Michael Phelps Wins Gold at Rio Olympics 2016 (The Evolution)

MICHAEL PHELPS AND HIS SWIM CAP
 By Carolyn Kormann , AUGUST 10, 2016
On the cusp of winning his twenty-first Olympic gold medal, Phelps gave fans a slapstick reminder of the mortal inside the myth.
On the cusp of winning his twenty-first Olympic gold medal, Phelps gave fans a slapstick reminder of the mortal inside the myth.
PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANÇOIS-XAVIER MARIT / AFP / GETTY
Earlier this year, Michael Phelps said that his decision to compete in one more Olympic Games had nothing to do with breaking more records or increasing his unprecedented gold-medal count. The asceticism and singular focus of the years leading up to Beijing, where he won gold eight times, had turned him into a machine, and Phelps just wanted to be human again. He told the world that he was on a personal journey to show that foibles and vulnerability—in his case, a D.U.I. and a stint in rehab, in 2014—can coexist with strength. This Tuesday night, however, Phelps couldn’t help himself. In his signature event, the two-hundred-metre butterfly, he had an extraordinary race. He cruised across the surface with the lightness of a great blue heron and the power of a dolphin. In an especially thrilling finish, he out-touched the two other fastest men to claim his twentieth gold. I don’t usually scream while watching televised sporting events, but, for the race’s last twenty-five metres, I was on my feet hollering.

At thirty-one, Phelps is the oldest swimmer ever to win gold in an individual event; most swimmers peak around twenty-one. The silver went to a twenty-one-year-old, a Japanese underdog named Masato Sakai. Phelps beat him by only four hundredths of a second—a tiny quantity of time, less than half the duration of a single blink of the eye. It was the smallest margin of victory in the event’s history. Yet, no matter how closely matched Sakai’s and Phelps’s performances were, those four-hundredths somehow make it plausible that Phelps wanted this win more than anybody, and had greater strength, focus, discipline, and precision in his training and preparation. In the old days, before highly sensitive digital touch pads lined pool walls, referees might have handed the gold to Sakai. In this case, technology confirmed the fairy tale: Phelps got his ten big fingertips to the touch pad first. He has the magic edge.

Phelps made his Olympic début when he was fifteen years old, in Sydney. (Katie Ledecky was the same age when she débuted, in London in 2012.) In that year’s two-hundred-metre fly, he placed fifth, and the next year he set the world record, which he has held onto ever since. He won Olympic gold medals in Athens and Beijing, but lost in London to the South African swimmer Chad le Clos. Yesterday, when he looked up at the scoreboard after the race and saw that he had won (le Clos came in fourth), he initially didn’t smile or celebrate. He barely moved. Then, suddenly, he clenched his fists and threw his arms straight up—Poseidon himself. The crowd roared, his mother cried, and the members of the U.S. men’s basketball team, who were sitting in the stands, transformed into giddy, cheering fanboys. Phelps was again a god, and it was good.

Read more of our coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro.
Read more of our latest coverage of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games, in Rio de Janeiro.
Seventy minutes later, Phelps was back behind the starting blocks, preparing for his second race—the final leg of the men’s four-by-two-hundred-metre freestyle relay. As he pulled on his swim cap, the rubber tore and the cap flung off his head. Meanwhile, Ryan Lochte, the relay’s third leg, was churning through the pool on the back half of his two hundred, meaning that Phelps needed to be airborne off the starting block in less than a minute. Ripping a cap at that moment was an embarrassing, amateurish mishap—like a tourist in Manhattan squirting ketchup on her shirt because she doesn’t know how to properly eat a hot dog. Phelps should have put his cap on earlier. But, in this case, it seemed like a slightly slapstick reminder of the mortal inside the myth. He immediately yelled for Conor Dwyer, who swam the relay’s first leg, to lend him his cap. Frantically, charmingly, Dwyer didn’t just hand it over but tried to help put the cap on Phelps’s head—twice—without success. Phelps finally said, “I got it, I got it,” and managed to yank the thing on himself. He hopped on the starting block, and seconds later was a white-water flash up the lane, far ahead of the rest of the competitors thanks to the lead his teammates had established. The Americans won, and Phelps collected yet another gold.

Despite what he has said, Phelps, who has raced in more Olympic events than anyone in history, doesn’t look like a man who wants these days of triumph ever to end. He lingered wide-eyed in the pool after his first race, sitting and rolling over the lane, in no hurry to get out; he got teary-eyed on the podium during the medal ceremony; he kissed his mother through the fence, as he always does, but this time his fiancée also passed him Boomer, their three-month-old son, who wore miniature sound-eliminating headphones. Phelps held the infant awkwardly for a moment—a giant unsure of what to do with such littleness—then returned to the pool deck. He seemed not quite ready to embrace that future.

Phelps has two more events to swim: the two-hundred-metre individual medley, where he will face his American rival, Ryan Lochte; and the hundred-metre butterfly. Commentators initially didn’t bet that Phelps would be a solid favorite in any of his events. But he seems to be firing on every cylinder, as focussed, determined, and strong as ever. On the other hand, Lochte, with a dark tan and a new silver hairdo, seems “not all there,” as one young swimmer who competed at the Olympic trials told me. It will be a pleasure to see Phelps continue his reign in the next few days. He can deal with being a human later.