Phelps officially world's greatest athlete ever

Mike Celizic

BEIJING - There isn't any question who the greatest athlete in the world is. He was on the top step of the medal stand after completion of his grueling Olympic performance, his hand over his heart as the Star-Spangled Banner filled the Water Cube.

You know his name by now: Michael Fred Phelps. You also know his accomplishments: more gold medals in Olympic competition than anyone has ever won before.

And to the distinction of being the greatest Olympic athlete ever, we can add the ultimate: World’s Greatest Athlete.

Ever.

That’s not a title that can be blithely bestowed. The world has seen a lot of great athletes — Jim Thorpe, Paavo Nurmi, Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis, Michael Jordan, Jim Brown, Tiger Woods, Pele, Lance Armstrong to name the obvious ones. If you’re going to say Phelps is better than all of them, you’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do.

Fair enough.

Let’s start with the presumption that if a person is to be considered for the title of the best ever, he or she will have to have done something that’s never been done before. It’s not enough to win championships or set records. You’ve got to have more of them than anybody else and you’ve got to do it a way that no one’s ever done. That knocks Tiger Woods out of the discussion already. If he wins golf’s professional Grand Slam — something no one’s ever done — he can get back in the argument. But not until then. It takes out Jordan, too, whose six titles are not the most anyone’s ever won.

You also have to dominate a sport that has a deep pool of highly trained and motivated talent. That knocks out the old-timers like Nurmi, Thorpe and Owens, who were competing in the infancy of modern sports in an era of haphazard training and limited depth of competition.

Slide show   Day 9's emotional moments Phelps claims his eighth gold medal, track events heat up. more photos

You have to do it on the biggest stage under the greatest pressure. And you have to do it in spectacular fashion. I would submit that you also have to do it as an individual because it’s really impossible to totally judge someone when he’s part of a team.

Already, the list has shortened considerably. We’re pretty much left with Lance Armstrong and his record seven consecutive Tour de France titles, and Phelps with his 14 Olympic gold medals, with a record eight in these Beijing Games. With his passage of Mark Spitz’s record of seven for one Olympics — Phelps is my choice.

I’m going to assume that Armstrong won his titles cleanly, an assumption that many in cycling will disagree with but one that has to be made because he never tested positive. And I’m going to say Phelps beats him on versatility. Armstrong was a one-race specialist. It’s a grueling and ridiculously difficult race, but it’s one event. Phelps is a three-event champion, winning his gold medals in freestyle, butterfly and the individual medley.

That’s why Mark Spitz, winner of those iconic seven swimming golds back in 1972, isn’t even in this discussion. He swam two individual events — the butterfly and freestyle — and won three medals in relays as a member of a team that was light years ahead of the rest of the world. He didn’t swim the individual medley, which is the hardest race in swimming, combining all four competitive strokes — butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle. The seven medals are an impressive haul, but Spitz isn’t really in the same league with Phelps.

Phelps has already done things we’ve never seen before and are unlikely to see again. And he’s done it every time he’s left the starting blocks. His 14 gold medals for his career are the record. In Beijing, he won eight gold medals, five of them all by himself and three as a member of two relay teams. He won two of the golds on the same day, and seven medals came with a new world record.

None of this should be possible.

Swimming is a highly evolved sport. All the athletes use the same techniques and have access to the same level of coaching, training regimens, nutrition and technology. Once, the great majority of swimming champions came from a handful of countries — the United States, the Netherlands, Australia, and the Soviet Union and its satellites. Everybody in the pool had white skin. Today, the entire world has jumped in the pool. Korea has won its first Olympic gold and China also won its first medal ever. An African-American, Cullen Jones, was a member of the gold-medal 4x100-meter freestyle relay.

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