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Maese: Phelps ready to dive right in

Sights set on 2008 Games, Spitz's record

Rick Maese

August 3, 2007

INDIANAPOLIS

Under his skull-tight swim cap, you can't really tell much about Michael Phelps' training. But under his Detroit Tigers ball cap, you can see his hair sprouting out like a well-watered houseplant. It's a subtle thing, but it tells us where Phelps is in his preparation for the Beijing Olympics.

"When he gets really serious, that'll be gone," promises Phelps' coach, Bob Bowman.

Next week is the year-out mark for the Summer Games, which means the time to get serious is now. Though Phelps' program at this week's ConocoPhillips USA Swimming National Championships wasn't designed to destroy records, when he leaves here Sunday, his attention will be focused on just one thing.

And just so there won't be any confusion, Bowman installed a clock at Phelps' Ann Arbor, Mich., training pool. It counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds until Beijing, each ticking digit bringing Phelps even closer to what promises to be an Olympics worth searing into the record books.

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Because he is counting on bringing home more hardware than he did at the 2004 Games, he's amping up his training schedule immediately, he says.

"This is really my last big chance to do something, to try something no one's ever done before," said Phelps of Rodgers Forge. "Why not go out saying you did everything in your power to be in the best shape, the best form you can be in?"

Swimming is not a sport that rewards age. Most male swimmers peak in their early 20s. Mark Spitz was 22 when he won seven gold medals at the 1972 Games. Phelps will be 23 next summer and knows that though he should still be competitive in a few events by 2012, his best shot at history comes next summer.

To that end, Phelps will leave Indianapolis and will then hit the pool 318 days in a row. That's the amount of time between this week's nationals and the Olympic trials next June. Usually, Phelps swims six days a week, but he and teammate Erik Vendt made a pact to train every day of the week.

"That's something that we came up with ourselves, that [Bowman] had no say in at all," Phelps says. "Usually that's our one day off a week, but Erik and I decided that this is the year."

For Vendt, the 2008 Games will likely mark his last as an elite competitive swimmer. For Phelps, next summer's Olympics mark the last chance he'll have to top Spitz's 35-year-old record. Phelps fell short of the mark in Athens, where he won six golds and two bronzes, but he showed how much he has grown when won seven titles at the world championships this year.

His goal is to pass Spitz next summer -- not tie him -- but what remains to be seen is by just how much. Phelps competed in eight events at both the 2004 Games and this year's world championships. But he's already shown at this week's national championships that he could easily contend in nine -- maybe even 10 -- different events by next summer.

On Wednesday night, he won the 200-meter backstroke -- an event that wasn't part of his last Olympic program -- and was just three-tenths of a second shy of breaking the world record. (Last night, in another event he skipped in Athens, Phelps raced the 400 freestyle in a personal-best 3 minutes, 47.13 seconds, finishing third.)

Here's what is scary about his backstroke mark -- Phelps had scaled back on his training since the world championships and still managed to post such an amazing time.

"There are things I can improve on and things that I can definitely fix," Phelps said. "I can be in 10 times better shape than what I am right now. And I know that."

His dominance is tough to translate to other sports. For all the talk of comparisons to Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, Phelps has put much more distance between himself and his top competitors. Without even being in peak condition, he can throw a dart at an event program and compete in just about any race.

Neither Phelps nor his coach will say which events -- if any -- might be added to the program in the next year. Bowman said the Beijing schedule makes it tough to add the 200 backstroke, but "it's doable."

That same competitive drive that's forcing Phelps into the pool seven days a week could propel him to raise a bar that even now only he can see, which means that at this time next year, we might not just be watching Phelps flirt with an Olympic record; he could be in position to obliterate it.