The First One Is Always the Toughest

BEIJING

It was the first thing Michael Phelps had to win, in order to win all those other things. He couldn't go for eight gold medals without a victory in the 400 individual medley, and therefore it shaped up as a stomach-tightening race, even for a nerveless-seeming giant Squid-Boy.

As Phelps sat in the ready room, the tension swaddled him like his overcoat-shaped robe. If there was greatness in him, he wasn't feeling it. Then something else swept over that sea-horse torso of his. "I started to get chills on my body and knew I was starting to get excited," he said.

The 400 IM is basically the quad-cathlon of swimming, a combination of four disciplines in a single event. It's the most interesting of all races, a grueling test of both the technical and the physical, and swimmers would tell you that it makes their limbs burn like no other. It was arguably the biggest challenge Phelps would face in the Olympic meet, and he rose to it with a combination of explosion and virtuosity, from his humpbacked butterfly, to the writhing backstroke, to the charging breaststroke, to the lunging freestyle. Phelps drew away like a cutter. All Laszlo Cseh of Hungary and Phelps's good friend Ryan Lochte of the United States saw was the whitewater from his kick as he won by 2.32 seconds and broke his own world record with a time of 4 minutes 3.84 seconds.

Phelps lifted an arm to the ceiling of the National Aquatics Center and grinned exuberantly at the two U.S. presidents who sat in the stands waving American flags. On the medal stand, with droplets still clinging to his shorn, spiky hair, he wept tears of release as he clutched what might be his most essential gold medal of the Games, the one that could convince his competition right from the outset that he simply is unbeatable. The performance called to mind Mark Spitz's description of Phelps. "Other swimmers can get demoralized," Spitz has said. "You not only do your best time and break his old world record, and you are still looking at his feet."

Four years ago in Athens, Phelps broadcast his goal of equaling Spitz's feat of seven gold medals, set in 1972. It perhaps was a strategic error that heaped pressure on 19-year-old shoulders that still were young and slim. "Can't get away from the numbers," he said, somewhat regretfully, at the time. The quest instantly became the focal point of the first week of the Games, and it ended disappointingly in just his third event, the 200-meter freestyle, when he finished third behind world record holder Ian Thorpe of Australia and defending Olympic champion Pieter van den Hoogenband. But while Phelps was decisively beaten in that race, the main impression he left in the water was a deep ripple of his coming greatness. If the other guys swam bigger, you just knew Phelps still had a lot of growing to do. The six gold and two bronze medals he eventually took home from Athens seemed merely like a good start.

Perhaps he's overreaching again in going for eight gold medals -- his schedule here will require 17 swims totaling 3,300 meters over nine days. But Phelps has morphed into a monstrous competitor with a great slab of a chest, an arm span that is about four inches longer than his 6-foot-4 height and a dolphin kick that generates the force of a motorized propeller.

Yet Phelps's real hallmark of greatness is that he's so highly organized. All swimmers break down races into measurable increments, but Phelps's intervals seem narrower and more precise. He seems to know what his pace and physiological measurements should be over every meter of water. A photo of Phelps during a practice this week showed him at one end of the pool with two fingers pressed to his throat, checking his heart rate. It was a perfect Phelpsian portrait.

The pressure of going for eight gold medals easily could tempt a less composed athlete to over-swim. Instead, Phelps delivered a series of measured physical detonations. His cruising pool lengths must have been far more strenuous than they appeared.

"Ninety-nine percent of the world, they just see him go, but they will never know how incredibly hard and ridiculous that is," teammate Eric Shanteau said. "I think it's the most painful race. You're just totally spent. You start to feel the pain halfway through. It's inhuman, it's in your lungs, it's in your legs, it's in your abs, everything is just on fire."

In addition to the physical trial, there was the pressure of swimming against Lochte, who a month ago pushed Phelps to his seeming limit in the 400 IM at the U.S. trials. In that final, Phelps barely out-touched him at the wall as both men broke world record pace. Phelps had every expectation he and Lochte would have a similarly close duel in Beijing. "Ryan was coming like a freight train," Phelps said.

But Phelps managed his body and his emotions perfectly. In his preliminary heat, Phelps swam to an Olympic record almost casually. That was just a tuneup for the dominant swim he delivered in the final. Phelps first took the 400 IM world record in 2002 as a 17-year-old, and he never has given it up -- this was the seventh time he's broken it. "He had a great race the whole way," Lochte said.

He's liable to have a great Olympics the whole way, too. "I'm just happy to get the first one under my belt," Phelps said.