that when he made me redo my strokes.

As we went along, Bob's biggest challenge became keeping a step ahead of me. I quickly picked up a keen understanding of how his program operates and how it is put together. To keep it fresh he had to find ways to change it up. He knew that would not only provide variety; it would keep me focused.

So, for instance, I would be asked to swim with my arms only, or my legs only, or with one arm or one leg.

I would even do butterfly and backstroke legs using only my right or left arm. That would isolate the one arm and make me concentrate on the way it moved through the water.

To improve my freestyle technique, I would do a drill that involved me keeping my elbows high while I pulled through the water with my fingertips. That would make my legs do more of the work.

I would swim in sneakers. While tethered to a pulley. Wearing a scuba vest. With an inner tube around my ankles.

All of these devices worked to increase resistance, the same way a baseball player takes swings in the warm-up circle with a donut on the bat. When the donut comes off, and it's time get in the batter's box for real, that bat feels a whole lot lighter and easier to swing.

A week before Bob and I would leave for Federal Way, Washington, those 2000 spring nationals where I would swim 1:59.02 in the 200 fly, Bob convened another meeting. This time it was with my mom, outside Meadowbrook.

“When we get back from Seattle,” Bob said, “we should talk.”

“Why, Bob? What's wrong?”

“Nothing is wrong at all. In fact, it's all good. But it's a matter of time before things start to change for Michael and nothing is going to be the same.”

“What do you mean?”

“He's way ahead of schedule right now and, at some point, I don't know when, we're going to need to get ready for media attention, hype, expectations. He'll need to prepare for that, and it will be on us sooner than we think.”

By then, Bob had for weeks been feverishly trying to assess possibilities for 2000, and the Sydney Olympics. He figured that I was suddenly in the mix for Sydney. Come 2004, I ought to make the team and probably win medals, maybe multiple medals. And in 2008, who knew? There were so many uncertainties, so many unforeseeable twists and turns along any journey. But come 2008 I might do something staggering. Something no one had ever done before.

•   •   •

A few weeks after the swim in Federal Way, I went to a meet at the University of Michigan. There I made the Trials qualifying standard in all of the events I entered. Jon Urbanchek, the Michigan
coach, had first seen me swim when I was eleven; his daughter was living in Baltimore and so he had stopped by. Urbanchek had been keeping an eye on me since—the boy might be a promising college swimmer—and said at that meet that I would probably make the 2000 Olympic team even though very few people knew even the first thing about me.

That June, as I turned fifteen, I held the American age-group records for boys ages thirteen to fourteen in both the 200 and 400 individual medleys, the 100 and 200 butterflys, and the 400 and 800 freestyles.

Swim geeks knew about me, maybe.

They also knew that were I to make the Games, I would be the youngest male swimmer to have qualified for a U.S. Olympic team since 1932, when thirteen-year-old Ralph Flanagan had made the team. In its 2000 Trials preview,
Swimming World
magazine said, “Fourteen-year-old Michael Phelps swam a phenomenal 1:59.02 at spring nationals but is probably a year or two from being a factor on the world scene.”

The 2000 U.S. Olympic Trials were held in August in Indianapolis. The story that year heading into the meet was Dara Torres. At thirty-three, she was trying to become the first swimmer to win medals in four Olympics. Her first Olympics had been in 1984. That was the year before I was born.

I was hardly Dara Torres. I still had braces on my bottom teeth.

Bob and decided I would swim three races: the 200 fly, 200 IM, and 400 IM.

On the second day, in the 400 IM, I finished eleventh. Shake it off, Bob said. Let's focus on the 200 fly.

Malchow, the 1996 Olympic silver medalist and world record holder in 1:55.18, was the clear favorite. Three or four guys, including me, the third seed, were probably capable of going under 1:58. Up in the stands, the seats my family had gotten were crummy. Mom moved down to stand in a tunnel down by the diving well, an area where no standing was allowed. An usher told
her to scoot. She said, “Just give me two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes.”

Before the race, Bob had told me that I'd probably be able to make up ground over the final 50 meters, per my style. Keep it close through the third turn, he said. Instead, at 150 meters. Mom started preparing an “I still love you” speech. Bob, too.

Over that last 50, I knew I was closing. But I had no idea whether I had closed enough. I touched. With my goggles on, I couldn't see the board right away, but I heard the announcer say my name and something about second place. I took the goggles off. The scoreboard said Malchow had come in first in 1:56.87. I was second, in 1:57.48.

My final 50 split had been nearly two seconds faster than Malchow's. He said on the pool deck, “I may have to retire sooner than I thought. He's exactly me four years ago. He doesn't know how much his life is going to change, but it's going to change real soon.”

Not that much. Bob made sure of that.

The morning after making the 2000 Olympic team, I swam in a preliminary heat of the 200 IM at the Trials. The top sixteen made it to the next round; I finished twentieth.

•   •   •

In Sydney, for the first time in Olympic history, the U.S. women's swim team roster was older than the men's. Malchow had been the only teenager on the U.S. team in Atlanta. Now there were eight of us, five of whom would serve as mainstays for the American team for years to come:

Vendt was nineteen.

Ian Crocker and Klete Keller were eighteen.

Aaron Peirsol was seventeen.

And I was fifteen, still months away from even having a driver's license.

In Sydney, at the village, I roomed with Peirsol. He would go on to win silver in the 200 back.

In my first Olympic swim, I won my heat, in 1:57.30. In my semi, I lowered that to 1:57 flat. In both races, I swam with the strings of my suit untied. All I can say is, I was fifteen. The good news is, my suit didn't come off. The bad news is, it was like showing up for a job interview wearing a gray suit only to realize you had a blue sock on your left foot and a brown one on the right. A lack of preparation.

Bob had no access to the Olympic Village. At these Games, he was not formally a U.S. coach. He did have access to the pool deck from the people who ran Australian swimming. The times are okay, Michael, he told me. But these are the Olympic Games. You are going to treat them right. What did we say about preparation?

The next night, the plan was for me to leave the village early so I would get to the pool with, as they say in Australia, no worries. Bob wanted me there two-and-a-half hours before the race.

My cell phone rang.

“Hello.”

“Hello, Bob.”

“Michael, are you here at the pool?”

“No, I'm going back to the village.”

“What? Now? Why?”

“I took the wrong credential. I was heading to the door and I grabbed Aaron's instead.”

Bad. Very bad. Of course Bob was upset. To his credit, he did not yell.

“Well, okay,” he said finally. “Let's get here and figure out what to do.”

I got to the pool with a little bit more than an hour to go. We shortened my warm-up. I was jittery. When we walked out onto the deck, instead of doing my thing behind the block I walked
over to Malchow to wish him luck. That's not the way it's done on the deck. I still don't know what I was thinking.

I swam that Olympic final in 1:56.50, a personal best, a time that would have won a medal at every previous Olympic final. It got me fifth. I was 33-hundredths of a second back of third place, and bronze.

Fifth. No medal.

Malchow won, in 1:55.35. He patted me on the back and said, “The best is ahead of you.”

Bob sent me to the pool the next day for a workout. The workout sheet said, “Austin WR.” That meant the 2001 spring nationals in Austin, Texas. No medal at the Olympics? New goal. World record in the 200 fly in Austin.

The final day of the swim meet in Sydney was medley relay day. I painted my face half red and half blue and wrote “Team USA” across my chest, and as I sat there, watching the American men and the American women win the medleys, I thought how cool it would be to swim the relays, which, at these Games, I had no chance of doing. At North Baltimore, I loved the feeling of being on a team. In Sydney, I loved it even more.

Maybe, I thought, in Athens.

And, I thought, maybe in Athens we could avenge the two freestyle relays, the 400 and the 800. Both were major American disappointments in Sydney, especially the 400.

Before Sydney, the United States had won the 400 each of the seven times it had been included on the Olympic program. The Australians wanted this one bad. It was in their country. The race was to be held on the first night of racing. They had Ian Thorpe, who at those Games would prove he was among the world's most dominant swimmers, assigned to the anchor leg. They were fired up, and then they got fired up even more because of Gary Hall, Jr., whose multiple Olympic medals included silver in the 100 free in 1996.

In an online diary published a month before the Olympics,
Gary had written how much he respected the Australian swimmers. But he closed the article with a prediction that no one in Australia was soon going to forget: “We're going to smash them like guitars.”

Everyone knew Gary would swim the anchor leg for the American team.

The rest was history.

An hour before the relay, Ian won the 400 free. He barely had time to change for the medals ceremony and then back into his bodysuit.

The Australians got out on the first leg. The Americans came back in the second. The Americans grabbed the lead in the first half of the third leg, but the Aussies came back. In the anchor leg, Gary passed Ian in the first length and turned six-tenths of a second ahead. With the home crowd roaring, Ian, who seemed so controlled, so languid almost in the water even as he was driving with ferocity to the wall, caught Gary with about 20 meters to go and edged ahead.

Ian knew when he touched that he had won. He sprang from the pool, and the Australians celebrated, with Michael Klim, who had taken the leadoff leg for the Aussies, memorably performing a mocking air-guitar concert on the deck.

“I doff my swimming cap to the great Ian Thorpe,” Gary said later. “He had a better finish than I did.”

I took it all in.

Lost in the commotion, at least for most people, was that third leg.

The American who swam that third leg: Jason Lezak.

•   •   •

The United States won thirty-three swimming medals in Sydney. Of the forty-eight swimmers on our team, forty-one came home with at least one medal. I was one of the seven who didn't.

In Austin the next spring, I got my world record. I defeated
Malchow and went 1:54.92 in the 200 fly. I had become the youngest male ever to hold a world record. I was fifteen years and nine months old. Thorpe had been the youngest before that, sixteen years and ten months.

Not accomplishing my goal in Sydney had driven me for all the months in between. I had always known how badly it hurt to lose, how much I hated it. Now I had concrete proof of how losing could motivate me to reach my goals at the highest levels of swimming.

The win in Austin earned me a trip to the 2001 world championships, in Fukuoka, Japan. I won the 200 fly—my first world title—and lowered the world record again, to 1:54.58.

That summer, I started to get asked more and more about the 2004 Olympics. If I could make the team, I said, I'd like the chance to medal in more than just one event. I was looking at the two flys, the 100 and 200, and the two medleys, the 200 and 400. This wasn't bragging. This was a reflection of how I had always trained, with an emphasis on versatility.

That summer, too, I signed an endorsement contract with Speedo. The deal was for four years, through 2005. I was barely sixteen, the youngest American male swimmer to turn professional.

It was about that time as well that, as I kept saying to Bob, why are all these people all of a sudden asking me about Mark Spitz?

Mark made himself legendary in Munich in 1972. But his excellence and potential had been apparent for years. In 1967, when he was seventeen, he won five gold medals at the Pan American Games in Mexico City. He then predicted he would win six golds at the 1968 Summer Games, again in Mexico City. He did win two golds, in the relays. But no more. In his last individual event, the 200 fly, he finished last.