After winning his final gold, Phelps and his relay teammates huddled together poolside and he told them, “It’s been an honor swimming with you in my last race”.
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Additionally, Phelps managed to break a almost 2,200-year-old record with his 13th individual gold medal last week in the 200m individual medley.
Speaking earlier this week to NBC, Lochte was asked if he was happy to have swam in the same era as his great friend. “When he called me and said, ‘I’m getting back with Nicole,”.
In Rio, where he took his Olympic tally to a staggering 28 medals – he also won three silvers and two bronze – it was apparent he was not going through the motions at all. How different his career could have been.
He carried the Olympic flag at the opening ceremonies for the 2016 games and swam his way to six medals – five gold and one silver – in the days that followed. It was his lowest medal haul, since competing in Athens in 2004.
Monica Puig won Puerto Rico’s first gold medal in any sport in Olympic history, upsetting Angelique Kerber in the women’s tennis singles final.
Most of the USA swim team was in the stands to watch Phelps’ finale, including the biggest female star at the pool, Katie Ledecky.
Phelps’ domination of the entire sport has been nearly as complete.
“Every one (Olympics) is special in a way and every medal is special in a way”. “It was really hard to go out and give your best, but I really wanted to win”.
Phelps also plans to become a coach there, but he says Baltimore will always be home. When the women’s 4x100m medley relay team won the gold medal, it was the 1,000th gold medal all-time for Team USA at the Summer Games, dating back to the first modern Olympics in 1896. And now that he’s found a different goal in the sport of swimming, I think he’s gonna come back, because he wants that challenge.
“It’s exciting to see that there are kids out there who want to represent our country, who want to swim at this level, and who want to do well”, he said.
“This is the part of my life where I get to start this whole new chapter”, he declared. “I don’t think you’ll be seeing another Michael, but you’ll be seeing a lot of other wonderful people”.
“Walking down the warmup pool deck, I started to get choked up”.
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Paltrinieri pulled away from the field and was under world-record pace much of the race before fading a bit at the end.
