LONDON — Here is one truth about the Olympics: For one week every four years, it manages to transform Planet Earth into a bloated community of experts. As humans, we rarely need any encouragement when it comes to offering our opinions on everything: music, movies, politics, shortstops.
That’s as true in Belgrade as in Bellerose, as common in Antwerp as Astoria.
So tomorrow, we will become savants on the subject of swimming. Next week, we will all channel Bela Karolyi when the pixies begin flying from bars and vaults. And if an archer or a shooter or a modern pentathlete sends an arrow/bullet/pellet too far astray of a target?
Well, I always go back to the Bulgarian journalist who had just witnessed his homegrown water polo team go down in watery shame to the Poles a few Olympics ago and was none too pleased about it. Most of the time, after tough losses, even the most hard-bitten among us sporting scribes affords the vanquished a second or two of respectful silence.
Not angry young Borislaw, who in memory was pulling hard on an extra-pungent European cigarette and crushing a Heineken as he grabbed the microphone.
“You are disgrace to nation,” he said. “Please respond.”
The translators had a hard time containing their chuckles to the end of the sentence. And when they were done, the room roared as if Louis CK had just taken the stage; nothing unites the world faster than a sportswriter sharpening his knife.
As Liverpool’s own John Lennon once wisely surmised: “Experts, texperts, choking smokers, don’t you think the joker laughs at you?”
So it’s well that when the Olympics begin in earnest tomorrow, they will begin in the water, inside the London Aquatics Center, designed by a world-renowned architect named Zaha Hadid, clearly at a moment when Dame Hadid asked herself, “If I make it look like skateboard ramp, will they build it anyway?” (Sigh, sorry; the Olympics turns us all into architecture critics, too).
Because the star of that first night will once again be Michael Phelps, who is one of the three most famous swimmers in history along with Johnny Weissmuller and Mark Spitz, and certainly the richest. Phelps enters the Games with 16 medals on his résumé, 14 of them gold, and by the time they extinguish the flame here it is likely he will own more medals than any Olympic athlete, ever.
And here is the great part about Phelps:
In an atmosphere so toxic with pressure, a once-every-four-years crock pot that can break even the strongest wills and iron-plated nerves, Phelps has always carried himself with the cool, detached expectation of excellence.
The Olympics, after all, are almost always defined by failure as much as success. LoLo Jones’ stumble. Lindsay Jacobellis’ hotdogging. Bode Miller easing his way down the mountain. Dan Janssen’s epic pursuits. On and on. The Dream Team was borne out of two bitter basketball defeats in 1972 and 1988, losses to the Soviets far more memorable than any of the games the U.S. won between 1936 and 1992.
And it isn’t an American issue, as poor Borislaw illustrated above. In 2000, a Moroccan miler named Hicham El Guerrouj finished second in the 1,500 meters, and instead of being saluted as a silver medalist the first question he faced was this: “How does it feel to let 30 million Moroccans down?”
Phelps has known only success, and it shows. He is unaffected. It might explain why one of his teammates, a nobody named Tyler Clary, made the ludicrous assertion not long ago that Phelps might really have been something else if he’d only worked harder at it.
And might also explain why it seems perfectly accurate when Phelps speaks of his goals at these Olympics (where he’ll be entered in only seven events, having dropped the 200-meter freestyle from his ’08 roster), he seems like the least burdened athlete at the Games, even as the most decorated one.
“How many toppings do I want on my sundae?” Phelps asked, sounding a lot like Usain Bolt, the Jamaican sprinter who will take the baton and be Week Two’s version of Phelps. Bolt said yesterday: “My main goal is to become a legend.”
A confident pair in a place where calamity so often reigns, immune even to a planet full of expert texperts.