Salon.com > Michael Phelps

LeBron James is a hero

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 13:06:00 +0000

Why is it so hard for our nation’s sports press to call LeBron James a hero? If there is one sport in which we are absolutely supposed to win the gold medal, it’s basketball. And yesterday LeBron saved the U.S. from the greatest Olympic humiliation in, possibly, our entire history.

With six minutes left, the U.S. team, made up of future Hall of Famers, was trailing to … not Russia, not Spain, but Lithuania. Yes, the Lithuania whose estimated population of 3.2 million is about a quarter of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. The same Lithuanian team that lost to Nigeria a month ago, a team the U.S. beat by 83 points last week.

And then, like in a bad sports movie, LeBron came off the bench, took on their best player – Linas Kleiza, who plays for the Toronto Raptors – and stayed on him much of the time. LeBron scored 9 of his 20 points, pulled down two rebounds, stole a ball, and said to Team USA, in the words of U.S. coach Mike Krzyzewski, “I got this. I’m doing this.”

Jessica Ennis: Better than Michael Phelps?

Sat, 04 Aug 2012 12:35:00 +0000

It really doesn’t seem like the Olympics until you get into track and field – athletics, in the official Olympics parlance that the Brits actually use. For many natives the Olympics began in earnest today. The press had been calling the empty seats in Olympic Stadium, which was built at a cost of 500 million pounds, a scandal; if so, the scandal ended abruptly on Friday when 80,000-plus packed in -- “There’s not a spare chair to be seen,” as a BBC announcer phrased it – for the first day of the track and field competition.

If you think the British are reserved, you did not hear the roar that greeted their own Jessica Ennis, the poster girl, literally, for British athletics in the 2012 London Olympics. The pressure Ennis was under Friday as she lined up for the first event of the heptathlon – which unofficially determines the world’s best female athlete -- must have made what Andy Murray went through at Wimbledon last month seems like a Frisbee toss in Hyde Park.

Before these games, you may not have known Jessica’s face, but you may have probably seen her washboard-toned midriff on billboards all over the city and even in a field on the landing pattern into Heathrow. NBC cameramen could not resist, zooming in Ms. Ennis’ midsection at least four times during the first day. Her latest honor is a perfect likeness in wax at Madame Tussaud’s.

Ye Shiwen swims like a girl

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Ye Shiwen, the 16-year-old from China, won the gold and smashed the world record for the 400 individual medley on Saturday. She dropped five seconds from her personal best. And she swam the final 50 meters of freestyle faster than Ryan Lochte, the men's gold medalist in the 400 IM. She then followed up by winning the 200 meter Tuesday. Yet her triumph was not taken as an epic achievement for women in sports. It was, instead, a scandal. Oh my God, this must all be a horrible mistake!

In an interview this week with the Guardian, John Leonard, the executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, was quick to brand Shiwen "suspicious." He said it recalled "a lot of awful memories" of Michelle Smith's doping scandal in 1996. "History in our sport will tell you that every time we see something, and I will put quotation marks around this, 'unbelievable,' history shows us that it turns out later on there was doping involved," he said. "I have been around swimming for four-and-a-half decades now. If you have been around swimming, you know when something has been done that just isn't right. I have heard commentators saying, 'Well, she is 16, and at that age amazing things happen.' Well yes, but not that amazing. I am sorry."

Michael Phelps is not the greatest

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 11:55:00 +0000

It’s dirty pool – in fact, dirty swimming pool -- the way the international press and especially the American press are jumping all over two-time gold medalist and London 2012 chairman Sebastian Coe for his comments about Michael Phelps after Phelps earned his 19^th Olympic medal (15 gold, 2 silver, and 2 bronze) in the 4x200 meter freestyle relay.

Nothing Coe said was disrespectful in the slightest: “You can probably say that clearly, self-evidently, in medal tally he’s the most successful,” Coe said Wednesday. “My personal view is that I am not sure he’s the greatest, but he’s the most successful. That goes without saying.”

Nothing there was intended to diminish Phelps’ achievement. And why, after all, is Coe obligated to say that Phelps is the greatest? I particularly liked it when he said, “This is the global pub game: ‘Who is the greatest Olympian of all?’ I could go around this entire room, we’d all come up with different interpretations on that, but you have to say he’s up there.”

Michael Phelps, Jordyn Wieber: Redemption!

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 11:45:00 +0000

Gone were Jordyn Wieber’s tears, and the running mascara, magically replaced by an impish smile and a playful bite on an Olympic gold medal.

Gone, too, was Michael Phelps' silver medal snarl, replaced by a post-relay war whoop.

It was Redemption Tuesday at the Summer Olympics.

Two days ago, when Wieber missed her chance at the all-around gold in women’s gymnastics, it was cause for outrage. A travesty, some suggested.

Actually more like a tragedy. As in Act I.

In NBC’s prime-time Olympics, story is king. And queen. And Wieber’s travails merely served up a handy narrative.

“She may be going from the abyss to the mountaintop,” said Al Trautwig, who had been milking Wieber’s woes all evening long, as the U.S. stood on the verge of capturing the team gold. And when Wieber finally cashed it in with a solid floor exercise, the story had come full circle.

And cash in she will. Asked about Wieber’s prospects just after the preliminaries, gymnast-turned-commentator Dominique Dawes told USA Today, “It could cost her a couple of million dollars throughout her career, probably.”

Olympics recap: Michael Phelps reaches the end

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 12:24:00 +0000

I first met Michael Phelps in June 2004 when he was still an 18-year-old Olympic hopeful. I talked to him for Interview magazine, but it wasn’t much of an interview. Michael wasn’t the most reflective kid in the world – I don’t think I’m dropping any secrets here -- and it was one of the things I liked best about him. I had interviewed baseball star Alex Rodriguez a few months earlier, and every question was torture – or rather, A-Rod’s replies were tortured, as if he had to consider each word three times before saying it.

In contrast, Michael was happy to give me the first thing that came off the top of his head. For instance, when he wasn’t in his Spartan-like regimen, what did he like to gorge on? “Oh, man, give me French vanilla ice cream served in big-ass waffle cones with so many Butterfinger chips that you’ve got to fight to get to the ice cream.” He loved DMX’s “Party Up” – “especially the extended version, the one that runs for nine minutes.”

That was pretty much the interview; the kid already had an agent, who told me, “We’ve had to turn down media. Every 15 minutes in Michael’s life is accounted for.” I thought, that’s a shame, because Michael really enjoyed being a boy, and I wished he had more time to work at it.

Olympics secret: They’re not about sports

Thu, 26 Jul 2012 20:20:00 +0000

Every two years, television reteaches us how to watch the Olympics. As thousands of sprinters, swimmers, archers, gymnasts, boxers, hurdlers, pentathletes and trampolinists descend on London for two weeks of gamesmanship that includes everything from basketball to badminton, fencing to field hockey, table tennis to taekwondo, NBC — the sole televisual purveyor of the Olympics in America — gets down to the business of instructing us, the viewing audience, on how to care about largely unknown athletes competing in not always well understood sports. It does this not only by explaining the rules of the decathlon and the steeplechase, the physical difficulties of the clean and jerk and the pole vault, but by telling us story upon story — the more dramatic, inspiring and tear-jerking the better — about the athletes involved.