Amazing Pace: The Story of Olympic Champion Michael Phelps from Sydney to Athens to Beijing. Cet article n’est pas disponible.Amazing Pace: The Story of Olympic Champion Michael Phelps from Sydney to Athens to Beijing

Before he was old enough to have a driver's license, Michael Phelps had a world record. Before he ever took a college class or turned 20, he had earned distinction by winning 8 medals - 6 gold and 2 bronze - at the Athens Olympics, the most in non-boycotted Games. Along the way, he captivated an American television audience and confounded the critics who questioned his ambition. "Amazing Pace" provides the most revealing look at a young man who became a world-class athlete before he had the chance to grow up - by respected "Baltimore Sun" journalist Paul McMullen, who followed Phelps's rise from an obscure 14-year-old to the most scrutinized competitor at the world's biggest sporting event. It details the plotting of his career, from turning professional at age 16, to the management of the first crises he encountered. No Olympian has ever earned 10 gold medals in a career, but Michael Phelps is on pace to achieve that milestone at the 2008 games in Beijing, China.

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ROOTS

INDIANAPOLIS, APRIL 2003

At first glance, the 17-year-old appeared indistinguishable from millions of American boys. Raised in the suburbs, he got a vicarious thrill listening to rap music, had little interest in books or schoolwork, was fiercely protective of his single mother, and tried to impress the girls with a hot set of wheels, in his case a Cadillac sport-utility vehicle. A baseball cap usually covered his unruly dark hair, a defense left over from adolescence, when oversized ears had made him a target of derision. He had a pleasant, goofy grin but wore a scowl when he was introduced to a sport that wasn't his first choice. That aversion became an avocation, and was now his vocation, but it still seemed preposterous, the astonishing things the boy could do in a pool. He was among a select group who had become world-class athletes before having had a chance to grow up, but calling him world-class damned him with faint praise.

Michael Phelps manipulated water like no man since Moses.

Swimming had never seen anything like him.

He stood 6 foot 4 inches but had a wingspan that spread to nearly 6 foot 7. A struggle to keep his weight at 190 £ds had led to guilt-free gorging and 4,000-calorie breakfasts, the ritual refueling that followed draining morning practices. The Sabbath carries little weight in the cult of athletics, and Michael found no rest on the seventh day. Eleven times a week, he dove into his work in Baltimore, Maryland, sharpening his strokes and physiology in a training session that lasted two or three hours. His form had been torn down and improved by a coach who had done everything but dance when he grasped the full measure of the boy's gifts. Years of training had expanded Michael's lung capacity and widened his shoulders. His elbows and ankles were double-jointed, which allowed him to reach angles that other swimmers could not. His most dominant feature was an abnormally long torso, which led the sailor who ran his club team to make the point that the boat with the largest wet surface moved the fastest.

Not yet physically mature, Michael moved on land with the grace of a large- breed puppy, but in his element, he had the self-awareness that comes with being on the cusp of something extraordinary. The matter wasn't as weighty in Olympic circles as the threat of terrorism or rooting out drug cheats, but predicting what he would do next was about to become swimming's main talking point. He was the world record holder in the 400-meter individual medley (IM); in order, the butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle. What the decathlon is to track and field, the individual medley is to swimming: a test of endurance and proficiency in multiple disciplines. The holder of the 400 IM world record could claim to be the best all-around swimmer on the planet, but Michael was also without peer in the two butterfly events and was on the verge of national titles in the backstroke and freestyle. Whatever program he chose, it was apparent that, in another 16 months, he had the potential to achieve something marvelous at the 2004 Olympics in Athens, Greece.

Those Games were already being forecast as the defining moment of a career that had first gained international notice with a series of precocious milestones. In October 2001, Michael became the youngest American male swimmer ever to turn professional. In March of that year, he became the youngest man ever to set a world record in one of the stopwatch sports that had formed the foundation of the Summer Olympics. Neither of those distinctions came as a surprise to anyone who had seen Michael in 2000--six weeks past his 15th birthday and too young to drive a car--swim fast enough to qualify for the Sydney Olympics.

That giddy accomplishment came in Indianapolis, at one of America's most storied pools, where Michael was now making his first return appearance. The occasion was the 2003 Duel in the Pool, which matched the United States against Australia, the powerhouses of international swimming. Given enough recovery time, Michael's range was so vast that he could beat all but those two nations in a hypothetical dual meet. Now even the other Americans and the Aussies were about to be overshadowed by the breadth of his skill, which had as much to do with nature as it did nurture.

On the first Sunday in April of the pre-Olympic year, as Michael prepared for another eventful competition, spectators found their seats. The Duel in the Pool crowd included his parents and sisters, the people who had brought him into the world and plunged him, sometimes screaming, into his sport. Perhaps the only thing that fully united them was that they all wanted the best for Michael. They understood that dreams don't always come true. The truth was, no family in America was better equipped to explain both the joy and the heartache that could be found at that pool in Indianapolis.

The three men who have won nine gold medals in the Summer Olympics were shaped by their relationships with their father. Bill Lewis, who grew up in Alabama when racism remained highly institutionalized in the South, told his son Carl, "Don't get mad, get even." Arnold Spitz drilled into his son, Mark, that only one lane in a pool could produce the winner. Losing his father at age 12 likely had something do to with hardening the chilly demeanor of Paavo Nurmi.

Michael's father, Fred Phelps, received similarly devastating news on Lincoln's Birthday in 1959. A blood clot had ruptured in his father's brain, killing him suddenly and unexpectedly. Fred was 8 years old, and the loss of his father shook his idyllic life in the Tri-Towns, a collection of burgs in a remote valley in the Appalachian Mountains where the Potomac River separates Maryland and West Virginia. The Tri-Towns still share a variety of social clubs, a little league, and a paper-processing plant that pollutes the Potomac. It has been linked to an abnormally high rate of cancer in the area but has provided employment for thousands. The plant dominated the view off the back porch at Fred's childhood home on a hillside in Luke, near where the Savage River, site of the 1988 U.S. Olympic Trials in whitewater canoeing, feeds the Potomac. On the West Virginia bank, just downstream, sits Piedmont. A mile to the north is Westernport, the hometown of Debbie Davisson Phelps.

An hour's drive to the north, on nearly the same longitudinal line as the Tri-Towns, sits Windber, Pennsylvania. It was the birthplace of Johnny Weissmuller, who didn't win nine gold medals but became more famous than the men who did. The great Olympic swimmer became Tarzan in the movies, the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Bruce Willis of his day. Like hundreds of communities in the Appalachian Mountains, the simple life was the only life in Windber and the Tri-Towns, not a reality television show. With pride and self-deprecation, Fred describes himself as a hillbilly. As a doe and her fawn bolted past the concrete foundation amid the ruins of his Grant Street home one recent autumn, he reminisced about what he called the three seasons in the Tri-Towns: hunting, fishing, and football.

"I didn't know what a lock was," Fred said. "You can still do a contract on a handshake in Tri-Towns. They don't care about fashion. They don't care about keeping up with the Joneses. They don't know who the Joneses are. I had the same teacher for my first three grades of school. Luke used to have 250 people, but it's down to 80 now. Somebody dies, the plant buys the house. Eventually, they'll buy up everything, and the town will stop being incorporated. Then they won't have to pay taxes."

Ancestors from Great Britain dominate the family trees of Debbie and Fred. In 1857, her maternal great-grandfather had emigrated from Wales to a settlement north of the Tri-Towns. Fred's maternal grandparents were born in that same county, Allegany, in the 19th century. Debbie's father was a home-improvement contractor for the Sears Roebuck Company. Fred's was a chemical engineer at the Westvaco paper mill, which employed 2,500 in the 1960s. Now its payroll was closer to 1,300. Like many mill towns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, the Tri-Towns were depleted by a reverse migration. Instead of continuing west in search of a new start, men before and after World War II headed back to the East Coast and found work there in smokestack industries. Later generations knew that stable employment could be had there, in classrooms. In the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington, D.C., thousands of schoolteachers shared roots in mountain towns, where fond memories didn't put food on the table. Teaching was a sensible career choice for some of the best and brightest from Luke and Westernport, who went to Bruce High School.

Fred played football, basketball, and baseball there. Title IX came too late for Debbie, as Allegany County was among the Maryland jurisdictions that waited until the 1970s to offer interscholastic sports for girls. The only uniform she wore at Bruce High was a cheerleader's, as girls in her era had to slake their competitive thirst in the neighborhood. Debbie spent many hours at the municipal pool in Westernport, but swimming was a country club sport, and kids went there not to train but to frolic and flirt. She could walk, down one hill and up another, from the pool to her home at the corner of Rock and Hammond. In the 1968 Bruce High yearbook, seniors were asked the location where they would most likely be found. Fred listed the street Debbie lived on.

That fall, he went to Fairmont State College in West Virginia. Debbie joined him there in 1970, after a year at Allegany Community College. Fred weighed 165 £ds in high school but filled out to 195 in college. A cornerback on the football team, he was fierce enough to knock bigger linemen off their stance but employed enough finesse to set a Fairmont State record for interceptions in a year. A football assistant doubled as the track and field coach. In need of bodies, he recruited Fred, who established another school record in the triple jump: 43 feet, 11 inches. Debbie and Fred both studied education at Fairmont State. They earned teaching certificates and married in May 1973, agreeing that they would move east to one of the suburban counties surrounding Baltimore, wherever one of them could land a good job.

Debbie's older sister taught in Harford County, northeast of Baltimore. That's where Debbie found her first job in education, teaching home economics to middle schoolers in Havre de Grace, where the Susquehanna River becomes the Chesapeake Bay. Fred's shot at professional football went no further than a cattle call for the Washington Redskins. After a year of substitute teaching, some flag football teammates encouraged him to apply for a position with the Maryland State Police. He was working a blue-collar job at a General Motors plant in Baltimore when he was accepted into the state police academy, and he was commissioned in October 1975.

Their first child, Hilary, was born in 1978, on St. Patrick's Day. Whitney, another active, adorable girl, came along on April 15, 1980. Fred and Debbie purchased 5 acres of land near the Pennsylvania state line, in Whiteford, not far from where the Boy Scouts of America still operate a large reserve of land, and designed and built a custom home. There were children under foot and deer drinking from the stream behind their property, but the harmony was short-lived. A decade after leaving the Tri- Towns to pursue their future together, Debbie and Fred separated.

On the rebound, they had a third child, a son. Michael Fred Phelps II was born on June 30, 1985.

The family's growth coincided with the cable television boom, and Debbie and Fred, determined to provide more healthy diversions, became typical American parents on the go. The girls were signed up for Brownies and ballet, and Hilary played baseball with the boys one spring, when there weren't enough girls in the community for organized softball. Charles Wax, the family pediatrician, touted the benefits of swimming, so the Phelps family joined the North Harford Swim Club. Sans goggles and cap, in a department store suit with a floral print, lace frills, and one shoulder strap, Hilary had a third-place finish in a 1986 meet and vowed to get the biggest trophy the next time. The only girls she couldn't beat wore Speedo suits and practiced year-round. Around Michael's first birthday, the girls advanced to a more ambitious club, in the Harford County seat of Bel Air. The move represented a greater commitment and more travel. A snapshot from that time shows Michael with scabbed knees, crawling on a wooden deck. His strongest memory of the home in Whiteford is a long driveway, perhaps because he was constantly being bundled into and out of a car or van. Debbie remembers driving an hour to a swim meet at a college on Baltimore's west side and changing Michael out of his sleeper pajama and into a playsuit.

Michael was 3 in 1988, when Debbie approached Tom Himes, an assistant coach at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club (NBAC), about moving the Phelps girls to that club. The NBAC did its summer training in Baltimore City, and the round trip from Whiteford to its pool at Meadowbrook was more than 70 miles, much of it on two-lane roads. As Michael wandered the Meadowbrook picnic grove, mooching from friendly tables and playing under them with his Matchbox cars, his parents tried to adjust to the commitment they had made to the NBAC.

"We had built a brand-new home on 5 acres," Debbie said, "but we were never there. We were never all home at one time in that house. I remember sitting at a desk at Loyola High School, before or after an indoor practice there, one girl eating pizza, another doing homework. You hear about ice skaters relocating or kids moving in with coaches, but they were not going to move without us."