Built to Swim
by Michael Sokolove

Published in The New York Times Magazine
August 8, 2004

One morning in early March, Michael Phelps emerged from the back seat of a Lincoln Town Car and stepped onto a Manhattan sidewalk busy with pedestrians. His chlorine-damaged hair was tousled and badly in need of a comb. His hands were stuffed in his pockets as he walked, his torsohunched forward. He did not glide along in the manner of so many elite athletes, those superior beings who even outside their sport are so evidently comfortable in physical space, less inhibited by gravity. Phelps shuffled, as if unsure of his footing. Nothing about him, other than his height, 6-foot-4, merited a second look or suggested that he was anything but a big kid still growing into his frame.

He walked half a block to his destination, a nightclub called Pressure, near Union Square, pausing to hold the door for someone else before he entered. The club had been turned into an elaborate set to roll out a new line of high-tech swimsuits. Techno music pulsated through the room; young women handing out promotional material were dressed in white lab coats to accentuate the scientific, space-age nature of the new swimwear. It was all silly and overdone, but Phelps listened closely to direction and tried earnestly to play his role, which was to model these suits on a runway. When he executed the rudimentary dance steps that had been choreographed for him, his shy smile indicated that he knew he had performed with something less than balletic grace -- and more in the manner of, say, Lurch, the butler on the old ''Addams Family'' television series.

Phelps is no good on land. He is weirdly hyperflexible, what is sometimes called double-jointed, and therefore not entirely stable. He does not lift weights. He used to run but gave it up because of a tendency to step in holes or trip over nothing. To exert himself on land, even mildly, is to risk orthopedic peril. A couple of years ago he went bowling with his buddies and caught hell for it. What was he thinking? Were a couple of frames really worth it?

By early afternoon, Phelps was finished modeling swimsuits and back in the Town Car, moving toward his element. Wherever he is, water must be made available to him. He craves it like some sea creature who can survive for only so long at the ocean's edge. Over the last seven years, he has spent just 5 days -- 5 out of more than 2,500 -- without being in the water at least once. In 2002 he returned to his home outside Baltimore from an international swim meet in Japan, exhausted and planning to take at least one day off, but at 3 the next morning, unable to sleep, he was on his computer, instant-messaging his equally jet-lagged coach: ''I want to swim. When can u meet me at the pool?''

The Town Car drove far uptown to a 50-meter pool, at a recreation center called Asphalt Green, at York and 91st Street. Within minutes, Phelps was in his swimsuit and knifing through the water, a soft warmup that was, nonetheless, mesmerizing to watch. On his back, he fully extended one arm until it reached toward the ceiling, then rhythmically brought it back through the water as the other reached high. His freestyle stroke was a steady, powerful churn. At the walls, he pushed off and disappeared underwater, re-emerging -- more quickly than you would imagine possible -- 15 or 20 meters up the pool. It was like watching a dolphin from the beach. You wondered, How did he get from there to there that fast? I have seen many other world-class swimmers. They were all skilled and comfortable, all of them beautiful in the water. But there is something different about Michael Phelps. Compared with him, the rest are all visitors.

The pool at Asphalt Green was mostly empty except for a handful of exercise swimmers. A 60-ish woman walked along the deck toward an open lane, then stopped at the sight of Phelps whooshing by. She stood and stared, frozen. ''He's a very good swimmer,'' she finally said. ''Is he on a swim team?'' I couldn't resist. ''Yes,'' I said, ''that's Michael Phelps. He's the best swimmer in the world.''

In a sport that measures time in hundredths of a second, where the difference between gold and silver can be the fraction of a blink of an eye, Phelps captured the 400-meter individual medley at last month's U.S. Olympic Swim Trials in Long Beach, Calif., by a preposterous 5.68 seconds -- while lowering his own world record by 0.68 seconds. He won the 200-meter butterfly by 3.06 seconds, the 200-meter individual medley by 2.70 seconds. He has now swum the seven fastest 200 individual medleys in history -- times between 1:55.94 and 1:57.94 -- in a race no other human being has completed in less than 1:58.16. (The grueling medley consists of all four competitive strokes: in order, butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle.)

Beginning on Aug. 14 in Athens, Phelps, who turned 19 in June, will try to match or surpass Mark Spitz's hallowed record of seven Olympic gold medals in swimming, won at the 1972 Summer Games in Munich. Phelps is entered in five individual events, one more than even Spitz contested, and could swim on three relays. Specialists predominate at swimming's Olympic level, swimmers calibrated to one stroke at only one distance, but Phelps is almost ridiculously versatile, dominant if not untouchable in three events and a potential threat to reigning world-record holders in as many as half a dozen others. There are swimmers, including some of Phelps's U.S. teammates, who seem to believe he wants to take their world records away, deny them medals, hoard all of what little glory the sport has to offer -- which is true. But what he wants most is their competition, the challenge he cannot find in events he already owns. If he limited himself to just his best events, he might be crushed by boredom.

It is an audacious goal Phelps has set for himself, a test of endurance that will push him to and maybe beyond the brink of physical and mental exhaustion. Including preliminary heats and finals, Spitz swam 13 times at the Munich Games. With a semifinal round having been added in the 200-meter events, Phelps could swim as many as 18 races. He will compete multiple times on most of the eight days of competition, sometimes twice within an hour, each time against the world's best swimmers -- many of them seeking just one, not eight, gold medals. His performance threatens to eclipse, among others, Ian Thorpe, the Australian superstar swimmer (the Thorpedo) who won three golds at the Sydney Games and who has expressed genuine concern that Phelps's goals are unattainable -- or fear at the possibility that he may succeed. On several occasions over the last couple of months, Thorpe told reporters that Phelps's pursuit of so much gold is a bad idea. Usually prefacing his remarks by saying he was only trying to ''support'' Phelps, he said that his rival had set himself up for sure failure -- that Phelps was trying to ''achieve someone else's achievement'' -- and that rather than going after Spitz's record, he should find his own path.

But this is Phelps's chosen path, and the doubts expressed by others only harden his resolve. The Athens Games have been preceded by a drumbeat of disquieting news: concerns about the host nation's readiness; fears of terrorism; the entire sport of track and field sullied by doping scandals. Phelps's Olympian ambition -- his willingness to push the outer reaches of athletic possibility and dream big at the risk of flagrant failure -- will very likely be the dominant narrative of the games. Television will dote on him. The world, or at least that part of it that still looks to sport for drama and inspiration, will cheer him on. For many months, Phelps has been waiting for the Games to begin, barely able to contain a confidence so assured that it is almost as if he has played the whole competition in his head and knows exactly how it ends. The first time I met him, back in February, I asked him how much faster he could go in those races in which he would not be favored. Without pause, he answered: ''As fast as I want to go. As fast as I need to go.''

In the pool, Michael Phelps is a virgin of sorts, untouched by what for most swimmers is routine: humbling defeat. A swimmer learns early on that someone, somewhere, is faster. If you are the local 10-year-old star, you qualify for your first regional championship and experience, for the first time, the shock of a rival's touching the wall before you. Or if you don't encounter your superior at the regional meet, you meet her or him at your first national meet, where after never finishing other than first in what you believed was your best event, you place, say, 46th out of 103 competitors. In the parlance of all sport, you have, for the first time, just been whupped. You wonder: Where did they all come from? You are shocked, then energized to train harder. But this has yet to happen to Phelps, and it's hard to imagine it ever will. Oh, he works. No one works like Michael Phelps. But it is never to rise to the top -- only to extend his dominance.

Out of the water, life has not been the same flurry of first-place ribbons. A cheerful, high-energy cutup, Phelps was found to have attention deficit hyperactive disorder in elementary school. Homework, especially any kind of writing assignment, was completed only with much parental supervision and frustration. Phelps's parents divorced when he was 9. ''It was all just a very hard time in Michael's life,'' says his mother, Debbie Phelps, a former teacher of the year in Maryland and now an administrator in the Baltimore County schools. She still recalls the transition from elementary to middle school as wrenching for both her and her son, something they survived only with a great deal of support from within the school. Phelps took Ritalin for a couple of years, then demanded to come off it as he finished sixth grade, telling his mother, ''I can do this on my own.''

The water was his therapy. ''He is not a sit-still person,'' Debbie Phelps says, ''but he can swim lap after lap.'' The youngest of three children, Phelps grew up following his two older sisters, both talented swimmers, to practices and meets, often spending early-morning trips asleep in the back of the car, still in his pajamas. He joined the North Baltimore Aquatic Club team at age 7 for the same reason most younger swim siblings do: he was always at the pool; he might as well get in. (His sister Whitney was the top-ranked American woman in the 200 butterfly in 1996 and seemingly a sure bet to qualify for that year's Olympic Games in Atlanta, but a back injury ruined her chances, cut short her swim career and, for the Phelpses, amounted to a kind of family tragedy.)

When Phelps was 11, the new swim coach at N.B.A.C., Bob Bowman, told his parents that they had to come together for a meeting; he had something important to tell them. Bowman was a sort of swim-world drifter, a knowledgeable but tempestuous coach who had probably seen a wider range of talented young swimmers than anyone in the nation as a result of his seven coaching jobs, in four different states, in the dozen years before he ended up in Baltimore.

What he told Debbie and Fred Phelps, a sergeant on the Maryland state police force, was, basically, that their son was abnormal -- he was a pure prodigy, a genius in the water. Bowman said that Michael should practice with the club's elite training group, alongside swimmers as old as 18, every day -- and eventually, twice a day. Follow the plan, Bowman told them, and this is what will happen: By age 15, Michael will be a national-level swimmer and should attend the 2000 Olympic Games as a spectator just to get a feel for the experience. By 2004, he will make his first Olympic team and contend for medals. Sometime after that, he will break his first world records. No later than the year 2012, he will be the world's greatest swimmer. The Phelpses were incredulous. How could this coach possibly project so far into the future? He couldn't. Bowman's timetable was way off.

Instead of attending the 2000 Summer Games in Australia as a spectator, Phelps made the team at age 15 in the 200-meter butterfly and became the youngest American male swimmer in the Olympics since 1932. He finished fifth. The following spring, still three months short of his 16th birthday, he shattered the world record in the 200 fly, becoming the first ever to swim it under 1:55 and the youngest male swimmer ever to hold a world mark. All of which was mere prologue. On June 29, 2003, Phelps set a new record in the 200 individual medley at a meet in California. One month later at the world championships in Barcelona, he shattered five more world marks -- two of them in one day, which had never been done. Back home in Maryland, on Aug. 9, he lowered his own world record in the 200 individual medley. Over the span of 41 days, he had set seven world records, an unprecedented stretch of swimming all the more remarkable for the fact that Phelps had just turned 18 in a sport where males typically peak in their early or mid-20's. And by the standards of world-class men's swimming, he is still just a baby: in this, his second Olympics, Phelps is the second-youngest male on the U.S. swim team.

''Michael is the most talented swimmer in the world,'' Eddie Reese, head coach of the U.S. men's Olympic swim team, says. ''The tough part for everyone else is he's also the hardest-working. It's a rare phenomenon. You never see it.''

The fascination of such a once-in-a-generation athlete is, above all, the question of what makes him so great. There never is just one answer, but rather a combination of them: physiological and mental gifts, work ethic, the will to compete and, always, happenstance. What if Phelps's sisters had not preceded him into the water? What if he had imagined himself a basketball player instead? In that case, he would just be another sort of tall guy sitting on the bench -- one with no idea that he had missed his true calling.

Phelps's build -- 6 feet 4 inches, 195 pounds, broad shoulders, slim hips -- conforms to the classic swimmer's physique. But he is a type within that type, with a bizarrely long torso and short legs -- an inseam of just 32 inches -- that help him ride high in the water like a long, thin sailboat. The body below hip level is what tends to sag in the water, creating drag, or resistance, so Phelps, relative to his overall height, has a short lower body to keep afloat. ''He has the upper body of a man who is 6-foot-8 but not the legs to go with it,'' says Jonty Skinner, USA Swimming's national team director of technical support. ''It's an advantage.'' Another Phelps oddity: unlike most people, for whom height and wingspan are nearly identical, his wingspan is 6-foot-7, 3 inches longer than his height. He is that rare person with short legs but long arms -- that is, long levers for pulling water.

He has size 14 feet, and his hyperflexibility allows him to flex them probably 15 degrees beyond average, almost parallel to his shin, so they operate like big flippers. That is an obvious advantage, but there are lots of big feet in swimming, most notably Ian Thorpe's size 17's. Phelps's flexibility, says Scott Heinlein, his physical therapist, is ''an all-over thing -- feet, knees, hips, elbows, back. But most elite swimmers either start out flexible or become so through training. The difference with Michael is control of that flexibility in the water.''

Swim coaches have their own peculiar criteria for assessing an athlete's body, a checklist of attributes that do or do not help propel a person through the water. (''Nice flippers,'' I once heard a coach say to my daughter, a serious competitive swimmer, as he looked down at her big feet. He meant it as a compliment.) Bowman, of course, took careful note of Phelps's physique when he first began coaching him, and those observations were part of his forecast for the young swimmer's future. Phelps has, Bowman says, ''what I would call an aquatic body.'' Bowman also knew that Phelps had started early -- ''He had been metabolically trained since the age of 7, which is a plus'' -- and that he had already benefited from far more sophisticated coaching than what is usually available at the local pool. Long before Michael Phelps started there, the North Baltimore team, under its founder, Murray Stephens, was turning out elite swimmers -- including the Olympic gold medalists Anita Nall, Beth Botsford and Theresa Andrews.

Bowman noticed one other thing, something that cannot be measured but is immediately apparent to anyone who knows swimming -- Phelps possessed, in the extreme, what is called a ''feel for the water,'' the ability to put his body in just the right positions to race through it. The job of swim coaching is to teach these positions -- to show a swimmer, for example, how to ''streamline'' after pushing off a wall, meaning how to fold his body into a tight posture so that it retains the momentum of the push; or how to roll the shoulders on the backstroke, but not so violently as to bob up and down like a small boat in choppy seas.

Feel for the water is shorthand for a combination of things: water gymnastics, flexibility and a specific kind of aquatic strength different from brute force on land. These skills can be taught, but only to an extent. A swimmer like Phelps who has an intuitive feel for the water, a primitive relationship to it, starts out with a huge advantage. Even Olympic-level swimmers go into slumps; they lose the feel for a certain stroke, or their timing gets just a bit off. It happens to Phelps -- he told me at one point of ''trying to get my butterfly in better sync'' -- but his slumps are short-lived and his confidence is such that he is never overcome with the fear, as some swimmers are, that he won't be able to regain his feel.

In testing conducted by physiologists from USA Swimming, Phelps scored as one of the weakest elite swimmers they had ever measured, but that was on such traditional tests as the bench press and how much weight he can lift with his legs. ''He's fine on land,'' Heinlein says. ''He can walk. He can do all the things you want him to do. But he's not extraordinary in any way. What Michael excels at takes place in water, so what does it tell you to test him on land?''

At practice one day this spring, I heard Bowman instruct Phelps to ''get his hips higher'' as he lunged for the wall on the finish of his butterfly. The fly is the most difficult and physically taxing of the four competitive strokes, combining a dolphin kick, a constant undulation of the body and a motion in which the arms simultaneously are thrown forward before pulling back through the water. It demands tremendous strength in the abdominal muscles along with exquisite timing. Done well, it is a thing of beauty -- a swimmer seems almost to be skipping over the water like a stone skimmed across the surface. To access the muscles that would bring the hips higher at the finish of this complex set of movements is not easy, but Phelps got it right the very next time. ''What Michael knows how to do, everybody else had to learn,'' says Kevin Clements, a teammate on the North Baltimore team. ''And most of it, he knew the first time he got in the water.''

Swimming is an endurance contest not just within the race, but over a meet. And Phelps has one other gift, a freakish ability to recover quickly, without which he could not even contemplate a schedule in Athens that will require him to swim multiple races on short rests. At a meet in Santa Clara, Calif., in May, I watched as Phelps got out of the pool after a 100-meter butterfly. He was certainly winded, but not like one of those runners you sometimes see staggering around after the finish line. Physiologists from USA Swimming took a pinprick of his ear, routine at such meets for top swimmers, to measure his blood lactate level. Lactic acid is what causes ''muscle burn,'' a sign of the oxygen deficit that causes muscles to shut down. The race had been a long-anticipated rematch against Ian Crocker, the swimmer who beat him a year ago and at the same time took away his world record. On this day, Phelps touched him out at the wall. His lactate level taken immediately afterward was an exceedingly low 5.0 (5 millimoles per liter of blood). Other swimmers after such races typically produce levels of 10 or 15, or sometimes higher. (Crocker's was not measured.)

Like nearly all his gifts, Phelps's aerobic capacity is genetic in some measure but also greatly enhanced by the high-level training that began at an early age -- averaging seven miles a day in practice, 365 days a year. ''His recovery is exceptional when compared to his opponents,'' Jonty Skinner told me. ''He doesn't produce a lot of lactate, and he recovers to pre-race levels in 20 to 25 minutes, sometimes less.''

Phelps has one glaring weakness as a swimmer, and predictably, it is a land-based movement: he is consistently slow diving off the starting blocks. At the Santa Clara meet, the crowd gasped as he slipped off the block on one start and all but belly-flopped into the water -- a typical racing dive for an 8-and-under in his first Saturday morning meet but shocking for someone at Phelps's level. A starting block sits about a foot above the pool deck at its highest point and slopes down toward the water at a gentle 10-degree angle. All elite swimmers that I've seen approach the block from the back and just step up; it's the obvious way to do it. But Phelps, uncomfortable as always on land, walks around to the front of the starting block -- lower by three inches -- and ascends gingerly.

I arrived one morning at the Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center in Baltimore, home of the North Baltimore swim team, just as Phelps was slowly steering his Cadillac Escalade into a parking spot a few minutes before 7 a.m. (One humane aspect of Bowman's practices is that unlike those at many elite programs, they do not begin at dawn.) With both indoor and outdoor pools and a configuration in which swimmers can train at the 50-meter length or in short-course 25-yard lanes, the Meadowbrook center is top-of-the-line -- but only by the Spartan standards of swimming. Phelps, the soon-to-be marquee performer of the Olympic Games, changes in a cramped locker room near a Koala Bear Kare diaper-changing station, or just bypasses it and executes what swimmers call a ''deck change'' -- he pulls a towel around himself and wiggles into his suit. Recreational swimmers paddle along in nearby lanes as he trains, including a regular known to Phelps and his teammates, because of his thrashing stroke, as Crazy Backstroke Man.

Phelps lives just a few minutes away in a town house he shares with his mother. He graduated from high school in 2003 but postponed college for at least one year to devote himself full time to training. He will never compete on a college swim team because he is a professional; he has been since signing an endorsement contract with Speedo at age 16. Speedo has put up a $1 million bonus if Phelps can match Spitz's seven golds -- an oddity, given that Spitz's image suffered in the wake of his 1972 medal haul from a perception that his too-public eagerness to cash in was somehow crass. But that was another era. Now big money validates a sport and crowns an athlete as someone who must be watched. ''The public's imagination, for better or for worse, is drawn to money, financial incentives,'' says Stu Isaac, a senior vice president at Speedo.

The bonus, while attention-grabbing, is a bit of a gimmick: it represents just a fraction of the $5 million already paid or committed to Phelps by Speedo, Visa, AT&T Wireless, Omega, Argent Mortgage, PowerBar and other sponsors -- and an even tinier portion of what what might come to him after Athens. Phelps will profit handsomely, far more than $1 million worth, even if he captures just two or three gold medals. After Athens, he will most likely be set for life, never needing to work a 9-to-5 job. (And Speedo has already got a huge bonus of its own, because with track and field hobbled by scandal, Phelps will be an even bigger figure than he might have been otherwise.) ''What would seven gold medals be worth?'' Phelps's agent, Peter Carlisle, muses. ''Nobody knows, but as a rough estimate, I'd say $30 to $50 million over time.'' Bowman says that the money represents ''another motivator for Michael. It's another thing to keep him interested in continuing to train and improve. It's not his primary motivator, but it doesn't hurt.''

I said to Phelps one day, ''You've already made a lot of money, right?'' He answered: ''For me, yeah. For LeBron James, no. But I guess I've got a lot for a kid my age.''

Phelps does not know what to do with the money he already has. He buys fancy cellphones, iPods, big-screen TV's. The Escalade has one TV screen on the dashboard and two facing the backseat. Heaven for Phelps is an hour to kill in a Circuit City. He likes to buy gifts -- an expensive watch for Bowman, a Christmas Mercedes for his mother, smaller trinkets for friends and relatives.

His schedule has not left much time for pursuing outside interests. All coaches of elite swimmers believe in heavy practice workloads, but Bowman takes it to an extreme. His philosophy is simple: there is no substitute for being in the water. Not running or weight lifting, and certainly not resting. Each day out of the water is a setback. (The N.B.A.C. team does a little bit of running for cross-training, but when his teammates put on their sneakers, Phelps now stays behind and rides an exercise bicycle.) All swimmers in Bowman's elite group, not just Phelps, are expected to swim almost 365 days a year.

Bowman, a former college swimmer, has short, graying hair and a manner that alternates between stern taskmaster and wisecracking provocateur. ''Michael's got a pretty easy life,'' he observes, ''if you don't count the five hours a day of torture I put him through.'' He sometimes refers to Phelps as the Boy Wonder. The relationship between coach and star swimmer is exceedingly close, forged over years of shared success and constant proximity, not just together in Baltimore but during the trips to national and international meets that Phelps's fast swimming has earned them. There have been some clashes between them, raw shouting matches on the pool deck, but fewer of them over the years.

Phelps has grown to trust what Bowman asks of him. When he is interviewed, he uses the word ''we'' -- we swam about what we expected to; we'll choose the events we feel we have the best chance of winning -- as if Bowman is in the water with him. He has internalized his coach's philosophies, none more so than the complete immersion in training. ''If you take a day off, it takes you two days to get back to where you were,'' Phelps says. ''That's two days wasted, and you can never get those days back.''

It is more illuminating to watch Phelps work out than compete, and to see that his utter hatred of being defeated (after his loss to Crocker in 2003, he put up his rival's picture in his bedroom) even extends to practice. The North Baltimore Aquatic Club is one of the most powerful teams in the U.S. It sent 12 swimmers to the Olympic Trials, including Kevin Clements, 24, who was ranked second in the U.S. behind Phelps in the 200 individual medley, and Katie Hoff, a 15-year-old who seems poised to become the nation's next female swim star. Practices consist of hour upon hour of interval training broken up into ''sets'' -- for example, 20 repetitions of 100-meter freestyles, with perhaps 30 seconds of rest in between. The sets are fast because Bowman does not see the point of practicing slow swimming. Over the course of several months of observing practices, I never once saw Phelps let Clements, or anyone else, beat him to the wall. His focus never wavered, his thirst for training never flagged. ''I hate to lose in practice,'' Phelps told me. ''If somebody touches me out at the wall, it puts me in a bad mood.''

A practice can be numbingly tedious. Swimmers resting between intervals keep up running conversations, ones that stop when they push off the wall then pick right back up during the next snippet of rest. They tell jokes, squirt each other with water. The N.B.A.C. team ranges from girls in their early teens, through a core of post-college men who gravitated to Baltimore to swim with Bowman and Phelps, all the way up to 31-year-old Marianne Limpert, a three-time Olympian from Canada.

Phelps is quite skilled at handling his status and fame within this tight group. When they travel for meets, he shares a hotel room like everyone else, even though he could well afford his own. If he is the first to wake up, his roommate can count on Phelps rousing him with the whack of a pillow. He flies coach class with the rest of the team and plays cards, and only occasionally on very long flights upgrades to first class so he can stretch out. ''Before I started training with him, I had of course heard about Michael,'' says Limpert, whom Phelps calls Granny or Grandma. ''I thought he would be this swim automaton, you know, a really humorless person. But he's a really good teammate. He pays attention to other people. He knows when somebody needs encouragement. He jokes around. Most of the time, to tell you the truth, he's just this big goof.''

But never in the pool. He doesn't keep up those running conversations during practice. ''The people I train with, they know that I'm not a person to talk to during a set,'' he says. ''I'm not a person for someone to come to the wall and say, 'Hey, how was your day?' When it comes to a set, I'm there to do a job. I'm in a mode, and I'm going to focus on that.''

During long-distance sets, Phelps, like many swimmers, sings to himself -- whatever song he last heard in the car. But during faster sets, he does not sing; he concentrates on form and speed. He knows his previous best practice times and competes against them. One morning I saw him swim under 23 seconds in a 50-yard butterfly from a push-off start, rather than a dive off the racing blocks. He reacted as if he had just won an big race. ''I felt like I probably went 23, but I went 22.8, which was amazing,'' he said. ''I was really happy about that.''

Phelps turns everything into a competition. A constant concern for him and all his teammates is ingesting enough calories to replenish what they have burned in the pool, and even that is turned into something he can win at. He eats at a local diner after morning practice, not particularly healthfully, just a lot: fried egg sandwiches, double orders of sausage and grits; big stacks of chocolate chip pancakes. He and his teammate Cory Knopp, 17, a promising distance swimmer, have contests to see who can eat the most. ''But I never win,'' Knopp says. ''There's no way he'll ever let me beat him.''

Like all child prodigies, Phelps never seems his actual age. In the pool, he is a full-grown man and then some. Out of the water, he is in many ways younger than his 19 years -- a boy in a chlorine bubble -- obsessively monitored by adults. It is all completely understandable and defensible. Phelps's mission, perhaps his ultimate purpose in life, is to show what is humanly possible in the realm of water. How sad would it be, what a stupid waste, if he wrecked the Escalade one late night and suffered an injury that wiped out his Olympic Games? Or, another low-level anxiety: what if someone slipped a banned substance into his water bottle, and the boy fueled by pancakes and sausages got disqualified from the Games for some kind of steroid? He is constantly reminded: Don't drink out of any water bottle but your own, and make sure no one else touches it. All the sentries -- Bowman, his mother, his teammates -- stand a nervous watch against anything that could spoil four years of meticulous planning and hard work. A result is that Phelps has traveled the world but experienced little of it.

He has high-school buddies he hangs with at home -- typically, they play video games or watch movies -- but will reveal little beyond that about his social life. (At the 2000 Games in Sydney, he was asked at a press conference: Do you have a girlfriend and have you kissed her yet? He wouldn't answer. Last month in Long Beach, Calif., he was asked the same thing. Phelps, with a big laugh, said, ''I'm still not answering.'')

Phelps was raised by his mother, by his two older sisters and, to a large degree, by Bowman. (He went close to a year without talking to his father late in high school, and by several accounts their relationship is improved but still fragile. Fred Phelps, who was a college football player, is expected to be in Athens.) With his single mother working, it was Bowman, 39 and unmarried, who would drop Phelps off at school after morning practice and make certain he ate the breakfast his mother packed for him. Years later, the coach taught him to drive a stick shift. Even now, Bowman serves as a combination of swim coach and hovering swim parent. In cold weather, he reminds Phelps that the back steps to his home get icy, so he should watch his step. He cautions him to drive carefully. No swim detail is left to chance. At the Santa Clara meet, Bowman told Phelps between two tightly scheduled events: ''Michael, you've had enough of the PowerBar. Now drink some of the Gatorade.'' When the evening turned chilly: ''Michael, get your parka on.''

''I don't feel like a father figure because I've just tried to be his coach,'' Bowman says. ''But realistically, yes, we've been a lot closer than most coaches and swimmers, and a lot of that has been by necessity. But I really am trying to give him his space, so he doesn't have to worry about me checking up on him. But let's face it, I probably have an interest in that because we've come this far, and I want to see all this work.''

Debbie Phelps had no problem agreeing to the intense training regimen that Bowman proposed when her son was 11. She is personally conservative, someone who says she believes that a child with free time will tend to find bad things to fill it with. Even now, whenever it is suggested to her that Michael may have ''missed'' something, she reacts incredulously. ''Like what?'' she said to me at one point. ''Like he missed some of the things that teenagers get into in this country? I don't feel bad about that. There was always a balance. He went to basketball games. He went to football games. He had friends. He was a normal kid. But he always came home early and got his sleep and went to practice the next day.''

Debbie Phelps says there was a period when Michael resisted the high level of training. He did not want to do ''doubles'' -- days of morning and afternoon practices. So in order to persuade him, she enlisted her daughter Hilary's male teammates from the University of Richmond, young men her son idolized. ''They made him understand that the more practices he did, the better it was going to make him,'' Debbie Phelps says. ''It was going to broaden his horizons.''

Earlier this year, Bowman accepted one of the top jobs in swimming, head men's coach at the University of Michigan. He will leave N.B.A.C. after the Olympics and move to Ann Arbor. No one can imagine Phelps and Bowman apart, and they probably won't be: Phelps expects to train and compete with Club Wolverine, a private team that Bowman will also coach. (Because all serious swimmers train year-round, it is common for a coach to lead both a college team and a club team that includes his college swimmers, in their off-season, and older post-collegiate swimmers.) Phelps plans to take classes at Michigan and perhaps to serve as a volunteer assistant coach for the college team. Everyone agrees that it will be time for Phelps's life to change a bit, although no one's quite sure what that will mean. ''He'll get some separation from Baltimore, which is what he needs,'' Bowman says. ''We'll get to the point where we'll work on the swimming part, but he'll also have a life because this has to stop at a certain point -- where there's everybody around him, and everybody knows what he's doing every minute of every day. It's not normal.''

It has, however, been the only life possible given the task at hand. Though Phelps, barring injury, is likely to be a top swimmer for the next decade or more, he may never be in better shape or better prepared than he is now. Never will his life and mind be cleared of all but what is relevant to swimming. Even if Phelps himself does not yet know it, those around him understand that the last four years probably cannot -- or at least should not -- be repeated.

The last time I sat down with Michael Phelps for an extended conversation was late last spring, above the pool at Meadowbrook in a little room normally used for baby-sitting. He used to romp in this room while his sisters practiced, but now he uses it to conduct his interviews. The swim world, at that moment, was obsessed with knowing his plan. What events would he swim? Which would he drop from his program? Whose gold medals and glory did he threaten, and who, by his absence in a certain event, still had a chance to shine? But rather than announcing his plans, Phelps let everyone wait and worry. ''Why do they have to know?'' he said with a smile. ''Wouldn't it be better for them just to concentrate on their own events and not worry about what I'm doing?''

Swimming prides itself on being a genteel sport, and it is. A sense of camaraderie prevails, a shared bond among athletes who know how hard they all work, and for so little tangible reward. But every four years, there is a little more than usual to go around -- a small pot of money, acclaim and television time -- and the prospect of one man taking far more than his share is, on some level, profoundly irritating to Phelps's rivals. (Stu Isaac of Speedo estimates that about 45 U.S. swimmers make a sustainable income from the sport, about $30,000 annually, from $1,250-a-month stipends paid by USA Swimming, small endorsement contracts, personal appearance fees and bonus money paid out at some meets. Of those, perhaps a dozen of the biggest stars make $100,000 and up, enough to call swimming a career.)

In the weeks leading up to the U.S. Trials and the Athens Games, everyone seemed to be trying to chase Phelps out of an event or two. ''How can you get the best out of yourself swimming that many races?'' Grant Hackett, Ian Thorpe's teammate, chimed in from Australia. Thorpe himself restated his criticism. Aaron Peirsol, an American and the world-record holder in the 200 backstroke (Phelps is right behind him), said: ''My goal isn't to take any of Phelps's glory away. It's just to preserve my own.''

Fierce competitors like to win, of course, and they disdain losing. But it is also not uncommon for them to enjoy the discomfort they cause others -- the intimidation, the fear, the gloom of impending defeat. And Phelps was clearly taking pleasure in this. He wasn't doing anything, really, just being a little coy, and still, he was bothering his rivals. If they were that thin-skinned, how would they be when they got in the pool against him?

Phelps told me a story about when he first moved up to the elite group at Meadowbrook and began training with -- and going faster than -- swimmers a half-dozen years older. ''The girls didn't mind too much, but to the boys, it was like I was on their territory, and boys don't like that,'' he said. ''I got picked on some. It wasn't anything big, but I would get frustrated. But it didn't do what they wanted, which I guess was to make me quit. It just made me swim faster.''

Phelps's immense talent -- and his range over numerous events and distances -- continues to put him in others' territories. Thorpe, the best middle-distance freestyler in the world, had talked of branching out into other events but has seemed to lose interest with Phelps's emergence. Ian Crocker, who took Phelps's world record in the 100-meter butterfly, is such a pure sprinter that he did not even enter the 200-meter butterfly at the U.S. Trials. (He did qualify for the Games in the 100-meter freestyle.) Phelps swims freestyle, backstroke, butterfly and both individual medleys. No one doubts that if he takes up the breaststroke as a discrete event (rather than just part of the medleys), as he may after Athens, he'll quickly be world class at that.

The strategy of Natalie Coughlin, the most dominant female U.S. swimmer today, was almost the opposite of Phelps's: she entered just three events at the Trials, passing up two in which she was top-ranked in the U.S. Her explanation was that she hoped to ''do really well in two or three events'' rather than ''be mediocre in four or five.'' No one seemed to mind.

The U.S. Olympic Swim Trials, where Phelps had to qualify for each event he wanted to swim in Athens, were contested in a glorious setting, a temporary pool in Long Beach, constructed just a couple of hundred yards from the Pacific Ocean and ringed each night by close to 10,000 screaming fans sitting in bleachers that rose high above the water. At each session of the eight-day trials, sentimental favorites filled the competition lanes: Jenny Thompson, 31, the most decorated American female swimmer in history, on leave from medical school and trying to make one last Olympic team; Lenny Krayzelburg, 28, a Russian immigrant as handsome as a Hollywood star, back from two shoulder operations and determined to reclaim his crown as the world's greatest backstroker; Amanda Beard, 22, a former teenage star who clutched her teddy bear at the 1996 Games in Atlanta, but now something of a sex symbol who has been linked romantically to Thorpe, of all people; Tara and Dana Kirk, trying to become the first sisters ever to qualify for a U.S. Olympic swim team; even Coughlin, prevented by injury from making the 2000 team and just now, at 21, hoping to make her first team.

Michael Phelps was far too good to be anyone's sentimental favorite, and he had no particular story to tell other than that he is a really fast swimmer who wants to win as many gold medals as possible. A palpable but unspoken sense that he needed to be taken down a peg found its public expression in a column that appeared in The Los Angeles Times just as the Trials began; Bill Plaschke, the paper's star sports columnist, took aim at Phelps because he had never sought Mark Spitz's counsel, had not gone out of his way to meet him and had even had the audacity to refer to him only by his last name. ''That's Mr. Spitz to you,'' Plaschke wrote. (Plaschke did write a subsequent column that was much kinder.) The media seemed to want something from Phelps that he could not yet give: a worldliness, a complexity of personality, a better up-close-and-personal life story.

Phelps swam six events at the trials -- 400-meter individual medley, 200-meter freestyle, 200-meter butterfly, 200-meter backstroke, 100-meter butterfly and 200-meter individual medley. In all, a grueling 17 races. (The 400-meter individual medley has no semifinal round.) The top two finishers in each qualified for Athens, and Phelps achieved that in every event he entered. But he did not win them all. He finished second in two races, to Peirsol in the 200-meter backstroke, and to Crocker in the 100-meter butterfly -- no shame, since in both races he was up against world-record holders who, in beating him, lowered their world marks.

But the outcome of the Trials left Phelps with decisions to make. The weather in Athens will likely be blisteringly hot. And because the organizers of the Games ran out of time to finish all the Olympic sites, the outdoor competition pool, intended to have a roof for shade, will be exposed to the sun. Relays (which were not contested at the U.S. Trials) will add to Phelps's fatigue. He always knew that he would have to drop an individual event, but which one?

Crocker beat him fairly decisively in the 100-meter butterfly -- by 0.39 seconds -- but Phelps kept that on his Athens menu and vowed that in the four weeks between the Trials and the Summer Games he would improve his starts. (Crocker established his winning margin in the first 15 meters, then just held Phelps off the rest of the way.) That left a choice between the 200-meter backstroke -- an event in which Phelps is ranked second in the world and one that he has completed in just a little more than a half-second behind Peirsol's record -- and the 200-meter freestyle, in which Phelps is the top-ranked American, but nearly two seconds off the world record.

The 200 free had an additional factor to consider: the king of the event is Thorpe. ''It would work well with his schedule,'' USA Swimming's Skinner noted, ''but then he would have to face the big boy, the Big Kahuna.'' That would send some athletes running in the other direction, but not Phelps (even if he could run). He sat at the press center podium each night after the Trials, wearing his baseball cap, slouching and looking, well, kind of goofy. He kept saying that he could not yet reveal his plan for Athens, but it seemed clear what he would do. Each time he was asked if he would stay in the 200 free, he answered, ''I love to race against the best.''

On the final day of the Trials, Phelps made it official: he dropped the backstroke. (''Phelps, Thorpe in Race of the Century,'' a newspaper headline declared in swim-mad Australia.) ''One thing I always wanted to do was race Thorpe in a freestyle event,'' Phelps said of his decision. ''It's something I haven't had the opportunity to do so far in my career. . . . I think it is probably the best opportunity for me to be able to swim in probably the fastest 200 freestyle heat in history.''

It may not have been the wisest strategy -- even Spitz suggested that if Phelps was serious about seven golds, he would stay away from Thorpe -- but the Boy Wonder is a true sportsman. Yes, he wants the big medal haul. And Spitz's record. But what Michael Phelps really hungers for is something the ancient Greeks would have approved of -- a good, fast race.

Copyright © 2004 Michael Sokolove