U.S. Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps will be the American flagbearer for the Opening Ceremony of this summer’s Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
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The Rio Olympics 2016 committee finally reversed their total ban decision imposed on the Russian athletes.
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“It feels so right”, said Missy Franklin, who is one of many USA swimmers who felt inspired by Phelps as she began to pursue her Olympic goals.
“Usually, I’ve always worn my grill at the Olympics”, Lochte said at a press conference Thursday morning, referring to his bedazzled mouthpiece. Then he joked: “I kind of want to steal that jacket”. “In London, I wanted to make history”, Phelps said.
Phelps would be 35 by the time the Tokyo 2020 Games rolls around.
Phelps won eight gold medals, breaking American swimming legend Mark Spitz’s 1972 Munich Games record of seven medals, during his outstanding two-week stint at the 2008 Beijing Games.
For the first time, Phelps is serving as a team captain at the Olympics.
Lochte is no longer top of the world rankings in any discipline and will compete in just the one individual event in Rio, as well as relays.
However, he will not contest the event in Rio, freeing him up to become only the second swimmer in history to carry the U.S. flag after Gary Hall at the Montreal 1976 Olympic Games. We’ve had this problem for how many Olympics and its sad that we can’t control it; that someone who is in charge cannot control this.
The first Olympic Games held in South America starts on August 5 and ends on the 21st.
Asked what he would do to clean up the sport if he were running FINA, Phelps ducked the question but said he agreed with Bowman about the state of sport as a whole. “So I’m saying he’s going to come back again”. He went into therapy, gave up alcohol, got engaged, made peace with his estranged father and, in the biggest change of all, became a father for the first time when son Boomer was born in May.
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And, after insisting all along this truly would be his final Olympics, Phelps dropped a tantalizing hint that he might not be done. “It’s just a cool feeling and absolutely an amazing, amazing, amazing honor”.
