Selected excerpts from Michael Phelps' new book, "No Limits: The Will to Succeed" by Michael Phelps with Alan Abrahamson.

Determination:
The 200 Fly

The night before that 200 IM in Melbourne, I swam the finals of the 200 fly. This is how good that race was. Afterward, Bob just smiled at me.

I was timed in that 200 fly in Melbourne in 1:52.09, not just a world record but by 1.62 seconds. The runner-up in the race, Wu Peng of China, touched more than three seconds behind. Typically, when a record is broken, the line that gets superimposed on the television broadcast or on the arena big board runs just behind a swimmer’s fingers; records are usually taken down by hundredths of tenths of a second. In this instance, the line was near my feet.

I felt like I was twelve again, in the sense that you break records by that much only when you’re twelve.

It was the sort of thing that made newspapers and television around the world take notice of swimming, in a non-Olympic year, no less. On ESPN, they debated my place in sports history. The back page of the Herald Sun, Australia’s largest newspaper, featured a photo of me rising out of the water in midstroke; the headline reached across the entire page of the tabloid, just one word: “Greatest.” My hometown newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, called it “stunning” and offered comparisons to Bob Beamon’s history-making long jump, 29 feet, 21⁄2 inches, two feet past what had been the world record, at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Mark Schubert, our U.S. team coach, told the Baltimore paper that what I did might have been even better. “I don’t think it’s comparable to Beamon’s performance because that was a lifetime, out-of-body experience that we never saw again,” he said, meaning Beamon never again jumped that far. “I think we’re going to see an even better time from Michael. I just think he’s that good.”

Honestly, in the warm-ups before the 200 fly final in Melbourne I had felt crummy. My arms felt sore. I had gone 1:43.86 in the 200 free just the day before.

Once I got up on the blocks, I had to get over all that. How I felt then was not the least bit important to what was possible now. It was time to go out and race, the weight training obviously making a huge, huge difference in what I was now able to do.

The time in Melbourne surprised me, but not the record itself. I had realized the month before, at the annual midwinter meet in Missouri, that I was on the verge of something special. I showed up at the Missouri meet with a full goatee. My hair was hanging out of my cap. I was obviously not shaved and certainly not tapered. Even so, I had gone out that night and lowered my world record in the 200 fly. In Victoria, at the Pan Pacs in 2006, I had gone 1:53.80; in Missouri, I took nine-tenths of a second off that, dropping the record to 1:53.71.

To go under that in Melbourne by more than a second and a half is why I had enormous expectations for myself in this race in Beijing, why I put 1:51.1 on my 2008 goal sheet.
At the Olympic final, immediately before the starter called, “Take your marks,” I pushed my goggles to my eyes. Not sure, even now, why.

I race in metallic Speedo goggles, a model called the “Speed Socket.” I also race in two caps. The sequence goes like this: I put the goggles on, then one cap, then the other. That way the goggles are secure.

Nothing seemed amiss.

Obviously, however, something was wrong. Fernando and Mona could see that all the way from Norway.

At the beep, immediately after I dove in, the goggles started leaking. I couldn’t tell whether the seal had broken on the top or bottom.

That wasn’t important. What was important was to go.

When I turned at 50, the thought flashed through my mind that maybe the leak wouldn’t be that bad. It seemed manageable.

At 100, though, things started getting more and more blurry. Just after that, as I made my way up the pool to the far wall, with perhaps 75 meters to go in the race, the cups of the goggles filled entirely. I could not see.

I could not see the line on the bottom of the pool. I could not see the black T that marks the coming of the wall. I could not see anybody else in any other lane. I could not see.
This wasn’t football, or basketball. I didn’t have the luxury of calling a time-out.

I couldn’t take the goggles off and swim old school because the goggles were trapped under both caps.

This was an Olympic final. I had to go. At that instant, that’s what was the most important thing. I had to go hard and fast.

There was no time to think about anything. But what was there to think about? I was the farthest thing from freaked out. This very thing had happened to me just the year before, in Melbourne, in the 200 IM finals. It happens sometimes in swimming. It was happening to me now.

In the 200 fly, there’s a regular and predictable progression of strokes as the race goes along. That is, there are so many strokes per length of the pool, the number typically going up by one per lap because of the inevitable demands on the body and the fatigue.

The first length usually takes sixteen strokes. The second, eighteen; the gap is two because the race starts with a dive. The third length usually goes nineteen strokes. The final length, nineteen or twenty.

When my goggles filled, I was on the third length. Thus, the magic number to get to the far wall was nineteen, maybe twenty. Because my goggles were already leaking before the turn, anticipating the crisis, I had started a stroke count as soon as I made the turn into that third length.

Four or five strokes into that third length—that’s where it all closed in and I could no longer see.

Sixteen. Seventeen. Eighteen. Nineteen. Where was that wall?

Twenty, and a glide; there, there it was.

Perfect. I had spaced it perfectly, the glide carrying me into the wall and a touch. I hadn’t come into the wall in midstroke or hammered into it or jammed my fingers or bent back my wrist or any of the other things that could have gone wrong. In Omaha, Emily Silver had broken her right hand after swimming into the wall at the finish of the 50-meter free semis. It put her out of the pool for more than a week.

In the stands, Whitney was concerned. His stroke is tight, she said to Mom.
Bob was also wondering what was going on. The way we had planned it, I should have been much farther ahead, pushing for 1:51. Bob’s mind had already started racing. Maybe, he figured, for some inexplicable reason I was looking ahead to the 800 relay, which both of us knew I was going to have to race later that morning, about fifty-six minutes after the end of the 200 fly, and was just going hard enough in the fly to get the job done.

Little did he know that I wasn’t looking anywhere. I couldn’t see. It was as bad as it could get.
Coming down the homestretch, I was just hoping I’d given myself enough of a lead so that nobody could run me down.

Seventeen. Eighteen.

I could hear the crowd roaring. For me? For someone else? Was it close?

Nineteen. Twenty. Wall, wall, wall, where was that last wall?

One more stroke. Give it one more stroke, twenty-one and reach for it, glide just a touch.

There, there it was! I felt it with my hands. Again, I had timed it just right. I didn’t ram into the wall with my shoulder or, worse, my head. I reached for it, hands out in front, and got it with my fingers.

Just the way I would have tried to do it if I could have seen what I was doing.
With my right hand, I reached up and ripped off my goggles. Both the caps came flying off, too, into the water with the goggles. I leaned on the lane line with my right arm, blinking hard. I tossed the caps behind me onto the deck with my left hand, picked up the goggles with my right and flung them behind me, too, then looked up, breathing hard, shaking my head from side to side, squinting at the scoreboard.

Next to my name it said, 1. It also said WR, a world record, 1:52.03. Incredible.

I was simultaneously thrilled and, candidly, frustrated as I got out of the pool and said to Bob, “I couldn’t see anything.”

I was not put out so much at the wardrobe malfunction—stuff happens—but frustrated at the opportunity lost. My fly had come on so strong in 2007 and 2008. I had extraordinary confidence I could go super-fast at the Olympics. I had, and yet I could have gone faster. There was no doubt in my mind that I could have gone faster. No doubt at all.

And it was natural, there in the pool, to wonder, would I have an opportunity ever again to swim this race so fast?

I shook it off.

What was important now was taking the briefest of moments to appreciate what I had just done.

Nine swims down, eight to go.

Four for four in gold-medal swims. Cseh had gone four seconds faster than he had ever gone before, and still come in second, in 1:52.70; Takeshi Matsuda of Japan went two seconds better than his prior best, and came in third, in 1:52.97. The field I had just beaten was so fast that bronze in Athens would not even have gotten a spot in the final eight in Beijing.
And now, of course I had ten gold medals over my three Olympics, more than anyone else in history. I thought, wow, the “greatest Olympian of all time,” that’s a pretty cool title.

It was too dizzying, way too much for me to appreciate right then and there. I had to go swim a relay. That relay was truly what was important now.

In the stands, meanwhile, Hilary said to Mom, it’s ironic, isn’t it? The 200 fly got Michael to the Olympics for the first time. The 200 fly is the event in which he got his first world record. It was the event that made him somebody in the international swim scene. Now that’s the event that launched Michael into history with his tenth Olympic medal.

Mom thought about that for a moment amid the din there in the Water Cube. She looked at Hilary and said, where do you come up with these things?

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