Swimming To History

You gotta love Michael Phelps. He keeps swimming and racing like a machine, yet he makes it all look easy and shrugs it all off.

I've seen most of his races at the Beijing Olympics - he's hard to miss - and it's amazing that he's not only won more career gold medals than any other Olympic athlete, he could actually beat Mark Spitz's record for most swimming gold medals won in a single Olympiad tonight. It's a relay, so he has depend on others as well as himself.

His victory in the 100-meter butterfly was so close that he won by the tiniest fraction of a second imaginable - so close, that his mother fainted at the thought that he lost. I'm glad she didn't think he won - imagine what that would have done!

Phelps has dominated this Olympiad so much that people not only forget there are other swimmers, there are other events! With his last race less than half an hour away as I write and track and field getting under way, one might expect Phelps to recede from the spotlight.

Don't bet on it.

Meanwhile, Dara Torres, 41, almost pulled off a miracle in the 50-meter freestyle race, losing narrowly to Britta Steffen, a German girl young enough to be her daughter. (She's 16.) Still, Torres - sometimes known as the "Tae-Bo Lady" for her appearances in ads for Billy Blanks's Tae-Bo workout videos - is an inspiration to older women, not to mention me (I'm 42) for her strength and fortitude. I'm never going to make fun of those Tae-Bo ads again!

In a major upset, Ous Mellouli of Tunisia won the "metric mile" (1500m) freestyle race, giving his country his first swimming medal ever, edging out the legendary Grant Hackett of Australia. Ryan Cochrane of Canada took the bronze. This is the first medal for Canada in this race since 1920 and the first medal for Canada, I believe, in these Games. Take off, hoser! :-p