Need any more proof that Olympic swimming champion Michael Phelps isn’t quite like the rest of us? Try on this story from Monday night’s Best of Preps banquet, where Phelps was the featured speaker.
Discussing his thoughts of retiring after earning a record eight gold medals in Beijing, Phelps told the rapt crowd of 1,600 at the Chattanooga Convention Center, “Until eight weeks ago, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep swimming. Then I woke up one Sunday morning and said, ‘Let’s get back in the water.’ Just something happened overnight. I found that passion again.”
Never mind that he’d gained 20 pounds since August. Or that he’d endured a very public three-month suspension from USA Swimming for a photo that surfaced in a British tabloid of Phelps taking a hit off a marijuana pipe at a party.
Or that, hey, after eight gold medals in one Olympics, after overcoming extraordinary pressure and scrutiny for the past four years, the guy might just like to be a normal young adult for a while.
Or that maybe, just maybe, there really is something to Phelps’ theory that he’s been suffering from “post-Olympics depression.”
Point is, what other elite athlete could wake up one morning after seven months in hibernation, drop 20 pounds in the next eight weeks and do what Phelps did at the Charlotte Ultraswim this past weekend by winning the 200-meter freestyle and 100-meter butterfly?
Sure, he finished second to Aaron Peirsol in the 200 backstroke and second to Frenchman Frederick Bousquet in the 100 free, but we’re talking second to Olympic competitors after a nine-month layoff. Did Tiger Woods finish second in the Masters after his layoff? Was Peyton Manning close to perfect at the start of last season after missing camp?
“I was just excited to race,” he said. “I still have that drive and that passion to race.”
The Best of Preps banquet always has been about honoring that drive and passion among our area high school athletes. Monday night was no exception. As stunning as it was to hear Phelps in a question-and-answer format for more than 20 minutes, it was no less memorable to see Polk County High football player Serge Foster win the Bobby Davis Award for heart and desire.
Once a promising running back, Foster lost the lower half of his left leg after a football injury. He returned to the Wildcats last fall as a kicker. When it comes to drive and passion, heart and desire, Phelps has nothing on Serge Foster.
Yet Phelps, by nature of his talent and his celebrity, can impact young lives in a way few can match.
Just ask Baylor swimmer Martin Grodzki, who’ll hit the water for the Georgia Bulldogs next winter.
“Just to know that he’s gone through some of the same things we go through,” said Grodzki, a native of Germany. “He thought about quitting and I’ve thought about quitting. But he didn’t and I haven’t. I thought he was great.”
So did 8-year-old Riley Grove, who had his picture made with Phelps before the dinner.
“I watched him every race in the Olympics,” Grove said. “I’ll put the picture up in my room, right by (Florida quarterback) Tim Tebow.”
Said Riley’s father, Paul, the CEO of public broadcasting station WTCI: “It will automatically be going on Facebook.”
Yet because this is Southeastern Conference football country, Phelps can also finish second in poster priority.
Asked which athlete was his favorite now — Phelps or Tebow — young Grove said, “Probably Tebow.”
But that appeared to be the exception rather than the norm, regardless of age. Auto dealer Brad Cobb and attorney Marc Harwell brought Cobb’s 7-year-old son Andrew and Harwell’s 6-year-old godson Colmore Hurst to the event.
So who was more excited, Andrew or his dad? Said Brad Cobb: “Definitely me.”
Phelps definitely kept the evening exciting and fun and informative.
On wearing the red, white and blue in competition: “We represent the best country in the world. It doesn’t get any cooler than standing on top of that podium, a gold medal around your neck while they play the national anthem.”
On what he learned from the bong photo this past autumn and a DUI after his 2004 Olympic performance: “Never make the same mistake again,” and, “know who your real friends are.”
On what really goes on behind the scenes in the Olympic Village: “We’d play spades and we played the board game Risk every day. And those games got pretty heated.”
And on becoming the the world’s best swimmer: “I went five years without taking a day off. Christmas. Birthdays. Never a day off. We figured that gave me 52 extra workouts a year. And since it usually takes two days to make up for one day off, I was getting a huge edge.”
Phelps said all of this with the greatest of ease, as if he really could be as comfortable out of the water as in it.
But given that his two most embarrassing moments have come immediately after Olympic success, someone asked if he’d considered how he might wind down from London in 2012.
“I’m going to a private island where nobody can find me,” Phelps said with a laugh. “Somewhere with no camera phones.”
Because everyone makes mistakes, but most of us don’t have to worry about them winding up on the Web.
