Yet another article on the Olympics. Its hard not to blog about it. It pervades your home TV, headlines your newspapers, your friends talk about it, you watch it on the bus on the way home, and on top of all that, you have Phelps.
So much has been written about this guy that the thesaurus has already run out of superlatives, and personally, I think people are getting tired of reading about him. At least I am. I just want to watch how the entire Olympics is being overshadowed by his personal quest. So much that the thousands of others taking part become sideshows, dwarfed by the enormosity of the Phelps, a leviathan among sportsmen, who is also fortunate to be talented in the right sport.
He makes it seem so easy, he almost cheapens the value of the Olympic gold. Then you realise that Singapore is still looking for its first gold, and the value goes right back up. Despite all our investment, we're happy that Tao Li finished fifth in one final. I mean, not that it isn't a major achievement, but the fact that we consider that a major achievement says a lot about our sporting excellence. Basically, we suck at sports.
But really, you know what sucks? It sucks to be in the same events as Phelps. No one gives a shit about you, you have no chance in hell of winning, and when he wins, you have to declare that its an honour to swim with him. Yeah, that's what you trained four years for. All that pain and sacrifice, for the honour.
Somehow I don't think that when they trained, the thought in their heads was, I want to swim faster! So that I can be second to Michael Phelps and swim next to him in the pool! The honour! But we need people like that. There are after all, 8 lanes in an Olympic swimming pool and we need 7 others who are after that honour to make Phelps an even more awesome spectacle.
You can't really appreciate how awesome Phelps is until he leaves 7 other world class swimmers floundering a whole body length behind him. Or more. Especially when you see how the cameraman struggles to put the 8 swimmers in the same frame for our reference. Or when they put that green line behind Phelps to show how far ahead he is.
Phelps is lucky that his is a sport that allows the individual to really showcase individual brilliance. If you are good in the butterfly, you can win the 100m, the 200m, and probably the team relay too. So that's 3 golds already. Unfortunately, he's good at everything, so for all those swimmers of his generation, it's basically GG thank you very much try again next time. And I'll still beat you anyway.
In fact, he's so good he's rewriting records that only he can set. It helps that he's actually a freak of nature, with numerous trivia websites online detailing how he's actually descended from fish rather than apes. That torso! The long arms! The flipper legs! The big ears! The gills! Okay maybe not the last two but you get my point.
Being a perfect blend of nature and nurture, it is almost his destiny to be placed upon a pedestal for others to strive to. Now, Phelps is 3 golds away from immortality in the Olympic annals. And in 3 days, he will be the greatest Olympian swim king ever.