Phelps's Head Is Above Water

Swimmer's Ability To Clear Mind Ranks With All-Time Greats

BEIJING, Aug. 8 For most, the battle in those moments before the gun sounds is fierce, unlike any other, waged against themselves. The training is over, the traveling done, the coaching absorbed or discarded. Standing on the pool deck, waiting to mount the starting block, there is but one remaining thought. Clear your head. Clear your head! Clear your head!!!

Michael Phelps will face that moment for the first time Saturday evening at the Summer Olympics here when he dives into the pool for the semifinals of the 400-meter individual medley. On Sunday morning -- Saturday night in the United States -- he will almost certainly swim for the first of what he hopes will be eight gold medals at these Games, taking on that same task. Yet when Phelps stands with seven other swimmers at the National Aquatic Center, he will have only the beat of Rick Ross or another hip-hop maven pumping through his earphones, filling his head till the last possible second. He will have ignored the announcer who introduces him to the sellout crowd. He will be oblivious to the NBC camera only feet from his face. The thoughts that overwhelm his brain?

"Nothing," he said this week. No nerves. No butterflies. No strategy. A void.

So much of the focus over the nine days of the Olympic swim meet is likely to be on Phelps's body, because it is exquisite, the rippled 6-foot-4, 185-pound basis for all he accomplishes. But from the moment his coach, Bob Bowman, first saw Phelps swim in a race at age 10, something else became clear.

"His greatest strength, I think," Bowman said, "is psychological."

This is not, by any measure, to suggest Phelps is a master tactician, a cunning strategist who relies on gamesmanship. Rather, Phelps's mind, his coach and competitors say, works in his favor precisely because when others' become jumbled, his is all but empty. His competitiveness is imbedded, a "special ability where he's like, 'There's no way I'm going to lose this race,' " according to former U.S. swimmer Jenny Thompson, owner of 12 Olympic medals. His physical superiority is undeniable, both due to genes and training, "and there's nothing you can really do to change it at that point," she said.

So what's left to fret about? Nothing. Phelps, the 23-year-old from Baltimore County, is being compared in his third Games to Mark Spitz, the Californian who in 1972 established the record by winning seven golds in a single Olympics. But in considering Phelps's singular focus, perhaps the more apt comparisons should be to icons such as Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods, physically gifted athletes whose legends have been forged because they mix uncommon ferocity with crystal clear-headedness at the times when nothing else will suffice.

"He is in that really small number of people in the world who have that mental toughness," said Len Zaichkowsky, a sports psychologist at Boston University who has studied the minds of elite athletes, including swimmers. "When I talk to people like that, they say, 'What do you mean by pressure?' They view it only as a challenge. 'Dammit, that's motivation, and I'm the best in the world.' It's not the induced pressure that inhibits the performance of 99.8 percent of athletes."

Routinely Clutch

Bowman considers Phelps "the perfect storm" of an athlete because he so sublimely mixes the physical with the psychological, and by now -- after a dozen years of forging this partnership -- he is hardly surprised by Phelps's ability to execute what, for Jordan or Woods, would be a buzzer-beating jumper or a clutch 20-foot putt. The instances in which Phelps's hand has narrowly touched before that of a swimmer physically capable of beating him are too many to count. Ian Crocker in the 100-meter butterfly in the Athens Games, a win by four-hundredths of a second. Ryan Lochte in the 400 IM at the U.S. trials just more than a month ago, a race in which both swam under the existing world record. Those are merely examples.

Bowman said he could foresee such ability at meets years ago, when Phelps developed his pre-race routine. Just like now, young Phelps would wear his headphones onto the pool deck.

"He would sit and be real quiet before he raced," Bowman said, "which is unusual, because most of the time, he was running around."

Not now. Phelps first stretches 90 minutes before a race, then again exactly an hour later. With Bowman's work long since done, Phelps's headphones don't leave his ears; no advice is worth receiving. When he arrives on the pool deck, the headphones remain on as he stretches against the starting block, first his left leg, then his right. Only when it's time to race is the iPod discarded, maybe with a minute to spare. And when he mounts the block, it is from the side, usually the only swimmer not to approach from behind. Why?