ATHENS, Greece - Michael Phelps will still win eight medals, which is a haul, no matter what color they are. After Tuesday's golds in the 200-meter butterfly and 800-meter freestyle relay, he's now more than halfway there. But we can lay to rest any more talk about him being the greatest swimmer in the world.

Any swimmer who’s honest will tell you, the king of the pool is the guy who can swim the 100-meter freestyle the fastest. And the emperor is the one who can win both the 100 and 200 free.

Phelps couldn’t win a head-to-head with the greatest sprinters in swimming - Pieter van den Hoogenband and Ian Thorpe. Swimming insiders knew all along that if form held, that’s the way it was going to be. The race to those who knew was between the Aussie and the Dutchman.

Phelps was a sideshow invented by the hype machine that is the American media. His goal was to swim for eight medals - one more, if they were all gold, than Mark Spitz won in 1972. U.S. big media transmogrified that into a dream, and pretended it was attainable.

The U.S. Olympic team played into it, too. The swim coaches put Phelps in the 400-meter freestyle relay to give him eight events. Gary Hall Jr., a certified 100-meter swimmer and member of championship relay teams, was relieved of his position to make way for Phelps. Hall complained bitterly about it.

After the U.S. took third in that race Sunday, the winning South Africans said Phelps’ presence in the race made their job easier. But don’t take that to mean the U.S. would have won if Hall had competed. The South Africans weren’t going to be beaten by anyone. America might have taken silver, but not gold.

So even those who knew best – the Olympic coaches – failed to acknowledge that Phelps isn’t the best sprinter around. But if they erred, if was on the side of giving a kid a shot at immortality – however unlikely it was that he would actually hit his target.

By the end of the meet, we may well call Phelps the best all-around swimmer in the world. But no one will call him the best, because he’s not the fastest in the race by which swimmers measure themselves – the short freestyle sprint.

Give him credit for trying. He did his best, and when he climbed from the pool after finishing third Monday night, he wasn’t glum or on the verge of tears. He smiled as he walked out and smiled on the medal stand.

It wasn’t the smile he had flashed when he won his first race Saturday, but it was a smile nonetheless. He knew he hadn’t failed. He had simply been beaten by men who were both older and better.

At the same time, however, he lost the right to lay claim to the best swimmer. It’s no different than going fast on the track. Athletes run many distances in a variety of ways – over hurdles, hazards, even walking – and everyone who wins gets the same medal. But the big money and glory goes to the short sprinter.

Jesse Owens wasn’t great because he won the 100 and the long jump. He was great first because he won the 100 and 200. Tossing in the long jump and a relay made him a legend. But without the sprints, he’s just another darned good track athlete.

And so it is in the pool. Phelps can win 10 medals if he can work that many events into his schedule, but he couldn’t win the race that counts, the one that separates pure swimmers from specialists. He jumped off the blocks with the two best freestylers in the world and finished third.

Some will say this is a disappointment for Phelps and U.S. swimming. Many are already saying Phelps’ dream has died.

They’re wrong. The quest for the eight gold medals that would have broken Mark Spitz’ record was always in the realm of the quest for the Holy Grail – more fantasy than reality. It was thinkable, but when you looked at what Phelps was up against, it was never really possible.

So don’t call him a failure, because he hasn’t failed. He won his specialty – the 400-meter individual medley. He finished third as a member of a relay team that was going to get beat no matter who was on it. And he took another third when he dared to go against the two best freestylers in the world.

His Olympics are far from over. He can still walk away with four individual golds and two more relay golds. That won’t qualify him as a superhero, but it will put him in very elite company.

Phelps knows he can come back in four years and try it again. He’ll be 23 then, mature and strong, and van den Hoogenband and Thorpe will be beyond their best years.

And it just may be that four years from now, with less hype and more maturity, we could find that 2004 wasn’t the end of the legend of Michael Phelps, but the beginning.

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