Now the answer is as plain as #PhelpsFace. Odds are good that he will add one more to his collection, and to that of the usa swimming team, with Saturday’s late-night relay. Britain won silver and Australia the bronze. Of course, that’s what he said after the 2012 Olympics.
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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.
Olympic all-around champion Simone Biles goes for her third gold in Rio de Janeiro when she competes in the women’s vault final Sunday.
It did not require one final gold medal in the 4×100 medley relay – his 23rd gold and 28th Olympic medal – to reinforce his status as the most decorated Olympian of all time but he delivered it anyway.
13 – The number of individual gold medals Phelps has won, including the 200-meter individual medley on Thursday night. Comcast ran two ads mixing its products with Phelps’ swims right after the winning relay, and repeated one of them later.
Whether he is done, or should be, is a separate matter entirely.
In his fifth and final Games, Phelps produced a blistering third leg of butterfly, putting the United States team back in front after Britain’s Adam Peaty had threatened to spoil his finale by surging ahead in the breaststroke leg.
Two hours earlier, Phelps had won gold as part of the USA’s 4x100m medley relay team.
Phelps has long said his goal is to grow the sport.
So, too, Friday’s bang-bang can-you-believe that, and that, and that? Joseph Schooling of Singapore built a big lead in the 100 butterfly and easily held off one of Phelps’ patented rallies.
Moments after Manuel’s win in the shortest women’s race of the meet, American Connor Jaeger took silver in the longest men’s race of the pool meet, the 1,500 free, with an American-record time of 14:39.48, a little less than five seconds behind gold medalist Gregorio Paltrinieri (14:34.57) of Italy. “It might be once in 10 generations that someone like Michael Phelps comes along”. The crowd went insane for its hometown guy. As if that wasn’t enough of an accomplishment, he broke Aaron Peirsol’s seven-year old world record while swimming the first leg of the men’s 100m medley final on August 14.
More nations are swimming, and more nations are producing elite athletes.
The Phelps of 2016 has been unlike any other Games.
Venus Williams can become the first tennis player with five career Olympic golds, pairing with Rajeev Ram against Bethanie Mattek-Sands and Jack Sock in an all-American mixed doubles final.
A huge roar went up when Phelps hit the water for the butterfly and then caught and overhauled Britain’s James Guy to hand a 0.41 second cushion to Nathan Adrian.
Adam Peaty’s split time for his 100m breaststroke leg was a staggering 56.59, well under the mythical 57-second barrier and nearly half a second quicker than his world record time set earlier this week en route to individual gold.
If the focus is only the Olympics.
“This is how I wanted to finish my career”.
The comeback endured a huge setback with his second drunken-driving arrest in 2014, which led to Phelps being banned from the world championships previous year.
Phelps: “It’s a pretty good one to win though”.
But what happens after a year or two?
Is the overall goal to compete with track and field for Olympic dominance?
The Americans, who failed to medal at last year’s world championships, had looked in peril when two-time doping violator Yulia Efimova gave Russian Federation the lead on the breaststroke.
That was down four from the 2013 Worlds in Barcelona.
He still had his shoes on when backstroker Ryan Murphy came out and broke the world record in the first leg.
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For sure a subset of athletes, coaches, officials and hard-core swim geeks.
