Some nominations on the Phelps "greatest ever" debate

So, I was having the "Is Phelps the greatest ever?" debate with a good friend of mine. He generally falls into the "you can't compare across sports" camp, which I get, but the day after the conversation he forwarded me an interesting article on the topic he found from the LA Times. The article suggests that Phelps is #6 right now, thus giving 5 nominations for athletes better than Phelps. They are: Carl Lewis (track and field), Pavvo Numri (track and field), Larissa Latynina (gymnastics), Birgit Fischer-Schmidt (kayak/flatwater canoe), and Steven Redgrave (rowing). Some of these have already been mentioned by my co-contributor, some have not. I shall tackle a few of them in future entries as I have time amongst other topics, but for today, I want to lay an assault to a number of the author's premises which I find flawed.

Where he primarily goes wrong is in doing what I refused to do, which is compare various sports (primarily track and field vs. swimming) in terms of the difficulty of the athletic feat. He makes the point that swimming is less demanding on the body than track and gymnastics. This is very true, but that doesn't mean by itself that swimming 8 events is less of a physical feat than competing in 4 track events, or competing in all the gymnastics events. Until a few years ago, before the team competition format changed to allow for more specialists, it was that uncommon for a gymnasts or two in a given Olympics to compete in the team, the all-around, and all the event finals - and every gymnast that competed in both the team and individual all-around would have done their full program 3 times before event finals anyhow. Nor is it that out of the ordinary for an athlete to compete in 4 track and field events. I would also submit to you that his sources for this supposition that minimizes the athletic feat that Phelps' performance was are all track athletes, who aren't exactly qualified to speak to the rigors of being a world class swimmer, any more than Phelps could speak to the rigors of being a world class sprinter, jumper, or distance runner. Unless you can find me a world class gymnast or track athlete who became a world class swimmer, or vice versa, I don't think there's anyone qualified to make this comparison.

A second supposition of his which I find to be completely bogus is the idea that Phelps' proficiency in both the fly and free is almost trivial. Clearly, the free, back, and fly are much more similar and easier to interchange than the breaststroke, but being proficient at multiple strokes and being dominant at multiple strokes are completely different things. A quick glance at the list of all-time Olympic medalists tells me that the number of men who have won individual gold in both fly and free at the same Olympics is quite small, and in fact may just be limited to Phelps and Spitz. I'll have to do a more careful study at some point. It's not that it's difficult to master both strokes, but it is exceedingly difficult to beat guys who are specialists in the individual strokes when you have to split your training between both, or in Phelps case, all 4 strokes as an IMer. Oh, here's another short list for you - men who have won either IM and an individual gold in a single stroke race in the same Olympics. I'm pretty sure that, to channel Brad Pitt's Rusty in Ocean's Eleven, Phelps "is the list." Good at multiple strokes? Meh. World class at multiple strokes? Very nice, but nothing to get shaken up over. Golden in multiple strokes? That's something special and rare, especially on the men's side.

I also take issue with his use of Ryan Lochte swimming finals less than 30 minutes apart as justification for his point on the ease of piling up swimming golds. Doing that, and being successful at it are two different things. Sure, Lochte won the gold in the 200 back and bronze in the 200 IM. However, in the IM, which was his second race, he was considered a legitimate threat to Phelps for gold, and he never came anywhere near that. Contrast that to Phelps, who earlier swam the 200 fly and 4 x 200 free in similar proximity to each other - setting a world record in the fly and then just missing his own world record in the 200 free leading off the relay. (By the way, one point I do agree with the author on is that about the world records not meaning much in evaluating Phelps' accomplishment - the pool and the new suits made that a virtual given.) And let's not forget Katie Hoff, who tried a Phelpsian program of 5 individual events herself, and clearly couldn't handle, coming up very short in a number of events in which she was favored for gold, and not even qualifying for the final of the 800 free, in which she was supposed to be a medal contender. Heck, even Spitz himself failed dismally at his first attempt at a Spitzian medal haul in 1968 As easy as Phelps might have made what he did look, it's clearly not.

The other thing to note is that Phelps is doing the closest swimming equivalent of being a world class middle distance runner and a world class sprinter at the same time. Phelps doesn't really train for sprints, as is evidenced by the fact that the 100 fly is his most vulnerable event. And yet, he led off the 4 x 100 freestyle relay with a time that is an American record, and would have put him on the podium in the 100 free. I'm not going to try and draw a direct comparison between that and track, but I will definitely say you'd be hard to pressed to find anyone else in swimming today, and perhaps ever, who has had the endurance to win a 400 IM while still maintaining the sprint speed necessary to be a medal contender at the 100 free. If, as he apparently wishes, Phelps sets his sights on the sprints for 2012, we may get an opportunity to see just what kind of difference full dedication to specific events can mean.

Let me be clear - my point here is not to make the same mistake the author did in trying to stack these sports up against each other in terms of sheer athletic difficulty, but only to point out flaws in the author's case for subjugating the relative difficult of Phelps' acheivement. This is also not me denigrating any of his nominations - as I said, I'll deal with them in time, and with an open mind. A cursory glance indicates that all are among the very, very best Olympians ever, and quite worthy of joining in the discussion.