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Michael Phelps Becomes Most Decorated Olympian of All Time

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SteveWD40

Member
charsace said:
The Olympics needs something that is like Pankration to make a return.
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Totaly, oldest sport in the world and all that. Maybe even Bas Ruten style open hand strikes. Boxing is worse for you but MMA can get bloody, sometimes it looks like they sacrificed a goat in the Octogon and the IOC won't like that (small gloves / knees / elbows).
 
A

AkuMifune

Banned
SteveWD40 said:
It's just genetics, he is physically perfect to swim fast, might as well have a who's tallest competition.
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By that logic, all champions are just genetically predisposed to be the greatest in any sport. Why even bother? Just like I am the genetic perfection in the art of masturbation.
 
E

EatinOlives

Member
Eh, the relay race that put him over the top of the record wasn't particularly meaningful. He was pretty much handed the gold by the time he dove in the water. He lost a significant lead from the ridiculous length that the other 3 team members had given him. The fact he got the gold really didn't have anything to do with his individual accomplishment. He may have even lost the race if 1st and 2nd places were close enough.

That said, he was going to get that gold at some point in time, later if not now. I just wish it would've been one I felt he actually earned.
 
K

Korey

Member
EatinOlives said:
Eh, the relay race that put him over the top of the record wasn't particularly meaningful. He was pretty much handed the gold by the time he dove in the water. He lost a significant lead from the ridiculous length that the other 3 team members had given him. The fact he got the gold really didn't have anything to do with his individual accomplishment. He may have even lost the race if 1st and 2nd places were close enough.

That said, he was going to get that gold at some point in time, later if not now. I just wish it would've been one I felt he actually earned.
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Ryan Lochte (1:45.15)
Conor Dwyer (1:45.23)
Ricky Berens (1:45.27)
Michael Phelps (1:44.05)

He was over a second faster than the next fastest teammate. And it's a team event, so your point doesn't even make sense
 
C

C.Dark.DN

Banned
EatinOlives said:
Eh, the relay race that put him over the top of the record wasn't particularly meaningful. He was pretty much handed the gold by the time he dove in the water. He lost a significant lead from the ridiculous length that the other 3 team members had given him. The fact he got the gold really didn't have anything to do with his individual accomplishment. He may have even lost the race if 1st and 2nd places were close enough.

That said, he was going to get that gold at some point in time, later if not now. I just wish it would've been one I felt he actually earned.
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He was the anchor, which is position for the fastest swimmer. And he was as seen above.
 
D

DBT85

Member
I just read this take on the "greatest Olympian" line on the BBC site. Quite interesting.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/olympics/19073234

As Michael Phelps ducked his damp head on Tuesday night to receive the 15th Olympic gold medal of his phenomenal career, two of his supporters high up in the crowd frantically waved a home-made banner that read, in wonky script - Phelps: Greatest Olympian ever.
That gold in the 4x200m freestyle, plus the silver he had to settle for an hour earlier having led the 200m butterfly until the final fingertip, took his tally to 19 Olympic medals.

Undisputedly, Phelps is the most decorated athlete in Games history. But the greatest?

These are the sort of sporting arguments that lead, inadvertently, to the reputations of legends being trashed in a car-crash of comparisons. So let us seek a little clarity and calm.

Here in London, Phelps has won the simple numerical battle. In his dust lie the totals of the woman who held the record for 48 years, Ukrainian-born gymnast Larissa Latynina (18 medals, nine golds); Nikolai Andrianov (the previously most decorated male, with his 15 gymnastic medals and seven golds); and the only swimmer to have got close, Mark Spitz (nine golds, a silver and a bronze).

Even someone as stellar as Carl Lewis (nine golds) can, by that basic rationale, only pale in comparison - which is why we must dig a little deeper.While Lewis holds his place in history in part for winning medals in four different events, no other sports offer the same opportunities for multiple medals as swimming and, to a lesser extent, gymnastics.

It is not only the four strokes, but the relay combinations on top. Lewis was part of a wonderful USA 4x100m team yet relay golds only contributed two to his tally. Phelps has eight.

The 27-year-old from Baltimore has now won medals across three Olympics, just as Latynina and Lewis did. If we consider longevity to be as impressive as an eight-year blitz, then other contenders must come into play.
Sir Steve Redgrave won five golds over five Olympics. Germany's Birgit Fischer won a remarkable eight, over six different Olympic Games, even having missed the Los Angeles Games entirely because of the Eastern Bloc boycott.
Hungarian fencer Aladar Gerevich won a little historical legroom of his own by taking medals in the same event six times. He even took gold medals 28 years apart.

And what of Al Oerter, winner of discus gold at four successive Games despite a car crash that nearly killed him, a man so obsessed with medals that when his doctor told him to retire on medical grounds he replied: "This is the Olympics - you die before you quit."

Numbers, you feel, can only take us so far.

Jesse Owens would surely have added to his four golds - and three Olympic records - from Berlin had a crass ban from US authorities and the global Armageddon of World War II not intervened.

So too would distance running pioneer Paavo Nurmi, winner of nine golds and three silvers between 1920 and 1928, who was excluded by officials from the 10,000m in Paris for health reasons and then banned from the 1932 Olympics for receiving a small amount of money in travel expenses.

Officialdom once again denied the wonderful Fanny Blankers-Koen, who after winning her four track golds at London's 1948 Olympics was then prevented from entering the high jump and long jump - at which she was world record holder - because athletes were only allowed to enter a maximum of four events. By the time of her triumphs, too, she was already 32-years-old, robbed of the peak years of her career by the World War II.

There can be great meaning and triumph, great wonder, in far fewer medals than Phelps has amassed.

There is Ray Ewry - three golds in Paris in 1900, three more in St Louis four years later, two more in 1908 - having overcome polio and a childhood confined to a wheelchair.

There is Emile Zatopek, winning gold in London and three more in Helsinki including, famously, the marathon in his first ever attempt at the distance, and Daley Thompson, champion in the hardest event of all on two epoch-making occasions.

And there is Usain Bolt, the golden streak behind two of the most staggering performances in Olympic history and with the opportunity for more before this fortnight is out.

Being a great Olympian is about more than simple silverware anyway. There is sportsmanship, character, charisma and reputation.

Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal in the 4x200m freestyle - his eighth relay gold

Phelps should not suffer in our eyes for being a bashful, low-key, East Coast kind of kid. Carl Lewis perhaps should for testing positive for banned substances three times before the 1988 US Olympic trials, and then reacting with a petulant, "There were hundreds of people getting off," when pushed.

Not for nothing did another great Olympian, Ed Moses, once say of his team-mate: "Carl rubs it in too much. A little humility is in order."
This is where the claims of others come to the fore. Redgrave remains the most modest of champions to this day. Blankers-Koen changed the world's attitude to women in sport.

Owens, who would later suffer the indignity of racing against horses to make ends meet, proved one of the Olympics' most fundamental truths in demonstrating, in front of Hitler himself, the emptiness of Nazi myth.

Despite his treatment back home he spent his later years travelling across the world as a US goodwill ambassador, and when the US decided to boycott the 1980 Moscow Games petitioned President Jimmy Carter not to sacrifice the Olympics in the name of political gain.

There is one more.
Muhammad Ali won gold in Rome as Cassius Clay, shocked the world again when he lit the cauldron in Atlanta 36 years later and was here in London, despite the ravages of Parkinson's, to welcome the Olympic flag during London's own opening ceremony.
Ali's most iconic moments in sport came outside the Games. Yet he remains the embodiment of their ideals, the most loved Olympian still alive.


The greatest? You take your pick. By comparing Michael Phelps to all these superstars of the past, perhaps the supreme accolade has already been offered
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EatinOlives

Member
DeathNote said:
He was the anchor, which is position for the fastest swimmer. And he was as seen above.
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That...doesn't negate anything I said. He was the fastest one on the team, but he was still losing the lead fast. In other words, the opponents were doing better, and might've lost if he hadn't been given the enormous lead.
 
M

MrPink93485

Member
EatinOlives said:
That...doesn't negate anything I said. He was the fastest one on the team, but he was still losing the lead fast. In other words, the opponents were doing better, and might've lost if he hadn't been given the enormous lead.
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Well France caught up .8 seconds because Yannick Agnel is ridiculous, and the Gold Medal winner for the 200m free style. Same guy who ran down Lochte in the 4 x 100. Most would have lost a bit of time, so what gives?
 
B

Blader

Member
EatinOlives said:
Eh, the relay race that put him over the top of the record wasn't particularly meaningful. He was pretty much handed the gold by the time he dove in the water. He lost a significant lead from the ridiculous length that the other 3 team members had given him. The fact he got the gold really didn't have anything to do with his individual accomplishment. He may have even lost the race if 1st and 2nd places were close enough.

That said, he was going to get that gold at some point in time, later if not now. I just wish it would've been one I felt he actually earned.
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I don't think you understand relay events.
 
C

C.Dark.DN

Banned
EatinOlives said:
That...doesn't negate anything I said. He was the fastest one on the team, but he was still losing the lead fast. In other words, the opponents were doing better, and might've lost if he hadn't been given the enormous lead.
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Do you know how maths work? If Michael went first and all of the other teams stayed the same, the lead would have been bigger for the 4th person. And the 4th person would be losing the lead faster than Michael did.

He was faster than all of his team mates. His team was faster than the other teams. Plain as simple.
 
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EatinOlives

Member
DeathNote said:
Do you know how maths work? If Michael went first and all of the other teams stayed the same, the lead would have been bigger for the 4th person. And the 4th person would be losing the lead faster than Michael did.
He was faster than all of his team mates. His team was faster than the other teams. Plain as simple.
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Right on to ad-hominems? I'm just saying I didn't find this win satisfying for the one medal that breaks the record.

I'm just going to pretend his next gold is the record-breaker :p
 
C

C.Dark.DN

Banned
EatinOlives said:
Right on to ad-hominems? I'm just saying I didn't find this win satisfying for the one medal that breaks the record.

I'm just going to pretend his next gold is the record-breaker :p
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He earned it 100%, and swam better than his teammates, but yeah, It'd be nice if he wins gold alone in an upcoming race and it would have been sweeter if he broke the record alone.
 
RoadHazard

RoadHazard

Gold Member
This could have been a good thread (his achievement is amazing, of course), but then it turned out to just be another "USA IS #1 AT EVERYTHING!" deal. Oh well.
 
S

Sky Chief

Member
lexi said:
The U.S. is the greatest, best country God has ever given man on the face of the earth.

SnW1W.jpg
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Every Olympics I am always upset that we haven't added the Moon as our 51st state yet and put it on our flag. That way every time we win Gold Medals everyone will see the moon on our flag and then remember who owns it.
 
B

Banana Kid

Member
RoadHazard said:
This could have been a good thread (his achievement is amazing, of course), but then it turned out to just be another "USA IS #1 AT EVERYTHING!" deal. Oh well.
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It's the Olympics! If a man can't exclaim his country is the best and all other countries are shit, then what's the point of even competing?

Don't worry, next time your country has the MOST DECORATED OLYMPIAN OF ALL TIME, you can brag too.
 
E

Effnine

Member
We seem to be bad at everything else that matters (education, health care, etc.), just let us have this one, haters.


redneck.jpg
 
Lamel

Lamel

Banned
Awesome for phelps and team america.

The rest of the world, are you even trying?

Also, this thread is like a salt mine...damn.
 
C

coldvein

Banned
why is swimming cut up into so many different things? i never really thought about it before. there are so many more opportunities for medals than in anything else..right?
 
C

Clegg

Member
coldvein said:
why is swimming cut up into so many different things? i never really thought about it before. there are so many more opportunities for medals than in anything else..right?
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Swimming is a very technical sport. Butterfly is completely different to frontcrawl which is different to breaststroke. You'll have some swimmers that strong in different disciplines and weaker in others. Phelps, for example, is relatively weak at breaststroke. Competitive swimming is open to a number of different specialities.
 
C

coldvein

Banned
so if all of swimming was put together into one american gladiators style swimming gauntlet comprised of every specialty in swimming, and there were just three medals given out for "swimming", would that be COOLER or not as cool as the current system?
 
C

Clegg

Member
TBH I like swimming in its current format. On top of the different strokes there are also the different distances. The 100m frontcrawl is a completely different proposition to the 400m frontcrawl. The swimmers that excel at one distance will struggle at another. I wouldn't change it.
 
Zoe

Zoe

Member
coldvein said:
so if all of swimming was put together into one american gladiators style swimming gauntlet comprised of every specialty in swimming, and there were just three medals given out for "swimming", would that be COOLER or not as cool as the current system?
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There's already an event that puts all four strokes together.
 
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