The "Fastest Man On Earth" is also an incredible showman. WOW.
Yes, Michael Phelps is amazing and was destined for 8, destined genetically to be a great swimmer – I mean, did you see the thing NBC did on his freakish body a couple days ago? Wow. Like Michael Jordan before him (nobody in MJ’s family is over 6′ tall), Phelps was born in all his double-jointed-crazy-bodily-form just for this moment in history, to be / do what he is and does. And he did it. Amazing, inspiring, he lived up to the hype and beat the pressure, and he’s a great kid on top of it all.
But Usain Bolt was also destined to be a sprinter (where big personalities combine with great speed for an unforgettable combination), and like a predecessor of his who wore golden shoes, a hero of mine when I was a young athlete (Michael Johnson), Bolt is just…amazing.
I’ve never seen someone dominate the 100m so completely, round by
round. And to shatter his own world record despite showboating the last
15m in the final, just mind-blowing. And I love his quote afterwards…
"Supremely confident, Bolt shook off repeated questions about the
prudence of coasting at the end when he could have absolutely shattered
the world record. "I didn’t come here to break the world record because
I already was the world-record holder," he said. "I came here to win." "
I hope he dominates for a long time to come – he’s fun as hell to watch run.
No, it wasn’t classy – but it was entertaining. No, he didn’t set a world record that might have been untouchable for a decade – but as he said…
Yeah, Michael Phelps makes me want to up the intensity of my
swimming workouts…but I’ll never step on a track again and stare down
those lines without thinking about Bolt’s dominant victory. And THAT image motivates me for my own little life.
Which is weird. Because I would have thought that the "greatest in history" would motivate me more than one dude winning one race and setting a record.
But in all honesty, I’m looking forward to watching Bolt run again
in the 200m far more than I was even looking forward to watching Phelps
swim for history…
Perhaps it was HOW Bolt did it that just blows my mind. The fact that he showboated in the qualifying rounds while winning handily, the gold shoes, the confident demonstration before the 100m final, at the starting blocks, and then of course slapping his chest while coasting to A WORLD RECORD finish, I mean, wow.
I don’t have the answer as to why Bolt makes me want to go run right now but Phelps doesn’t necessarily make me want to go swim. Heck, I’m a water guy even, I do swim workouts (as well as track sprint workouts) a couple times a week at least.
I dunno. Maybe I’m subconsciously jealous because Phelps is an aw-shucks white guy, and Bolt is different than me so I’m not threatened. No, that’s not it, at least not totally.
I think I just prefer my champions to kill their prey.
Oh, I know what it is, I just thought of it. What disappointed me about Phelps – and I’ll probably be the only prick on the planet willing to say something negative about him (don’t get me wrong, I stand in awe of what he just did, it’s amazing and I have all the respect in the world for the guy, he earned it) – but what killed the mystique for me is the exact moment that BUILT more mystique for everyone else: one one-hundredth of a second.
In context for my comments: with the trash-talking by Cavic before the race about how "it would be good for the sport and for Phelps if he lost", and then Phelps answering after the race that those comments had "fired [him] up", that’s what bummed me out.
When MJ got fired up, he would go out and drop a double-nickel on his victims. The Patriots last year? Piss them off, and they’re going to be throwing touchdowns while up by 50 with a few minutes to go.
So when Phelps barely won, I was stoked because he was still en route to history – I mean, hell yeah I wanted him to win 8! Just like I wanted the Patriots to win 19 last year. I love to see greatness in action, and Phelps is the greatest Olympian ever, unquestionably.
But when he said that he used those comments to fire himself up, I was like, "wait, dude…it was simply fate that you won, fate and your superhuman skill and a mistake by Cavic at the finish. If you were fired up, you should have DESTROYED him!"
See, if there’s one thing I have learned from Hollywood (lol), it’s that if you don’t pull the trigger and destroy your nemesis when you have the opportunity, then they usually come back to get you in the end.
Cavic, to his credit, took the loss with dignity. And the line that if they raced again, "I would win it". You see? If they ever do race again, perhaps Cavic will win. Because Phelps left him a smidgen of hope by not destroying him.
Asafa Powell, the other Jamaican sprinter? He is done. He was done before this race, but now he’s really done. He’ll NEVER beat Bolt again. And frankly, unless there is a sprinter with the same brain type as Bolt, or unless Bolt gets slow, nobody is going to beat Bolt who raced against him in Beijing.
Because Bolt got into their heads.
I think for me that will be the lasting image of these Games.
Some people will not like Bolt, while it’s impossible not to like Michael Phelps.
I guess I just like my heroes with a little more edge to them than Phelps. Yes, it’s the greatest accomplishment in sports history, and all that. As Morgan Freeman said in the Visa ad afterwards, we need more adjectives to describe what Phelps just did.
BUT.
If I were to step onto a basketball court for a game of 1-on-1 with Phelps and Bolt, in turn (just hypothetical here, who knows if they’re good at hoops)…I would confidently go right at Phelps, but I would have to get into my own head in order to not be intimidated by Usain Bolt.
Does that make sense? I’m kind of just writing this train-of-thought in the middle of the night.
But it makes sense to me. I’m not scared of Phelps; Bolt? He’s a different animal. He might kick my ass just because he enjoys kicking people’s asses.
The "nice-guy" thing is great, and honestly Phelps is probably a much better role model and maybe even a better human being than Bolt.
But this isn’t a competition for who gets into heaven! It’s athletic competition, for the best in the world. And yeah, Phelps is definitely best in the world. It just doesn’t seem plausible given his persona.
Dara Torres is another great example of someone who, like Phelps, is a "great person". Helping a competitor whose suit had ripped, what a great act of sportsmanship. But then she got silver, and while disappointed, she seemed ok with it.
(Update on that, from her interview on Sunday she was obviously pretty bummed about it. So I guess she was just gracious in the post-interview and on the medal stand. But she alluded to karma after seeing Phelps and Cavic and thinking "I’m glad that’s never happened to me" meaning losing by the slimmest possible margin…then she did, unfortunately. Was second her fate?)
If your goal is just to get to the Olympics, ok, getting a medal would be surpassing your expectations. But if you’re suppos
ed to win Gold? Um…
I would be gracious in defeat (yeah losing is lame, but if you lost you better not make it worse by being a poor sport), but I definitely would not smile if I expected Gold and came up with Silver or Bronze. That…would suck.
Maybe I’m just subconsciously jealous because it appears that Phelps has zero flaws – he’s the greatest Olympian of all time in the history of the universe and he’s aw-shucks nice and girls think he’s cute and he loves his mom AND his teammates and there is absolutely nothing to dislike about him whatsoever. He’s the perfect athlete AND human. Maybe it’s just too much.
I mean, some people say that about Tiger Woods, but come on, we know Tiger cusses out photographers and breaks clubs from time to time, so ok, he’s at least partially human. Phelps? Flawless, down to the image of him being a normal 23 year old texting his buddies while listening to hip-hop with his hat on backwards. Somehow that wasn’t ok with mainstream America when it was Eminem or Tony Romo, but Phelps just made that package acceptable.
Just once I was hoping the cameras would catch him giving the stink-eye to the Aussies or cussing out a cameraman who was all up in his grille before a race. But no. All we got was him on the medal stand wondering where his mom was. It was endearing (I’d want my mom there too).
But there have to be other people like me who loved the guy for winning more Gold medals than anybody in history, and simultaneously rolled their eyes at how unbelievably perfect his destiny and persona have shaped up to be.
Talk smack about Cavic, or Thorpe, hell, drop an F-bomb on Bob Costas just to see how smoothly he covers it, do something so I can relate to you.
Maybe that’s what it is. It’s like movies that I hate because the plot is so ridiculously impossible in real-life because the characters are scripted wrong and act in contradiction to how their brain types would really act in real life. You can’t relate to a character that is not in some way human. (Maybe that’s why God had to incarnate? Just a thought.)
Only, this is really real. A super-duper-nice guy winning and doing it more than anybody in history – how does that happen?
I think that’s it. I expect the victorious to pound their chests and raise their hands to the crowd, like Usain Bolt. I expect them to get in a DB’s face after scorching them for a touchdown, ala Tom Brady. I expect them to stand over their vanquished opponents and roar, as did Muhammed Ali.
I like fire, and passion, and the "don’t fuck with me or I will kill you" attitude. Or the "how do you like them apples" post-victory approach (with competitors, anyway – you have to then MJ it up to the media and come across as uber classy). I like it when teams refuse to let up at the end of games, like the Dream Team in ’92, like the Redeem Team against Spain yesterday.
Maybe I’m not giving Phelps enough credit for that, since I can’t see his eyes or his face when he’s swimming. Maybe he’s crazy-intense and really is like that. Maybe, just maybe, he’s a killer in the pool. Seems difficult to believe, though, because he just seems too nice.
Which is why he’s hard to relate to – because if he doesn’t have that killer side to him, if he really is just a nice human who is a freak of nature genetically, then what is there to relate to about him?
All the hard work he puts in, perhaps? That’s definitely an inspiring part of his story – his uber discipline, his training regiment. Ok, nice guy genetic freak or not, he puts in the work. And that is human, and that inspires me.
Ironically, I wrote a post about nice-guys and arrogant athletes just a couple weeks ago, and Phelps appears to be the epitome of what I suggested athletes should be…
I’m not sure why I’m still working on figuring it out at 2am, lol. I’m as impressed with what Phelps did as anybody else, but all I can think about is that image of Bolt just pulling away from everybody so beautiful and machine-like, and then that look in his eyes when he pounded his chest before the finish line.
THAT made me say wow.
Which, in a way, seems contradictory to what I’ve been saying, but it’s not. I like athletes / teams who are machines. They just have to be human – in some facet – as well.
Perhaps, though, Morgan Freeman is right…I understand "wow"; I do not understand the adjectives which do not yet exist for what Phelps has done, and how he has done it.
