For all the vaunted anatomical advantages that have propelled Michael Phelps in his bid to become the greatest Olympian of all time at the Beijing Games today, one curious statistic has gone largely unremarked. Out of water, the 23-year-old American had until recently one of the most fragile bodies ever recorded of any professional swimmer.
Although an all-round athlete at school, Phelps evolved by entirely aquatic means into the Baltimore Bullet who smashed world records, bypassing the regimen of weight training and running that most swimmers adopt. The result was that his highly flexible ankles and knees might have buckled under the strain of returning to the lacrosse field.
“On land, he’s one of the weakest swimmers we’ve ever measured,” said Genadijus Sokolovas, director of physiology for USA Swimming, the national governing body of competitive swimming, when Phelps was the sensation of the Athens Olympics in 2004.
One of the benefits of Phelps’s decision to begin weight training for last year’s world championships is that he risks little injury by hoisting his 13 Olympic gold medals - more bling than any athlete in the modern era - including seven won so far in Beijing. Having equalled his compatriot Mark Spitz’s record gold tally in a single Games, set in 1972, Phelps is on course to join the Olympian immortals by achieving the so-called “great eight” in today’s 4x100m medley relay.
Massacring world records in an effortless and imperious manner, his long strokes apparently slower than those of rivals thrashing in his wake, Phelps has challenged the hyperbole of sports writers. “Phelps can manipulate water like no human since Moses,” wrote one. “Phelps does not need testing for drugs but an outboard motor,” marvelled another.
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