Michael Phelps

Photo: Finlay MacKay
New York Times:

BUILDING THE PERFECT MACHINE: Bob Bowman has made Phelps his consuming project.
Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air.

Phelps — owner of a dozen world and American swimming records; winner of six gold and two bronze medals in Athens in 2004; odds-on favorite to accumulate more such jewelry this month in Beijing — must, at some point, come up for air. Or so you would think. But as you stare at the eerily still surface of the new pool at the Qwest Center in Omaha, into which Phelps has just lunged, it is possible to imagine, momentarily, that the figure undulating like a mass of kelp in the shallows of Lane 5 might just prefer to stay put, indefinitely, there in his element. I was watching a video from June 29, cueing the finals of the 400-meter individual medley at the United States Olympic Team Trials again and again with the hope of determining, somehow, the precise factors that enable Phelps to thrive, as few ever have, in an environment so unaccommodating to humans.

It’s not a simple task. Of all Olympic sports, competitive swimming is perhaps the most resistant to casual analysis. When the contestants are not entirely submerged, they are typically face-down; the strokes they carve through the water tend to look the same, and much of what they do is in any case concealed by the splash of their effort. Unless you have an intimate knowledge of the athletes, there are few physical characteristics to distinguish one form in the water from another, an effect compounded by body shaving and the uniform of caps, goggles and bodysuits. (The new, much-publicized Speedo LZR bodysuit that Phelps wears, for instance, is a peculiar cross between a piece of lingerie and a tourniquet; fabricated by ultrasonic welding rather than by stitching, it molds the swimmer’s trunk into a drag-reducing form, can take 20 minutes to don and is proving to be a great improvement, speedwise, on old fashioned, no-tech skin.)