THE PHELPS PHENOMENON

Hello my dear Friends. I hope you enjoyed my review of Singh is King and sincerely believe that most of you must have watched the movie by now. Now, I thought of changing the topic for my new post. If I continue to add movie reviews, I am sure my readers will be bored. So I have decided to switch to another topic of my interest-Sports. And speaking of sports, I decided to focus on the Olympics. And speaking of the Olympics, I decided to focus on the athlete who has taken Beijing by storm by capturing 8 gold medals in the 8 races he participated. Yes, I am talking of none other than Michael Phelps.

7 days, 20-25 races(including the heats, semifinals and the finals), 8 events and 8 golds. History created. 36 year old record wiped out. Yes, this is what Michael Phelps achieved in one of the greatest sporting events of all time- The Beijing Olympics 2008. He came with a mission and achieve it in style. Out of the 8 finals he swam, 7 of them were won in World Record times- an achievement that has raised the question whether Phelps is the greatest ever sportsman ever born!!

His dream was shattered in Athens 4 years back when he won only 6 gold medals and 2 bronze. But he decided that he was not going to repeat his mistakes all over again. He took to the pool and made it his very own playground. I am sure that all of you who saw his races would agree with me that Phelps was his own competitor!! Such was his brilliance and domination that if one constitutes Phelps as a nation he would be standing at number 6 in the official medals tally!!! And more importantly, he also made, the record of the most number of Olympics medals, his very own. He has now a total of 16 Olympic medals-14 golds and 2 bronze.

And whats fascinating is that he is only 23 years old. That means, we could see a further emulation of this 8 gold medal record at London 2012. I will not be surprised if he finishes 2012 Olympics with a total of 24 medals with a total of 22 golds.

There was a Carl Lewis, a Paavo Nurmi, an Al Oerter, A Mark Spitz....but what the world will remember from 17th August 2008 is that there is a Michael Phelps-The greatest sportsperson of the millennium!!!

However there were close misses also in his journey to greatness. But then, without risks and setbacks noone can succeed in life. His second race, the 4X100 freestyle relay headed for a nailbiting finish. Phelps nearly lost his second gold medal during the race but for his US teammate Jason Lezac who swam from behind and defeated the hot favorite Alain Bernard in the last second to win the race. Furthermore, in the seventh race, Phelps won by a hundredth of a second to equal Mark Spitz's 36 year old record and the rest was history. The overcome of these narrow misses clearly showed that Phelps was destined to overtake Mark Spitz. But it was his hard work combined with a splendid display of swimming that really did the job!!

Beijing 2008 was Phelps's playground...History was created on August 17th at this very venue...Come London 2012 will see Phelps emulating his own feat and will stamp his supremacy once and for all...make no mistake about it. Even after this, I am sure that it will take nearly 40 years from now for another Michael Phelps to appear and break this phenomenal record. Till then, Swimming has only one legend and his name is Michael Phelps!!!