Phelps said he had felt himself “starting to crack” with emotion as he went to the Rio pool Saturday where he played a decisive role in his final relay victory.
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Australia came up second with a time of 3:55.00 to take silver and Denmark rounded out the podium one-hundredth of a second later.
Double gold medalist Ryan Murphy led off on backstroke, followed by Cody Miller on breaststroke, Phelps on butterfly and Nathan Adrian swimming the freestyle leg. She broke her own world records in both the 400m and 800m events, and continued her remarkable global competition win streak.
Phelps swam the butterfly third leg of a tight race, pushing the U.S. from second behind Great Britain up to first before freestyle specialist Nathan Adrian saw it home for gold in an Olympic record time of three minutes 27.95 seconds.
On the return lap, Phelps powered through the water with his whirling butterfly stroke, surging ahead of James Guy to pass off a lead to the anchor Adrian.
In a departure from Games past, Phelps’ fifth Olympics offered a glimpse not only of a sporting great relentless in pursuit of success but also of a man buoyed by warm relationships heading purposefully into a post-swimming life.
“Absolutely not, I’m not even looking”, Bob Bowman said after Saturday’s final swimming races which left Phelps with 23 Olympic gold medals.
In his fifth and final Games, Phelps produced a blistering third leg of butterfly, putting the U.S. team back in front after Britain’s Adam Peaty had threatened to spoil his finale by surging ahead in the breaststroke leg. “It’s been an honor to be a part of all these relays”.
Phelps swam the third leg of the men’s 4×100-meter medley relay, with Team USA winning the event with a time of 3:27.95. “It’s been an honor”.
It seemed only apt that Phelps and his teammates would extend that record to 1,001 golds shortly after.
That was not a picture presented before by Phelps, not as a young striver in his first Olympics at 15 in Sydney in 2000, not in Athens in 2004 where he arrived working his way up into the heavyweights alongside Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband.
“I’ve lived a dream come true, something that I wanted for so long”.
“I honestly don’t know”, he said. “My swimming career might be over, but I have this future ahead of me, and I can just turn the page and start whatever I want”.
While the spotlight was on the 31-year-old, who retired after the 2012 London Games before returning for one last hurrah, the USA women’s 4x100m medley relayers captured their country’s 1,000th Olympic medal.
The final two individual golds of the games went to Pernille Blume of Denmark in the 50 freestyle, her country’s first swimming victory since 1948, and Italy’s Gregorio Paltrinieri in the grueling 1,500 free. Phelps set an American record but finished third.
No other Olympian has more than nine gold medals.
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Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
