Happy 25th birthday Michael Phelps. The American celebrates a quarter of a century on the planet today while in Vichy, France, for a week of doing what he has done to a consistently high level for the past 10 years and more: training (sets of broken 200s is coach Bob Bowman's gift to Superfish today, he tells me from the burning deck in Vichy).
It gets no easier. In fact, it is probably harder now than it ever was, at least by some measures. Which human with a million miles and more in their muscles, with all that gold in tow, laurels piled up forest deep and a pack of hungry wolves in chase of a line in their own careers that would read "I beat the greatest of greats" would wish to take another stroke?
Answer: Michael Phelps, a man who last year was still winning world crowns a year after cranking his Olympic gold count up by 8 to 14 on his way past the seven gold tally of Mark Spitz in Munich and the record career totals of nine gold medals shared by the American pioneer of 1972 with Paavo Nurmi (FIN), Larysa Latynina (URS), and Carl Lewis (USA).
Those eight golds were stunning but so too were the efforts of Phelps and Bowman at Melbourne 2007 world titles: he won every race he entered, set five world records, four of them on his own: 1:43.86 in the 200m freestyle eclipsed Thorpe’s global mark; 1:52.09 over 200m butterfly (no other man has swim inside 1:54.50); 1:54.98 and 4:06.22 in the 200m and 400m medley (no other man has swum inside 1:56 and 4:09).
"There has been nobody that's been not just as dominant but as versatile. His performance was the greatest performance of all-time. He can do it from behind, he can do it from the front, he can do it when it’s close, he can do it when it’s not close. He can go anywhere," coach Mark Schubert told a room packed with the world media.
I wrote in "Aquatics - 1908-2008", a trawl of FINA's first century: "At 10, fresh from shedding a fear of putting his face in water, Phelps joined North Baltimore Swim Club and coach Bob Bowman, a Beethoven fan with a degree in developmental psychology, minoring in musical composition. If the instrument was willing and able, then the notes that Bowman mapped out in those early days would become a masterpiece. Their slogan was 'The solution lies with us'."
It still does. So much water under the bridge since the thrill of thrilling raw material walked through the door at the North Baltimore Swim Club. "He was so fast, he had to swim with older swimmers ... but by the end of the practice, and at the most difficult part of the session, I saw a little cap moving up forward to the front of the line with each repeat swim," said Bowman post those pieces of eight in China. "It was so remarkable, I'd never seen anything like it and when I went home that night I couldn't sleep I was so excited, but of course I didn't tell him that."
He added: "He also had a built-in clock." Bowman asked him to write down the times he wanted to achieve in three favourite races. "He was just 11 but six months later he swam those exact times, to the one-hundredth of a second," Bowman recalled. "I don't know how that's possible but it's true. He always had a very good sense of finding where he wants to go and how to go there."
Down the years since, so much water pulled through by what might be described as the most efficient pair of swimming paddles ever to grace the element, though that sentiment would, for accuracies sake, have to include the mindset, toil and much more that steered the fingers that felt their way to fame. Some have painted a picture of Bowman as puppet master but, at best, that's something of a child's caricature of the real thing.
Long gone the days when Bowman could step on Michael's goggles just before a race so that his young charge would learn to cope with adversity, to step up under any circumstances and perform at his best, to take whatever was thrown at him, turn it to fodder and feast on the energy.
Bowman told me: "I've always tried to find ways to give him adversity in either meets or practice and have him overcome it." He took Phelps, 14, to an evening competition and asked the driver to turn up late - on purpose. "That way there was no dinner - he had to deal with it. He's used to handling pressure situations in training, where that pressure comes from me. We have often put him in a situation where practice is not over until he achieves a certain time. Things have to be done absolutely correctly or we do them over."
Some of that will remain but Phelps is now a man, a man with what many would assume to be "job done" stamped across his own personal hall of fame. Phelps wants more, as he told SwimNews in an end-of-decade interview that can be read here and here. But now more than ever will the next chapter hang on the might of will in a man Bowman has long called "the motivation machine". It is not Bowman who now tells Phelps to get up, get going, do this, do that. It is Phelps who tells himself, and so far, he has been unable to do that with the same consistency and regularity and purpose as he once did, by his own admission.
After the Paris Open, Phelps, 10 years on from his first Olympic final as a 15-year-old at Sydney 2000, told the media: "I hope for the Pan Pacs. I don't know. I'm clearly disappointed, but it's my own fault. I know I didn't do the training when I needed to do it at the right time. I've got to train more and train harder. Everybody is going to be a rival at this point. I'm way behind. I'm the one who needs to catch up with them. I blame myself. You've got to be responsible for your own actions. I'm the only one who can fix it."
In the short-term, that means by US national championships from August 3-7 and the Pan Pacific championships, in Irvine, California, from August 18-22. In the longer-term, it means the swansong of the greatest swimmer of all-time, London 2012, aged 27, with a lifetime of choice ahead of him.
Happy Birthday Michael Phelps and Many Happy Returns Of the Day.
