COMMENTARY

By Jim Litke

updated 11:39 a.m. ET Aug. 30, 2004

Michael Phelps became an Olympic champion by winning more gold medals than all but a handful of competitors ever had.

Then he did something that none of them ever did.

He stepped aside.

Not long after climbing out of the pool with the 100 butterfly title and his fifth gold medal of the Athens Games, Phelps told U.S. men’s coach Eddie Reese that he wanted his place on the 400-meter medley relay team to go to Ian Crocker instead.

In a delicious twist, Phelps managed to get revenge on one of the few rivals to beat him in the past 18 months and help out a good friend in the bargain. Crocker won the 100 butterfly at the world and U.S. national championships. Phelps paid him back in the Olympic pool Friday night, then called his close pal over to give him the news. It must have been some conversation.

“He said ‘I don’t know what to say,”’ Phelps recalled. “He goes, ‘So, we’re going to have to talk about this later.’

“And I said, ‘OK, but tomorrow night, I want you to get out there and I want you to show the world what you’re made of.’ And I have confidence,” Phelps added, “that that’s what he’s going to do.”

Crocker and the rest of the U.S. squad did Phelps proud. They crushed their own world record by over a second in capturing gold. Because Phelps was a member of the team during qualifying heats, he also takes home gold. It is his sixth of the Games and his eighth medal overall, tying Russian gymnast Alexander Dityatin’s 1980 record for the most medals at one Games.

But Phelps' medal boon is not what makes this story special.

In this age of multimillion-dollar endorsement deals, when sponsors often hold greater sway over an athlete than either team or country, it was stunning to find one willing to point the spotlight at somebody else. The only thing that wasn’t surprising is that Phelps would be the one to do it.

The 19-year-old arrived at these Olympics with a handful of sponsors already on board, but he was never about just money. They rolled out the red carpet for him, but he insisted on walking around with the rest of his teammates. They had half of a made-for-TV movie already in the can, and handed him a script for the rest. Phelps tore it up.

He was such a ferocious competitor, even as a kid, that Phelps probably had his sights set on Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals in a single Olympics long before he qualified in enough events at the U.S. trials to make it possible. But then he admitted as much, and one of his sponsors dangled a $1 million bonus to see it happen.

It didn’t. That quest effectively ended Monday night when Phelps was beaten by Australian Ian Thorpe and Dutchman Pieter van den Hoogenband in what was arguably the greatest 200-meter freestyle of all time. It was a race that Phelps could have sidestepped and still had a shot at Spitz’s record.

He came away from that contest with a bronze medal, one of two Phelps has already captured to hang alongside the golds. Anybody who wondered why he got into a fight he had almost no chance of winning — Thorpe and van den Hoogenband are two of the greatest of all-time at that distance — probably won’t have a clue why he pulled out of this one.

Numbers don’t matter to Phelps. They didn’t define him when he was a prodigy setting world records, nor last week, when he waved off the easier road toward seven golds so he could face Thorpe and van den Hoogenband on their turf.

Besides, after racing 17 times in just seven days, he figured Crocker gives the U.S. team a better chance to win. And he gets a night off and likely another gold medal for sitting in the stands. The Americans have never lost a medley relay at the Olympics and proved Saturday why they were an overwhelming favorite to win gold again.

“I wanted to come in here and I wanted to win one gold medal. And I did it the first night,” Phelps said. “So, from then on out I was here to have fun and I was here to swim and I was here to represent my country as best as I could. And I feel that I’ve done that in this past week.”

He has — and more.

Like every true Olympic champion who’s gone before him, Phelps wants to win every time he ventures onto the stage. He plans to total them all up when he’s done, but not a moment before.

That’s why when someone asked him whether this frenetic week has changed him, Phelps didn’t pause long to reflect.

“I’m older. I’m a week older,” he said. “Other than that, not really.”

EIGHT MEDALS FOR MICHAEL PHELPS Medal date Event Result Sat, Aug 14 400 individual medley Gold (WR) Sun, Aug 15 400 freestyle relay Bronze Mon, Aug 16 200 freestyle Bronze Tue, Aug 17 200 butterfly Gold Tue, Aug 17 800 freestyle relay Gold Thur, Aug 19 200m individual medley Gold (OR) Fri, Aug 20 100 butterfly Gold (OR) Sat, Aug 21 400 medley relay Gold (WR)

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