Phelps phenomenon goes global

2008-08-15 14:49

Beijing - Quick quiz: What has 13 letters and means global phenomenon?

Easy.

Answer: Michael Phelps.

The Beijing Olympics have belonged to one man, a 23-year-old American swimmer who has become a household name from the Philippines to Peru and Cairo to Caracas.

With his sensational gold medal and world record haul so far, Phelps has transcended Olympic sports and exploded onto the planet's consciousness as a once-in-a-lifetime supernova.

"He doesn't swim - he flies," said the sports daily Ole in Argentina.

With his victory Friday in the 200m individual medley, Phelps picked up his sixth gold medal and sixth world record of the games. With two races left, he is on course to break Mark Spitz's record of seven golds at a single Olympics.

His current count of 12 career golds - he also won five in Athens four years ago - has already made Phelps the athlete with the most gold medals in Olympic history.

International Olympic Committee president Jacques Rogge calls him simply "the icon of the Games."

Phelps's feats have drawn banner headlines across the world, including in regions and countries where swimming normally gets scant attention, with newspapers and commentators tripping over each other for superlatives and nicknames:

"The barracuda from Baltimore," said Chile's largest newspaper, El Mercurio.

"The New Olympic Legend," blared Egypt's El Badeel.

"The American dolphin," wrote Spain's El Pais.

"The God of Olympia," intoned France's Nouvel Observateur.

"The water man from another planet," hailed Denmark's Berligske Tidende.

"At a time when world records seemed to have hit the ceiling of what's physically possible to wrestle out of the human organism, Phelps has been the man who managed to push the limits with his magnificent performance," the Danish paper said.

With the Chinese team running away with so many golds, the Phelps phenomenon has hardly been the center of attention in the host country, though it has not gone unnoticed. Friday's newspapers' headlines were all about another swimmer, Liu Zige, who won the 200m butterfly, giving China its first swimming gold of the Games.

Chinese media have dubbed Phelps' the "flying fish" or the "American superfish." One editorial cartoon showed Phelps as a shark overtaking a torpedo. China's most popular sports newspaper, the Titan Weekly - which is running daily editions during the Games - made Phelps one of its two front-page stories on Thursday. It ran a large photo of a joyous Phelps under the headline "His Majesty Phelps."

The world has shown a special fascination with Phelps' diet, which counts an amazing 12 000 calories a day - six times what a normal adult male eats. For example, his breakfast includes three fried-egg sandwiches, an omelette, a bowl of grits, three slices of French toast, three chocolate chip pancakes and two cups of coffee.

"Any average adult human being needs some 2 500 daily calories to live a life without excesses," Argentina's Ole said. "Of course when you're in the presence of a monster like Michael Phelps, those parameters can go to hell."

French media have focused on their own swimmer, Alain Bernard, who has one gold and one silver, but has given Phelps his due, too.

The sports daily L'Equipe devoted an entire page to Phelps under the headline "Alone in the Pantheon." Le Parisien newspaper said, "There aren't enough superlatives" to describe Phelps.

The Times of London devoted three full pages to Phelps, including a sketch in the style of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous Vitruvian Man to highlight his physical attributes.

The British Broadcasting Corp. remained focused largely on its own country's rare successes and China's domination of the medal table, and some papers questioned whether Phelps was truly the "greatest Olympian" or just the greatest swimmer.

"The all-time No 1 Olympian or just one of many such belt-holders?" Daily Mail columnist Paul Hayward wrote.

"The latter, is my conclusion, because numbers of golds won is only one criterion by which to weigh Olympic greatness - not least because of the sheer number of scarcely distinguishable events open to swimmers - though Phelps will move another giant step towards the all-time title on Sunday if he puts Spitz in the shade."

British bookmakers, meanwhile, are already listing Phelps as 5-6 (odds-on) to win five or more gold medals at the next Olympics in London in 2012.

"We couldn't care less whether he's the greatest Olympian ever," Ladbrokes spokesperson David Williams said. "The truth is he's costing us a fortune and punters (bettors) just love him. If Phelps comes to London in 2012 there's a strong chance he could clean up again. Frankly, we're already dreading it."

Nowhere is swimming bigger than in Australia, and Phelps has eclipsed the country's own Ian Thorpe, the "Thorpedo" who won five Olympic gold medals, 11 world titles and set 13 world records before retiring in 2006.

The Australian, a national broadsheet, described Phelps in a front-page headline on Thursday as "the champion who swims in his own galaxy."

"If Michael Phelps were a country he would be sitting fourth on the Games medal tally," the paper said.

A regional newspaper, The Newcastle Herald, lauded Phelps in an editorial.

"Every Olympiad produces its own titans: athletes whose performances galvanize the world's attention and whose names become synonymous in Olympic history with the cities and years of their triumphs," it said. "In that sense, Beijing 2008 will always belong to Michael Phelps."

A tongue-in-cheek letter in The Age may have best summed up the world's amazement with the Phelps juggernaut.

"Is it true," wrote reader Pat Lester, "that Michael Phelps can take a three-minute shower in two minutes?"

- AP