FOREWORD

Not too long ago, at an NBC Olympics event in New York, I walked into a back room where a few people were milling around, and Michael Phelps was seated on a small couch. In front of him, on a coffee table, was a large, empty pizza box. Phelps was downing the last morsels, so I waited a moment before confirming my suspicion.

“Michael, did you eat that whole pizza by yourself?” I asked.

His smile, framed by some lingering crumbs on the sides of his mouth, was a mixture of sheepishness and pride.

“Yeah,” he said. “I housed it.”

Okay, I know Olympic athletes in training burn ridiculous amounts of carbs and calories. But still….

As he turns 23, Michael Phelps is a peculiar combination of a typical American young man and thoroughly extraordinary American athlete. Sure, he’s already well on his way to becoming the most decorated Olympian ever, and he might only be halfway through his career. But in the handful of times we’ve met over the past several years, what’s struck me as much as the superhuman aspects of him is the normal stuff. The kid from Baltimore raised by his single mom and older sisters. The football fan who goes to a bar in a purple jersey every Sunday in the fall when he’s training in Ann Arbor to watch his hometown Ravens (cleaning out the kitchen of chicken wings, mozzarella sticks, and potato skins by halftime, I’m guessing). The video game fanatic who has to schedule his day around his housemate: an English bulldog named Herman.

Maybe what accentuates Phelps’ normalcy on dry land are the freakish gifts he has when water is involved. We’ve heard and read a lot about how Phelps was born to swim—how his elongated torso, large feet, and massive hands are a racer’s dream combination. But to understand what makes him so phenomenally successful, you have to know the level of his dedication. In the year leading up to the Athens Games, Phelps took just one day off from training—that includes weekends–and it was the day his wisdom teeth were removed. In the four years since his dominance in Greece, his coach says he’s somehow found a way to step up the intensity another notch. Like Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, two athletes he’s sometimes compared to, Phelps has the most talent. But like that esteemed pair, he wins so often because he understands that while talent is huge, hard work takes it to other levels. And also because, like Jordan and Woods, he loves nothing more than competing, and hates nothing more than losing.

Since he last was on the Olympic stage, Phelps’ life has been, sure enough, a combination of the normal and the remarkable. He’s made a wrong turn or two, but afterwards, he’s taken full responsibility. He talks about what he’s learned from those missteps in this update to his book. Meanwhile, in the pool, while you may have been turned away, he’s set eight more world records and counting, won 12 more gold medals at the World Championships, and done everything he can to put himself in position for his monumental goal in Beijing: eight events, eight gold medals. It would be the greatest achievement in the history of the Games.

As Phelps himself might put it, he’s looking to “house” the Olympics.

I’m not going to bet against him. That pizza box was empty, but it sure looked like he had room for more.

—Bob Costas, June 2008