Michael Phelps , the golden swimmer , his father, sisters ,mother and coach

Swimming's Wonder Boy
Gifted Phelps Is Primed to Win Multiple Medals in Athens
By Michael E. RuaneWashington Post Staff WriterSunday, April 18, 2004; Page E01
First in an occasional series
Shortly after Michael Phelps turned 11, the coach of the North Baltimore Aquatic Club summoned his parents, Debbie and Fred, to a meeting in the baby-sitting room of the pool where their son learned to swim.
The coach, Bob Bowman, told them that Michael was an extraordinarily gifted swimmer who had a fabulous future ahead of him.
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"This is my prediction," Bowman explained: By 2000, Michael should be in the audience at the U.S. Olympic trials, just getting the feel of big-time national competition.
"In 2004, he'll probably make his first Olympics," the coach said. "Two thousand eight will probably be a better Olympics for him, [and] 2012 . . . will be his best Olympics ever."
Debbie Phelps, who tells the story, was stunned. "Bob," she replied. "He's 11 years old." How could the coach foretell the boy's life so far into the future?
As it turned out, Bowman was wrong.
Michael Phelps wasn't in the stands at the 2000 tryouts. He was in the water, where, at 15, he made the team, and went on to swim at the Olympics in Sydney. There, he finished fifth in the 200-meter butterfly as the youngest U.S. Olympian since 1932.
This year Phelps is aiming for the Summer Games in Athens, not as a rookie Olympian, but as the most dominant swimmer in the world.
Indeed, just 10 months out of Towson High School, and seven years removed from Bowman's forecast, Michael Phelps could make history this August in Athens. All he has to do is win seven, or more, gold medals, equaling or beating the achievement of the legendary Mark Spitz at the Munich Olympics in 1972, and making him one of the greatest Olympians ever.
"I don't want to be the second Mark Spitz," says Phelps, who will turn 19 on June 30. "I want to be the first Michael Phelps."
Spitz wishes him well: "I hope he does it. It's going to be great for the Olympics. . . . It's going to be great for America. It's going to be great for him."
Phelps, a resident of Rodgers Forge, near Towson in Baltimore County, already has gained world-class attention.
He has a case full of crystal trophies and medallions in the elegant Tudor townhouse he shares with his mother. Last week he beat out basketball stars LeBron James and Diana Taurasi to win the prestigious James E. Sullivan Award, given annually by the Amateur Athletic Union.
Phelps has the added incentive of $1 million offered by Speedo, the swimwear company whose products he endorses, if he matches Spitz's record.
Skilled at several strokes, he is the world record holder in the 200-meter butterfly, the two individual medley events -- which combine all four strokes -- and is regularly referred to by coaches, colleagues and observers as the best all-around swimmer in the world. Last summer he became the first person to break five world records in one meet.
He has the perfect swimmer's physique: He stands 6 feet 4, weighs 199 pounds and has broad shoulders, a long torso and a 6-7 wingspan.
He has the training discipline for which his sport is famous, swimming endlessly up and back in the pool at Baltimore's Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center, seven days a week, almost 365 days a year.
He has two more advantages.
At a young age he fell by good fortune under the tutelage of Bowman, a former college music major and student of child psychology, who at 39 has become one of the best coaches in the country.
And Phelps grew up in a talented, driven, if somewhat fractured, swimming family.
His parents, who are now divorced, reared him and his two sisters by the side of the swimming pool, and all three children became crack competitive swimmers. Hilary Phelps, the eldest sibling, excelled at the butterfly but gradually lost interest in participating in the sport. Whitney Phelps, the next youngest, seemed certain to make the U.S. Olympic team as a 15-year-old in 1996 only to fail at the tryouts -- a blow so severe that she says she no longer swims, not even for pleasure.
Michael Phelps is the youngest, and most promising.
He has lost just two races in the last eight months, in both cases because of illness. He lost just twice last year, and keeps a picture of a swimmer who beat him last July near the computer in his room for motivation. "Right when I get out of bed, I can see it every morning," he says.
His coach says Phelps is the most competitive person he has ever met.
Phelps says, "I hate to lose."
Numbers Game Bowman is whistling like the driver of a mule team, as he strides rapidly along the pool beside his star swimmer.
"Yeah! Yeah!" he yells at Phelps, who is churning, exhausted, through the last lap of a long butterfly drill.
"Attaboy!" he hollers, stalking the athlete with a stopwatch. "Attaboy!"
It is 5:30 p.m. on a chilly February evening, and the sun is setting behind the bare trees outside Baltimore's Meadowbrook Aquatic and Fitness Center.
Bowman is putting Phelps and other elite swimmers through the second training session of the day, which for some began around 6 a.m. It has been mostly quiet, with the metal pace clocks clicking off the times in big digital numbers, and the coach watching from the plastic chair where others are forbidden to sit.
But the session is almost over, and Bowman is now out of his chair and riding Phelps relentlessly, staying even with him, whistling, yelling, until Phelps touches the pool wall, and finishes the drill, gasping, "way too fast. I went out way too fast."
"That's all right," Bowman calls, briskly walking away. "You gotta go for it."
Training for a swimmer is hard, monotonous labor. It leaves its acolytes in excellent physical condition, pallid from the mostly indoor work, and often with weird circles around the eyes from the pressure of their swimming goggles.
There are numerous diabolical training variations that can be thrown in by the coach, such as swimming laps with sneakers on, as Bowman had commanded earlier that day. But chiefly it is like plowing the same furrow in a watery pasture.
In addition to possessing physical skill and endurance, Phelps is a keen swimming mathematician. In a sport that is obsessed with figures, and times, and where training sets are written on blackboards like dense equations, Phelps is a human calculator. His mind is like a clock, his mother says. "That's all the sport is," Phelps says. "A bunch of numbers."
Among the figures stored in his brain for quick recall are his world record times of 4 minutes 9.09 seconds in the 400-meter individual medley; 1:55.94 in the 200-meter IM; and 1:53.93 in the 200-meter butterfly.
Phelps loves it. He is eager in the pool. He is happy swimming. It is his life, he says. Canadian author and swimming guru Cecil Colwin likens him to the late Russian ballet dancer, Rudolf Nureyev. "He can intellectualize what he's doing," Colwin says.
Bowman sees him more as a musical virtuoso. "Michael swims like he would play an instrument," says Bowman. "If he was a concert pianist he would practice eight hours a day," only a little more than Phelps practices swimming several days a week.
Phelps credits Bowman with much of his success. "The physical part is all Bob," Phelps says. "I just swim. It's something that he's taught me to do. . . . If he says something; if he says 'Your left hand is coming higher than your right,' then I try to fix it, then just keep on swimming."
Phelps would be a freshman in college, had he not deferred his education for the Olympics. He is a big fan of the late comedian Chris Farley. He loves rap music, and during meets loses himself under his headphones to the rumble of 50 Cent or Eminem. He has the Olympic rings tattooed on his right hip.
He drives a sand-colored Cadillac Escalade, purchased after he turned pro and started earning endorsement money three years ago. Two Christmases ago, he bought his mother, a teacher and Baltimore County school administrator, a silver Mercedes-Benz ML320. He put the keys in her Christmas stocking.
In street clothes, baggy corduroys, layered T-shirts and red baseball cap, he is just a big, broad-shouldered kid. He can still walk around a mall, or a hotel, relatively unnoticed. Though he has appeared on network TV, he recently slipped into a meet at Baltimore's Loyola College, gulped down pizza and melted easily into the poolside throng.
So far, he says, "I can just go on, be on my way, and not have to worry about getting mobbed and being jumped on."
That may be, Bowman laughs.
"Not for long."
All in the Family "Watch this," Debbie Phelps said, sitting by herself in the bleachers of Auburn University's James E. Martin Aquatics Center on a rainy Saturday in January. "He always does this."
By the pool below, her son was poised on the Lane 5 starting block, crouched in a classic racing stance: left foot forward, toes gripping the platform edge, right foot back, heel raised.
Then, in the moment of silence before the start, he began swinging his huge arms. He first locked them behind his back as if handcuffed, then swung them twice across his chest, until they slapped against his shoulders.
Twice the quiet was broken by the whack of his hands on his shoulders, part of his ritual, prerace stretching. (The few times he hasn't done it, he says, he hasn't raced well.) When the starting tone sounded, Phelps launched himself at the water, and his mother was soon on her feet yelling: "Come on Michael! Come on honey!"
Michael Phelps is, in fascinating ways, the product of his family.
His sisters have provided inspiration and example. His father, though estranged from Phelps, was an intense and talented athlete in his youth who also dreamed of greatness.
And his mother has been parent, advocate and fan while spending large portions of her adult life beside swimming pools. "You take every moment of your life and you make use of it," she says of the sport.
An amiable, engaging woman who for years taught middle school in the Baltimore County school system and was twice a Maryland teacher of the year, she was fashionably dressed as she watched the Auburn meet. At 53, she had just gotten braces on her teeth last fall. "It was time to do something for me," she says.
Her son credits her for much of his success. And his success has changed her life.
The granddaughter of a coal miner, Debbie Phelps was born in Westernport, Md., a flood-plagued, Allegany County railroad town situated at a bend in the North Branch of the Potomac River.
The second oldest of four children, she was a tomboy as a kid. She married her high school sweetheart, Fred Phelps, a strapping football player from an even smaller mill town up river. Both went off to college in West Virginia, then moved east to take jobs, she as a home economics teacher, he as a state policeman.
But over time, their marriage foundered. She was left with the kids, work and swimming. Amid the domestic turbulence, she says she was determined to provide stability for the children.
All three swam from an early age, and while Hilary, 26, was the first to compete successfully, and is now one of Michael's most ardent fans, it was Whitney, 24, who seemed destined for greatness.
Tall, broad-shouldered and strong, she swam the butterfly, and began to travel, win medals and make headlines.
But she developed serious back problems, which she kept to herself even as they worsened. Her parents had separated, she found solace in the water, and she was determined to make the 1996 Olympics.
At the trials in Indianapolis that year, in front of her anxious family, she failed to make the team.
"To this day," her mother says, "we'll talk, and she'll say, 'How good could I have been?' "
Whitney Phelps now lives with her father, who has remarried, in Linthicum, Md., 20 miles from where her mother and brother live. In a recent interview, she said she loves and admires her brother. "He has this fire burning inside of him that keeps him going," she said.
But she doesn't intrude. "I kind of stand on the outside and look in," she said. She will attend a meet to watch him swim, but then "I like to go."
"I'm still angry about everything," she said. "It's still a touchy subject."
She no longer swims, even for pleasure. "I still want to be able to compete," she said. "But I can't. So I don't want to torture myself just going for a Sunday swim. I'm probably never going to swim, ever again."
Fred Phelps said his daughter's fate was a tragedy. He, too, suffered athletic disappointment as a young athlete, but not in the sport of swimming.
His love was football.
Fred Phelps, 53, who retired from the Maryland State police on Jan. 30 after 28 years on the force, was raised in tiny Luke, Md. His father died when he was 8, and his mother worked as a secretary. He grew up swimming in the nearby Savage River. "Organized swimming?" he says. "Nah, we never had it."
A robust figure at 6-2 and 230 pounds, he said he grew up tough and hard, hunting and fishing and playing sports. As a young man he worked on the labor gang at the paper mill, and, summers, as a bouncer in Atlantic City.
"My God, by the time I was 18 I was in more knockdown, dragouts," he said. "You grow up in a small community, buddy, you either take care of business or you get the [expletive] knocked out of you."
He played football at Fairmont State College in West Virginia, mostly on defense, and dreamed of playing in the NFL.
"I loved playing ball," he said. "I loved hitting. There was something about laying a shoulder on somebody and hearing that gasp of air leave their body." He, too, hated losing.
After college, he tried out for the Redskins but failed to make the team, which took time to get over.
Though he and his son see little of each other, and Michael rarely mentions him publicly, Fred Phelps said he understands.
"He's shooting for the stars," Fred Phelps said. "One of the last things I ever want to do is to step in front of his aim. Never want to do that."
"Ride that rocket while it's running, baby," he said.
"Take it. Take the ride."
To Be the Best Four weeks after the January meet at Auburn, a group of youngsters carrying American flags led Michael Phelps and seven other swimmers toward the starting blocks of an old indoor YMCA pool in Orlando.
Rock music pounded through the PA system, and the pool deck and the stands were filled with spectators. It was the final of the 200-meter backstroke at the Spring Nationals, the biggest national swimming meet before this year's Olympic trials in July.
As he walked in the prerace ceremony, Phelps had on his game face: an unsmiling look of defiant, outta-my-way determination.
His goggles were propped up on his forehead, just below his white swim cap. There was a swagger in his step, and intimidation.
Earlier in the meet, he had told reporters that he was "tapered and shaved," meaning that he had tapered, or sharpened, his training, and had shaved much of his body hair along with a microscopic layer of skin. He was, physically and psychologically, ready to race.
Phelps had beaten out 54 swimmers in heats earlier in the day, and earned the coveted Lane 4 in the middle of the pool for the final.
The event was not one of his best, but he and Bowman had been working on it to broaden his chances for gold in Athens.
The world record was 1:55.15. But Phelps had previously done it in 1:56.10, and the crowd knew he might do almost anything.
At the starting tone, Phelps took the lead and finished the first 50 meters in 27.93 seconds, very close to the record split of 27.75 seconds.
As he pulled further into the lead, the crowd grew more excited, realizing what might be coming. Standing at poolside Bowman began whistling ferociously with his eyes closed, and yelling, "Come on, Michael! Go!"
Paul Yetter, a North Baltimore coach at one of the club's satellite pools, started timing Phelps's stroke cycles with a stopwatch and calling out the numbers.
Phelps finished the first 100 meters in a fast 57.09 seconds, and then streaked to the 150-meter mark at 1:26.54. "Come on!" Yetter yelled, "Come on!"
When Phelps finished in 1:55.30 -- .15 second off the record -- there was a groan from the crowd. "Oh, man!" Yetter yelled. So close. "Whoo!"
But as Bowman stepped out of the throng, and headed to greet his swimmer, he was grinning. He had tried to foretell this young man's future before, and was short of the mark. Here was Phelps, dashing near a world record in an event that was not his specialty. Who knew how far he might go?
"That," Bowman chuckled, "was pretty good."