![]() With the blessing of a longer career, of course he was able to compete for more medals. He was a swimmer and swimmers have longer careers (typically) than other athletes: there will likely never be a middle-aged world-class sprinter, though some swimmers are trying their hand at the extremes of longevity. Well, for starters, there are arguments that Phelps isn’t the best ever. So why the long face, ESPN analysts? Why carp about NBC’s enthusiasm and support for a guy who really could be the best ever? But once the gun goes off, everyone is trying to bury everyone else. Like tennis players, there’s a community of competitors nearby, people with whom they can relate and work. It’s not as if professional swimmers leap from the kiddie-pool to the deep-end with no preparation.Īnd, for the most part, swimmers do it alone. Professional swimming requires all the discipline, time commitment, and energy of other sports: the seven-day-a-week training, the long hours, the reps, the weight lifting, the conditioning, and the dieting. He competed in multiple events across multiple days, switching from teammate to opponent with his own U.S. He did so in a variety of events that each requires different strengths and training regimens. ![]() Phelps medaled more in the 2008 Olympics than anyone before him-in swimming or otherwise-and has left the 2012 Games with more medals than anyone else by long miles. Which is to say, even out of the pool, he has more on his shoulders than past athletes do. He had to win in the age of the instantaneous Internet, dealing with a media circus that never ends and a worldwide audience that never sleeps. He has more medals than others in a sport that is notoriously competitive and extremely challenging physically and psychologically. He has competed in four separate Olympics and medaled in four of them. There are arguments to be made in favor of Phelps being the greatest Olympian ever. After all, doesn’t ESPN line its coffers through the glorification and burial of its nascent and fallen heroes? Though they are correct in asserting that NBC’s fawning over Phelps was excessive, the ESPNners’ response had all the poorly-timed alacrity and hastiness they themselves are so often guilty of. They were also reactive, the protestations of group-thinkers who play the part of naysayers against an institutional establishment. They were consistent, skeptical, and at times, unusually dismissive. When your competition only comprises three billion people instead of six and a half, you have an edge. Reilly went on to say that merely having a lot of hardware doesn’t make a person the greatest: after all, Allison Krauss has won more Grammies than any female artist, but no one’s going to suggest that Krauss is a greater musician or artist or vocalist than Aretha Franklin or Whitney Houston or Etta James.Ĭolin Cowherd noted the fact that only half of the world’s population can swim, so the “pool of talent” (his words, not mine) is smaller than for track stars because, evidently, everyone can run. Rick Reilly weighed in by noting that Michael Phelps won a lot of medals but, then again, of all the gold medals, only eight were in individual events-the same number of gold medals Carl Lewis won in individual track events. There’s no ball involved, and swimmers, for some reason, are able to compete in their sport for many years longer than track stars or basketball players. In the afternoon, a histrionic Skip Bayless-who apparently still hasn’t learned any lessons from his very-public shaming by Mark Cuban-bloviated that swimming didn’t require any hand-eye coordination and success in the sport was merely a product of repetitive motion.
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