Phelps, Bolt will go down as Beijing's main men

Mike Celizic

BEIJING - Want to win a bar bet tonight? Try this sports trivia question: Who were the three swimmers who saved Michael Phelps’ historic Olympics in the men’s 4x100-meter relay?

It happened little more than a week ago, and it was the race of the Olympics. I’m sure you remember the finish. An American had to swim the race of his life to make up a big deficit and beat somebody else by a fingernail. Already, I’m betting that a lot of you can’t even remember which country that other somebody was from. I know not one in 10 can name the heroic American who swam the last leg, and probably not one in 50 can name the entire relay team. I wrote about it and even I’d forgotten one of the swimmers already.

But don’t take my word for it. Try it out at your neighborhood sports bar. Everyone will know Phelps, of course. Some will know that the French team finished second. A few will remember that Jason Lezak is the hero who swam the fastest 100 meters ever swum to save the day. And virtually no one will be able to tell you that the other two American swimmers were Garrett Weber-Gale and Cullen Jones.

And that’s today. Wait a month or two, and virtually no one will remember Lezak, the true hero of that relay, the man who made the Phelpsian Feat of eight gold medals possible.

So it is with all Olympics. Some of us watch from dawn to dusk, churning through the cable menu, suddenly absorbed in table tennis and badminton and field hockey and water polo and fencing and team handball — who knew such a sport even existed? We keep checking the results online at work and maybe watch some live streaming video.

And a week later, what we remember are two or three moments that forever will define 2008 and Beijing in our memory banks.

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This year, it’s Phelps and Usain Bolt, the Jamaican rocket who set world records in both the 100 and 200 meters and then tacked on a third gold in the 4x100 meter relay.

Phelps was impossible to avoid. His quest to break Mark Spitz' record of seven gold medals at a single Olympics was the hyped as the story of the Games, and rightly so. Phelps swam 17 races, won eight golds — with a little help from his friends — and established himself as the greatest athlete of all time.

So how does one try to match a feat like that? You run to world records in track & field's glamour events. Bolt blew away the field in the 100-meter dash, setting a world record despite slowing up more than 10 yards from the finish line. A few days later, he broke Michael Johnson's 12-year-old record in the 200, and ran a leg on Jamaica's record-breaking 4x100 relay. He was the Phelps of track, if you will.

After them, you’ll probably remember the golden girls of beach volleyball, Misty May-Treanor and Kerri “Six Feet of Sunshine” Walsh, the first team to win back-to-back gold medals in their sport.

But you probably won’t remember the guys who matched their feat a day later — Todd Rogers and Philip Dalhausser. Maybe if they wore Speedos and went bare-chested, they’d have a better shot at being remembered. Maybe not. On the beach, babes in bikinis always rule.

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If you remember one more person, it’s likely to be Dara Torres, who didn’t win a gold at all but was celebrated far and wide as the 41-year-old Olympic mom.

By the time they snuff the torch on Sunday night, there will have been 302 gold medals awarded to athletes in 28 sports. When they re-light it in London four years hence, most of those winners will be dim memories.

You can say you’ll remember, but start flipping through your Olympic memory bank. I’ve been doing it myself, going back to the first Summer Games I attended in 1984 in Los Angeles. That was Mary Lou Retton and Carl Lewis. I also remember Daley Thompson, the decathlon champion, but I doubt many others do. Edwin Moses, the greatest 400-meter hurdler of all time was in the mix as well.

In 1988 in Seoul, it was Lewis again, Florence Griffith-Joyner, who somehow managed not to get caught by the drug police, and Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who did get caught. Greg Louganis split his head open hitting the springboard in diving, but won both diving medals anyway.

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