Turning now to some tragic news...
>> Tuesday
American Olympic swimming star Michael Phelps has died today after accidentally wearing his regular headphones into the pool, causing his head to explode. Phelps was 23 years old.
Read more...
Showing posts with label michael phelps. Show all posts
Showing posts with label michael phelps. Show all posts
The Stopwatch Thinks Otherwise
Mark Spitz has claimed (perhaps tongue-in-cheek, perhaps not...you really can't tell from the article) that the only person who could beat Michael Phelps is Mark Spitz. Rocky VI-style CGI duels between athletes from different eras aside, let's examine the six events that both Phelps and Spitz swam in their respective record-setting Olympics. (Note: Each one of these times set a new world record in their respective events at the time.)
Event----- Spitz in 1972 (Phelps in 2008)
200m FREE 1:52.78 (1:42.96)
100m FLY 54.27 (50.58)
200m FLY 2:00.70 (1:52.03)
4x100 FREE Relay 3:26.42 (3:08.24)
4x200 FREE Relay 7:35.78 (6:58.56)
4x100 Medley Relay 3:48.16 (3:29.34)
Say what you want about different swimsuit fabrics and different pools affecting the times, but we've seen what a big deal it is to break a world record by a half-second or so. The closest a 1972 Spitz comes to a 2008 Phelps is the nearly four seconds he would finish behind Phelps after just two lengths of the pool in the 100m Butterfly. Had Spitz's time been a finishing time in the 2008 100m Butterfly Final, it would have been in last place...only about two seconds behind Ryan Pini of Papua New Guinea.
Going either further back, it would have been the last-place time in the Semifinals for that event as well.
Note: I am in no way an expert in swimming, and realize this entire post contradicts what I wrote on.....Christ.....Monday. However, I can read a stopwatch.
Come on, Michael Phelps isn't really THAT great
>> Thursday
Let's stop it now. Michael Phelps has not automatically claimed the title of "greatest Olympian ever" or "best athlete on the planet" just because of his performances over the last week.
First of all, let's face it: the number of gold medals he will ultimately earn will be skewed no matter what the total. See, fortunately for Michael Phelps, his sport has the greatest number of sub-events of any Olympic sport. Kobe Bryant could win 8 gold medals too if they had a 5-on-5 men's basketball tournament, a 5-on-5 tournament with games that were half the length of regulation games, a 3-on-3 tournament, a one-on-one contest, a dunk contest, a lay-up drill, synchronized dribbling, and an open-floor, freestyle jump shot routine. Thus, Phelps is arguably just a beneficiary of a system that provides more events for his sport. Maybe I don't understand the nuances of the 200-m individual medley vs. the 200-m freestyle. But correct me if I'm wrong: both of these are swimming events of equal lengths, are they not? Wouldn't somebody who excels in one 200-m swim be expected to be pretty damn good at another one?
Also, Michael Phelps joins the rest of today's athletes in an era of training labs with advanced computerized biophysical analysis, outstanding nutritional supplements, low-oxygen training tents, and almost certainly steroids that we still don't know how to detect by tests. Thus, like his other colleagues in the realm of elite athletes (e.g. Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, etc.), he simply cannot be compared to previous generations of athletes. I don't know how many times that argument needs to be made.
Finally, I have to add the other classic but again appropriate argument against the title of "greatest Olympian ever": he's excelling in one sport alone. If he were doing a floor routine in gymnastics tonight and competing in a swim relay tomorrow, maybe he gets consideration then. However, we all know that no one can ever earn the designation of "greatest athlete ever" simply because there is no way to compare people across sports. As Kip says in Napoleon Dynamite, "Come on, Napoleon, like anyone can even know that."
So shut up about Michael Phelps already.
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