Phelps supreme as greatest rivalry ends
American legend claims 22nd gold of his career Friend and foe Lochte left trailing in his wake
Just a few minutes before the start of their race, Michael Phelps had been laughing and joking around with his friend and rival Ryan Lochte in the call room for the last time. Then Phelps went out and tore Lochte and everyone else to pieces, to win the 22nd Olympic gold medal of his career.
As he blew his cheeks out and waved four fingers – one for each of his gold medals at these Games, although another could have arrived overnight in the 100m butterfly – one word sprang to mind: how? How can a man of such mild manner serve up such brutal thrashings? How has he done it? How is he still doing it? But then, Phelps has now been puzzling us for more than a decade.
At the age of 31, his triumph in the 200 metres individual medley in Rio made him the first swimmer, male or female, to win the same Olympic event four times in a row.
Almost two seconds behind him, Kosuke Hagino, of, Japan took the silver and Wang Shun claimed bronze for China. Lochte, having cleaved to Phelps’s side for much of the race, fell away at the last and ended up fifth. The pair embraced afterwards, a final seal on a relationship that has laid waste to an entire generation and troubled airport metal detectors the world over.
Lochte ends his Olympic career with 12 Olympic medals. As for Phelps, according to an orthopaedic surgeon interviewed by The Wall
Street Journal, if he were to wear his 22 gold medals at once, they would weigh about as much as a bowling ball and he would be at serious risk of cutting off the blood supply to his arms. He has heard the American national anthem so many times he probably finds himself inadvertently humming it in the shower.
And so ended one of swimming’s greatest ever rivalries. It began a full 12 years ago, when they first met at the US Olympic trials in 2004, and through their many ups and handful of downs, it has been one of sport’s most compelling sagas. There are a few more crevices in the brow these days, a few more miles on the clock. We have watched Phelps grow from a goofy freak-boy into a goofy freak-man. Lochte, if anything, has gone the other way. His attempt to rock a bleached platinum-blonde look at these Games backfired somewhat when the extended exposure to pool chlorine turned it a faintly lurid shade of green.
Lochte had said in the build-up that it would take a “perfect” performance to dethrone Phelps. Instead, it was Phelps who produced it.
Wildly cheered on by the home crowd, it was actually Thiago Pereira, of Brazil, who started fastest and turned first at 50 metres. Meanwhile, Phelps and Lochte could scarcely be separated by a hair. They were just 0.01 seconds apart at halfway.
But Phelps pulled ahead on the breaststroke leg and as the final stretch approached, he stepped on the gas with all the brutal callousness he displayed in naming his firstborn son Boomer. Hagino finished strongly in lane six; Pereira fell away but left the pool to adoring acclaim. Britain’s Dan Wallace was last.
Can any athlete really be considered unlucky when they have won six Olympic gold medals and 18 world championships? If you are Lochte, perhaps.
In any previous era, he would surely have been feted as the greatest of all time, with all the fringe benefits that entails. Or as he put it in an interview with NBC: “I guess you would say I’d be like the Michael Phelps of swimming if he wasn’t there.”
But they have needed each other, too. As with all great sporting rivalries, the sheer relentless pursuit of excellence has inspired both swimmers to push each other to far greater heights than they would have reached on their own. They hold 11 world records between them, some of which will surely last for many years.
More importantly, they have forged a friendship that remains cast-iron, even as their sporting relationship evaporates. They are rooming together in Rio along with fellow gold-medallist Conor Dwyer and in the hours and days between competition there have been the card games, the hours whiled away on Snapchat.
They are both in their 30s now, but in a way, their bouncing enthusiasm and shared frat-house sense of humour have helped to keep them both young.
A couple of hours before the race, Lochte posted a photo of the pair of them on Instagram. In it, he and Phelps are both doing their final warm-downs, wearing cheesy grins while eating giant boxes of spaghetti. The caption reads: “One last time!” You can read that as either a celebration or a lament. We’ll miss them. But how they’ve both spoilt us.