Phelps first started visualizing his perfect swim when he was 12 years old. He had started swimming for his engaging and demanding coach, Bob Bowman, who wanted his protégé to find a way of mastering his excesses of energy.
Before he went to sleep, Phelps’ mother, Debbie, would come into his bedroom and tell him to relax a part of his body at a time, until he reached a meditative state. This was the point Bowman had instructed him to “play the videotape” in his head.
It was a film he had stopped watching after Beijing. He lost his motivation for getting in the pool. He spent, in his words, “three years not doing much” before regaining his focus last year. Now he is back doing the old routines, preparing body and brain for his final assault on the Olympics.
There is a new film running inside his skull: Phelps III, the final part of an epic trilogy. He knows how he wants it to end.
“I had not been doing the visualization as much before last summer really,” he said. “Now I have gotten back into the rhythm of it, of seeing what I want to see, seeing what I don’t want to see, seeing what I possibly could see. I’m trying to picture it all, everything I possibly can, so that I’m ready for anything that happens.”
Memory and anticipation mingle. Phelps knows what it feels like to have eight gold medals hanging around his neck; this year in London he will attempt to win seven.
His other target is to accumulate the most medals of any Olympian in history: he currently has 16, so only a spectacular collapse would prevent him overtaking the Russian gymnast Larisa Latynina’s tally of 18.
To most athletes, such targets are the stuff of lunacy; Phelps, however, is no ordinary athlete.
“Throughout my career nobody has been able to stand in my way. I have gone through ups and downs. Nobody is going to put a limit on what I'm doing.
I’m going to do what I want to do, when I want to do it. That is how I have always worked. If I want something I am going to go and get it.
“I’m feeling confident and happy. I was saying this summer I was feeling happy again and I haven’t had that feeling in a while. I’m happy in the water. I’m probably doing things that I haven’t wanted to do or haven’t done in the last three years.
"Different work-outs and sets that, in the past I have said 'Bob I don’t want to do this, I’m not doing this’. Now I’m just accepting it, realising what I need to do to be able to accomplish my goals.”
A return to old methods has come with a return to old haunts.
For his Beijing preparation, Phelps and Bowman moved to the University of Michigan’s facility at Ann Arbor. Now he is back at Meadowbrook, the pool in which it all began for him. It is nestled in Mount Washington, a quaint suburb in the north of his hometown, Baltimore.
It is a long way from the projects with their high homicide rates, made famous by The Wire. “Welcome to Bulletmore,” says my taxi driver cheerfully. “Or, my preference, Baltimorgue. We all live HBO movies here.”
There is no doubt this sort of stuff gets laid on a bit thick for the tourists but Baltimore is no frills. This is a blue collar city with a lot of attendant aspiration and industry. Phelps is part of the fabric of the city — everybody has a story of meeting him in a restaurant or the store. At Meadowbrook he is part of the furniture.
It makes for an unpretentious training base: members of the Aquatic club can find themselves in the lane next to the greatest swimmer to have dived into a pool.
When I visit the building is full of boisterous kids, coming in and out of their lessons with the Michael Phelps Swim School.
There is a 50m indoor pool and a 50m outdoor one too, which was built back in 1930. It is not the training base you would associate with an athlete estimated to be worth $5million a year in endorsements.
There is one clue, though, although it is concealed beneath covers at the moment. It is what they call an endless pool, a Jacuzzi-sized contraption that pushes water at you like an aquatic treadmill.
This one has been customized to accommodate Phelps’ incredible wing span when he swims butterfly and he has also installed flashing lights and a subwoofer, so that he can listen to his favourite hip hop tunes while he swims.
Tucked away in another corner in what looks like a storage area is a large wooden gazebo that you might find sheltering pots of plants outside a garden centre.
This is the “dojo”, where Phelps does his dry-land work. To call it spare does not do it justice — the walls are made of clear tarp, there are free weights scattered around, the cross beams are used for pull ups. During the winter they have to bring patio heaters in.
“It is kind of like the place Rocky worked out in Rocky IV, when he went out to Russia,” Phelps said. “That’s where we lift every single day. It’s kind of cool and has been fun to work out there for the last couple of years. We have our own thing going on and we love it. We’re just joking around together.”
To complement this raw backdrop, Keenan Robinson, Phelps’ dry-land coach, has got him and his training partners boxing. “We throw punches and comments,” he said.
“It’s great, throwing jabs around. We have fun and keep it relaxed. There are only four or five there and we enjoy ourselves.” I have been given a taster of what “enjoying himself” means, invited to watch an exhibition work out at the headquarters of his sponsor, Under Armour, down in Baltimore harbour.
What to Phelps is “a more relaxed” work out looks like some of the terminal work of the Inquisition. At one stage he is dragging a metal sled, loaded up with weights, along the dockside at another he hangs from a metal bar until his hand comes out in blood blisters.
He relishes this low-tech approach — fitting as it does the industrial skyline of the city — but can also call on hi-tech sports science support. In the Under Armour lab, of which they are so protective you can only enter with a vascular scan of the back of your hand, a team of engineers customise Phelps’ gear, to his unusual body shape — short legs, long torso and an arm-span wider than he is tall.
“The thing I have found really important is the Recharge suit they have made for me,” he said. The suit compresses the muscles and prevents post-work out swelling. “Recovery is huge for me as I have got older and older.
"I throw on the suit whenever I am traveling and when I’m doing the hardest of hardcore training I’ll be sleeping in it. My upper body actually recovers quite quickly but my legs get very sore so I need to do everything I can to recover faster.”
The “hardest of hardcore” training happens at altitude in Colorado. “I spent three weeks out there recently and it has had a big impact on where I stand in training.
"We do nothing but go to the pool, the gym, eat and sleep. There is nothing else. I don’t want to say I love it but I enjoy the effects of altitude training. It is super, super boring but I get so much work done there and I know it is what I need to do.”
Phelps and Bowman talk about these sessions as deposits in the bank, a reserve they can then draw on come competition. “I made a big, big deposit,” he says with a slight shudder.
Phelps will need to draw out every last cent in the coming weeks. In Ryan Lochte he is faced with a formidable rival, someone who has emerged from Phelps’s shadow to become the star of the US swimming team.
At the World Championships in Shanghai last summer Lochte beat Phelps in the two events in which they went head-to-head, the 200m individual medley and the 200m freestyle. He then threw in a victory in the 400m individual medley for good measure at the US Olympic trials.
Phelps fought back with wins in the 200m freestyle and 200m individual medley at the trials, but the defeats in Shanghai have left their mark. Phelps has decided not to defend the 200m freestyle title he won in Beijing to focus on beating Lochte in the medley races, meaning these two titans will meet just twice in the pool this summer: in the 400m IM on the first full day of competition, July 28, and the 200 IM on Aug 2. The world will stop to watch every stroke.
For Phelps, the memory of his set-backs in Shanghai and Omaha serve as massive motivation. When Ian Crocker beat him in the 100m butterfly in 2003, Phelps hung a poster of him on his bedroom wall as a reminder; when Ian Thorpe questioned his ability to win eight golds in Beijing, Phelps cut out the newspaper article and kept it in his locker. With Lochte, though, rivalry is mixed with friendship.
“People have their own way of doing things but we are still friends,” Phelps said. “I’m sure everybody is going to say what they want in public.
It is not going to hurt our friendship. We love to compete. We have been able to bring the best out of each other the last couple of years and that’s what we are going to continue to do this year. It’s going to be exciting. I’m looking forward to being able to give him a race rather than flopping like I have in the past.” Telling that, for Phelps, silver at the worlds qualifies as a 'flop’.
There is no sentimentality about him, something that comes across when he talks about his old rival Thorpe’s failed bid to qualify for London. “When I read his quote that he said he felt he was going to be disappointed, I knew right then he wasn’t going to do it,” he said.
“Nothing against him but when you say something like that, you are kind of giving up. It is sad. I’d have loved to have been able to compete with him again.
“I would probably say he didn’t give everything he could. He is the kind of guy that is talented enough to be there. It doesn’t matter if he has been out of the game for seven years. He’s got enough talent to know what he is doing. If he wanted to work hard enough to make it, he would have. It is just sad to see it. Hopefully he is satisfied and if he is then that’s all that matters.”
This uncompromising attitude reveals a lot about Phelps himself, and how he wants to finish his career. “I think the biggest thing is that there is more hunger right now,” he said.
“Being able to finish my career how I want to, that is more important than anything else. I know I’m not going to have this for my whole life. I don’t want to be 20 years down the road saying what if I did this, what if I did that. I never want to have that. I’m at the point were I want to go out and have fun.
“Once I entered the sport I wanted to do things that nobody had seen in the sport before. There are the records and the medals, but if in my eyes I can look back on my career and say that I have done everything I have wanted, then I don’t care about anything or anybody else. To go out and do whatever I can do on that given day.
"If I can hang my suit up at the end of my career and be happy that I have done everything I wanted then nothing else matters.”
Michael Phelps is an Under Armour athlete. For more information on how Under Armour makes all athletes better, visit www.UA.com
Source: www.telegraph.co.uk
Olympic Rush Begins As Teams Land In London - Sky.com
Defence Sec: Olympic Games Will Be Secure
Updated: 7:06pm UK, Sunday 15 July 2012
Defence Secretary Philip Hammond has told Sky News he is confident troops can deliver a secure Olympics as athletes start to arrive in London for the Games.
Some 3,500 extra troops have been drafted in after security firm G4S admitted it was unable to deliver on its contract.
Speaking on Sky News' Murnaghan programme, Mr Hammond dismissed security concerns surrounding the event.
"The security required to make the Olympics safe and secure will be in place," he said.
"The army, the air force and the navy are working alongside G4S and we will ensure that the games are secure.
"There was always going to be a very significant armed forces component, it will now be a bit larger than we originally envisaged it being."
He refused to be drawn on whether troops should get an Olympic bonus, similar to the one-off £500 payment London bus drivers will receive.
"People in the armed forces are not London bus drivers. The armed forces is a contingent organisation, people who join and expect to be asked at short notice to do tasks that they have not necessarily envisaged doing."
"We will make sure, and I've already given this commitment, that nobody will be out of pocket,” he added.
Meanwhile, Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt refused to rule out the prospect that even more troops will have to be drafted in.
When pressed on whether the 3,500 additional troops who have been brought in to make up the shortfall would be sufficient, he told BBC1's The Andrew Marr Show: "We have contingency plans for all eventualities."
G4S has a £284m contract with the Government to provide 13,700 security guards for the Olympic Games, but only 4,000 guards are trained and ready.
It is believed that the Government found out about the shortfall on Wednesday, and quickly had to boost the number of military personnel working on the Games to 17,000 - almost a fifth of the entire army.
G4S said it would see a loss on the contract of between £35m and £50m. Shares in the company were also down 1.5% when markets closed on Friday, meaning more than £150m has been wiped from its market value over the past two days.
On Saturday, G4S chief executive Nick Buckles apologised to troops returning from Afghanistan who will have to give up their leave to help secure the Games.
Source: news.sky.com
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