Who would have thought, the long time fan of decorated Olympian swimmer Michael Phelps would stop his reign on the 2016 Rio Olympics?
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“I felt very inspired this week, for sure”, he said. I’m relaxed. I’m comfortable, and I know my surroundings.
“And it turned out pretty cool”. Being able to cap it off with these Games is just the ideal way to finish. Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina was the record holder for 48 years, so she had a good run.
He also said the London Games were his last four years ago only to change his mind.
In the previous race, Simone Manuel anchored the U.S. women’s 4x100m medley team to the 1,000th gold medal in her country’s Olympic history. I think he is going to continue to try to grow that.
“As soon as I walked into the warm-down pool that final night, the tears started coming and filling up in my eyes, and [coach] Bob [Bowman] and I shared some of those emotional moments with one another”.
“When I made a decision to come back I wanted to do it the right way”, he said. It was a challenge getting back to this point.
“(The 800) was the last race of my meet here and I wanted to remember it really well, ” she said.
With a total of five gold medals, one silver, and a remarkable comeback after having hard times, the Baltimore-born defeated his own professional climax achieved in Beijing 2008, when he won eight golds and broke Mark Spitz’s record.
“I’m in the best place possible, with everything that’s going on in my life”, he added.
Phelps’ other gold medals in Rio came in the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle relays, the 200m individual medley and the 200m butterfly, the stroke he is most famous for and the one he swam in the medley relay. He was no doubt disappointed when he narrowly missed out on a medal in his first final of the event, but the four gold and two silver medals he picked up after that surely helped take the sting off. “I know now that I won’t have that”.
You don’t have to be an Olympic medal-winner to do something incredible.
At 31, he sounds much more adamant when he says his swimming career really is over.
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Then he and his teammates grabbed a sign that said, “Thank You Rio”. “I’m retiring, but I’m not done done with swimming. This is just the start of something new”. “I’ll be there watching, cheering everybody on, but I will not be in the pool competing”. Phelps’s heroics in 2008 (eight golds) were arguably matched-or at least almost so-by the likes of Jesse Owens in 1936 (four golds in track and field), Mark Spitz in 1972 (seven golds in swimming), Carl Lewis in 1984 (four golds in the same events as Owens), Eric Heiden in 1980 (five golds in speed skating, sweeping the sport’s five events), and Vitaly Scherbo in 1992 (six golds in gymnastics).
