No Limits by Michael Phelps

deck from the people who ran Australian swimming. The times are okay, Michael, he told me. But these are the Olympic Games. You are going to treat them right. What did we say about preparation?
    The next night, the plan was for me to leave the village early so I would get to the pool with, as they say in Australia, no worries. Bob wanted me there two-and-a-half hours before the race.
    My cell phone rang.
    â€œHello.”
    â€œHello, Bob.”
    â€œMichael, are you here at the pool?”
    â€œNo, I’m going back to the village.”
    â€œWhat? Now? Why?”
    â€œI took the wrong credential. I was heading to the door and I grabbed Aaron’s instead.”
    Bad. Very bad. Of course Bob was upset. To his credit, he did not yell.
    â€œWell, okay,” he said finally. “Let’s get here and figure out what to do.”
    I got to the pool with a little bit more than an hour to go. We shortened my warm-up. I was jittery. When we walked out onto the deck, instead of doing my thing behind the block I walkedover to Malchow to wish him luck. That’s not the way it’s done on the deck. I still don’t know what I was thinking.
    I swam that Olympic final in 1:56.50, a personal best, a time that would have won a medal at every previous Olympic final. It got me fifth. I was 33-hundredths of a second back of third place, and bronze.
    Fifth. No medal.
    Malchow won, in 1:55.35. He patted me on the back and said, “The best is ahead of you.”
    Bob sent me to the pool the next day for a workout. The workout sheet said, “Austin WR.” That meant the 2001 spring nationals in Austin, Texas. No medal at the Olympics? New goal. World record in the 200 fly in Austin.
    The final day of the swim meet in Sydney was medley relay day. I painted my face half red and half blue and wrote “Team USA” across my chest, and as I sat there, watching the American men and the American women win the medleys, I thought how cool it would be to swim the relays, which, at these Games, I had no chance of doing. At North Baltimore, I loved the feeling of being on a team. In Sydney, I loved it even more.
    Maybe, I thought, in Athens.
    And, I thought, maybe in Athens we could avenge the two freestyle relays, the 400 and the 800. Both were major American disappointments in Sydney, especially the 400.
    Before Sydney, the United States had won the 400 each of the seven times it had been included on the Olympic program. The Australians wanted this one bad. It was in their country. The race was to be held on the first night of racing. They had Ian Thorpe, who at those Games would prove he was among the world’s most dominant swimmers, assigned to the anchor leg. They were fired up, and then they got fired up even more because of Gary Hall, Jr., whose multiple Olympic medals included silver in the 100 free in 1996.
    In an online diary published a month before the Olympics,Gary had written how much he respected the Australian swimmers. But he closed the article with a prediction that no one in Australia was soon going to forget: “We’re going to smash them like guitars.”
    Everyone knew Gary would swim the anchor leg for the American team.
    The rest was history.
    An hour before the relay, Ian won the 400 free. He barely had time to change for the medals ceremony and then back into his bodysuit.
    The Australians got out on the first leg. The Americans came back in the second. The Americans grabbed the lead in the first half of the third leg, but the Aussies came back. In the anchor leg, Gary passed Ian in the first length and turned six-tenths of a second ahead. With the home crowd roaring, Ian, who seemed so controlled, so languid almost in the water even as he was driving with ferocity to the wall, caught Gary with about 20 meters to go and edged ahead.
    Ian knew when he touched that he had won. He sprang from the pool, and the Australians celebrated, with Michael Klim, who had taken the leadoff