Michael Phelps: Eight-Gold-Medal Man (with a Little Help from His Friends)

When American swimmer Michael Phelps, age 23, won his eighth gold medal at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing—breaking the record for most golds garnered at a single Games, set by another U.S. swimmer, Mark Spitz, at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich—the feat was hailed as one of the greatest individual achievements in sports history, and Phelps was proclaimed by many the greatest Olympian of all time. Yet had it not been for extraordinary performances by Jason Lezak, Phelps’s teammate in two gold medal-winning relay efforts, all the hard work that brought Phelps so close to achieving his Olympic dream might have been for naught.

Phelps had already won six gold medals at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, and in Beijing he was also pursuing the record for career gold medals—nine—shared by Spitz, U.S. sprinter and long jumper Carl Lewis, Finnish distance runner Paavo Nurmi, and Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina. Phelps’s grueling preparation for Beijing included years without so much as a single day away from the pool. To win eight golds, Phelps had to swim an exhausting 17 races in nine days with virtually the whole sporting world looking on expectantly. “Swimming not only builds character…it tests it,” read the inscription to the 2005 documentary film about Phelps’s rivalry with fellow American swimmer Ian Crocker. Phelps’s character was more than tested in the final of the 200-metre butterfly, which he won even though his goggles had filled with water, preventing him from seeing anything for much of the race. Moreover, by keeping his head down while Milorad Čavić lifted his ever so slightly, Phelps touched the wall one-hundredth of a second before the Serbian and thus triumphed in the 100-metre butterfly to capture his seventh gold. Earlier Phelps had broken world records in winning the 200-metre butterfly, 200-metre and 400-metre individual medleys, and 200-metre freestyle and as a member of the gold medal-winning 4 × 200-metre freestyle relay team.

At the end of the third leg of the 4 × 100-metre freestyle relay—with Phelps in pursuit of his second gold of the Games—it had looked as if he might come up short of his goal of eight gold medals, as the anchor of the French team, Alain Bernard, who had vowed to “smash” the Americans, took a commanding lead into the final leg. In that final leg Bernard bettered the blistering 100-metre split that Phelps had recorded only moments before during his leg of the relay. However, riding in the Frenchman’s “wash,” Lezak (at age 32 the oldest member of the American men’s swim team) incrementally caught and then passed Bernard, securing another gold for Phelps and a world record for the team—a remarkable come-from-behind swim in which Lezak blazed to the fastest 100-metre split ever recorded, at 46.06 seconds.

The Americans were trailing again in the final of the 4 × 100-metre medley relay when Phelps retook the lead in the third leg, the butterfly. It was up to Lezak to hold off the challenge of Australian Eamon Sullivan, the world record holder in 100-metre freestyle, and he did, winning an eighth gold for Phelps as the team notched yet another world record.