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This Day In Sports…August 4, 2012:
American swimmer Michael Phelps competes in what we thought would be his final race and temporarily retires as the biggest Olympic medal-winner of all-time. The 27-year-old Phelps swam the butterfly leg of the men’s 4X100 medley relay at the Summer Games in London, winning the 18th gold medal of his career and 22nd medal overall. A victory five days earlier in the 4X200 freestyle relay had broken the 48-year-old record of Soviet gymnast Larisa Latynina.
Phelps’ Olympics career started at the Sydney Games in 2000, when—at the age of 15—he became the youngest U.S. Olympic swimmer in 68 years. His hardware haul began in Athens in 2004 and continued in Beijing in 2008, when he broke Mark Spitz’s record of seven golds in a single Olympics (he won eight). The highlight of those Games came in the 200-meter butterfly, when Phelps’ goggles leaked and filled with water. He had to count his strokes as he blindly splashed to the finish line—and he still broke a world record, one of seven he set in those Olympics.
Despite the retirement, Phelps would be back in 2016 in Rio, where he captured five more gold medals and another silver and became the oldest individual swimming gold medalist in history at the age of 31. He also became the first swimmer to four-peat in an event, winning the 200-meter individual medley in a fourth consecutive Olympics. It was then that Phelps retired once and for all with a career total of 28 Olympic medals, 23 of them gold. He held 39 world records—29 individually and 10 in relays.
Phelps was 6-foot-4, and he had a 6-foot-8 wingspan, so he could move a lot of water—and get through it quickly. And his size 14 feet acted like flippers. When he began swimming at age 7, he began by learning the backstroke because he was afraid to put his face in the water. Safe to say he overcame that.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
