The Hindu : Sport : Phelps's achievement lifts us all

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Wednesday, Apr 04, 2007
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Phelps's achievement lifts us all

Rohit Brijnath

INCREDIBLE: With his recent stupendous performances, Michael Phelps has shown how the boundaries of human excellence can be redrawn. — Photo: Quinn Rooney/Getty Images

When Michael Phelps performs he brings his opponents to their knees and the world to its feet. When he commences races, folded on the blocks like a pterodactyl contemplating flight, you are sitting. As he finishes, you feel compelled to award him a standing ovation, to shout your admiration. Even at a television set.

Phelps is exhilarating because he is obscenely fast. Men break records by the length of an unclipped nail; he did last week by an entire body length. Still, to say he swam the 200 metres freestyle in 1:43.86 seconds is meaningless, so let us say this: if Phelps raced Otto Scheff, the 1908 world record holder, he would have won by 62 metres.

As good as Owens's feat

Phelps' five world records in winning seven World Championship golds in eight days is an achievement to sit with anything man has done since he invented the athletic contest. You'll find it there, just below Jesse Owens breaking three world records and equalling a fourth, in a span of 45 minutes, in 1935.

In a time of mayhem in cricket, for instance, Phelps is important. The world record does not change the way we live, but it reminds us of the purity of the athlete, it illustrates the muscularity of the human spirit. Here before us lies the persistent man, the noble man. Occasionally we are shaken by insinuations that the most chaste champion (i.e. Thorpe) may be fake, but still we keep the faith, we have to. Anyway, watching sport as a cynic is to miss half the pleasure.

Phelps is no different from a climber of distant mountains, for he goes where no other has, he is an advertisement to alien civilizations of human potential, of what is possible when body and mind are together tuned. For every 0.05 of a second gained, Phelps must swim hundreds of miles, taste pain and lick it.

How far, we wonder, can we go as a species, and Phelps, right now, is our representative in this process, mankind's lead scout in discovering the limits of the human body. But every time Phelps goes faster, we also wonder, is there a point beyond which we cannot go, is there a finish line to athletic progress?

Between 1912 (10.6 seconds) and 1968 (9.95), the 100-metre track record progressed by .65. Despite sophisticated spikes, artificial tracks, lycra shorts, sports science advances, from 1968 to now the record has progressed by .18 to 9.77. For some it is little, for others substantial.

In shorter distances especially, on track and in pool, it seems harder to squeeze that little extra from the body. Perhaps improvements will be so slight that the measurements will have to alter, from hundredths of a second to cycling's thousandth of a second.

But because there is no such thing as the perfect race (in reaction time, in turn technique, in fitness towards the end, Phelps will insist his races were imperfect), man can only go faster. That day in 1935, when Owens broke all those records, he had a sore back.

Meant to be broken

Records will fall because every time progress slows, the planet belches out another freak of physiology, an athlete designed by God for a particular purpose. Phelps has a long torso, a wingspan (six foot seven inches) that stretches further than he does vertically (six feet four inches), and size 14 feet. He is built for speed in water.

In the 200 metres butterfly, the world record improved by 5.29 seconds between 1971-1981, by 2.32 seconds between 1981-1991, by .51 seconds between 1991-2000. The improvements were by smaller margins every decade. Then Phelps, alone, from 2001 till last week, lowered the record by 3.09 seconds! When Phelps is done, we will blithely proclaim we will never see his like again. It's true. We will see better.

On an iniquitous planet, sporting talent remains unexploited. Out there on the margins, in lands where 50-metre swimming pools are rare, who knows what lies. Twenty-five years hence when opportunity arrives, a gangly-armed hero may come walking out of the warm surf of Bangladesh to remind us we can go faster still. There will be a time, imagine, when Phelps will seem slow.

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