You may remember this winter we posed the question, "Is Tiger Woods the greatest athlete ever?" Of course our answer was a resounding no. It was our opinion that the designation of "greatest athlete" must involve a sport in which you have to increase your heart rate or at least break a sweat.
Every sport requires some combination of strength, speed, stamina, and precision. But some sports are simply more "pure" than others. Tennis takes more athleticism than NASCAR. Soccer takes more athleticism than diving. Boxing takes more athleticism than archery. You get the picture.
Enter Michael Phelps. In a sport that requires strength, speed, stamina, and precision (One mis-timed stroke can spell defeat), Phelps set the all-time record for gold medals in both a career and a single Olympic Games.
And he did so in every conceivable way. Phelps swam all four strokes. He won a 400-meter medley. He won a 100-meter sprint. He won five individual events and three relays. In some races, he dominated. In another, only teammate Jason Lezak's miracle swim kept Phelps' quest for history alive. And in yet another, Phelps trailed for all but a hundredth of a second: the race's last hundredth of a second.
Phelps' resume in the 2008 Olympic Games: Eight events. Eight gold medals. Eight Olympic records. Seven world records.
His march to history presented the best that sports has to offer. The drama was compelling and unscripted. The pressure was immense from the beginning, and it only grew. This was real reality television. Phelps faced the world's greatest swimmers and won not once, not twice, but eight times.
Phelps' resume in the 2008 Olympic Games: Eight events. Eight gold medals. Eight Olympic records. Seven world records.
His march to history presented the best that sports has to offer. The drama was compelling and unscripted. The pressure was immense from the beginning, and it only grew. This was real reality television. Phelps faced the world's greatest swimmers and won not once, not twice, but eight times.
And that's why Michael Phelps is the greatest athlete alive.
2 comments:
Completely agree. Many people were hoping for 7 golds at the 2004 Games in Athens, but "only" finished with 6, plus two others. That's when he was only 19... and hadn't even begun to lift weights yet. People can pick up a basketball and play anytime, feeling winded at the end of the game. Baseball isn't an overly active sport (short sprints, lots of standing), and perhaps football is one of the toughest. But, if you tried to swim 25 meters in a pool, you're instantly winded because of all the muscles used and the resistance of water. Phelps' shortest race was 4x that distance. To win 8 different events of varying lengths and setting records in every single one, I can't see how that could be easily reproduced in the next 50 years.
lol, nice article other than the "compelling and unscripted" cliche...i liked it
Post a Comment