Phelps, the greatest?

The races at the Aquatics Centre ended on Saturday, but, in one sense, the race was already over much earlier for Michael Phelps. Phelps has now won more medals than any Olympian: summer or winter, spring or fall.

But if you think that must make Phelps, by acclamation, the greatest Olympian in history, it is not that simple.

"Clearly and self-evidently from the medal tally, he is the most successful; my personal view is that I'm not sure he is the greatest," Sebastian Coe, head of the London Organising Committee, said on Wednesday.

Coe, a two-time Olympic champion himself, was speaking at a news conference the day after Phelps secured his 19th medal -- and 15th gold -- by swimming the anchor leg for the United States in the 4x200 metre freestyle relay.

With his total of 19, Phelps surpassed Larisa Latynina, the female gymnast who won 18 medals for the Soviet Union between 1956 and 1964. Following his 100M butterfly victory on Friday, Phelps now has 21 medals, including a staggering 17 gold.

But not all Olympic medal counts are created equal. If you happen to be the world's greatest javelin thrower, you do not get the chance to win medals by throwing the javelin right-handed, left-handed, underhand and overhand. You get just one chance, one Olympic event, every four years.

In swimming, if you are as versatile and voracious as Phelps, you can swim in eight events, as he did in Athens in 2004 and again in Beijing in 2008, or in seven events, as he did here in London.

"There's no 16-pound shot put, 18-pound shot put and 25-pound shot put," said David Wallechinsky, the American who is president of the International Society of Olympic Historians. "You simply have to take into account that swimmers and gymnasts have an easier shot at multiple medals because they have multiple events. If you look at the 12 people who have won the most medals in Olympic history, nine of them are gymnasts or swimmers." Clearly, 9 of the 12 greatest Olympians in history are not gymnasts or swimmers.

Three of Phelps' events at each Olympics have also been relays, another option not available to most Olympians.

This statistical imbalance can too easily warp the debate, and there are other considerations like longevity and universality.

"With 15 gold medals he already has to be listed as one of the finest Olympians ever," the British Olympic icon, Steve Redgrave, wrote of Phelps in The Daily Telegraph. "And yet I still believe his feat would have been more impressive if he achieved it over six or seven Games."

This is Phelps's fourth and, by his own indication, is his last Olympics. He competed in the first in 2000 at age 15 and did not win a medal but has made the podium his home away from the pool since then.

Redgrave won gold medals for Britain in rowing in five consecutive Games: from 1984 to 2000, winning the last in Sydney after having told his public, four years earlier, to "shoot me" if he ever went near a boat again. Redgrave, unlike Phelps, could not pile on the events. He focused on one at each Olympics, adding a second in just one Games (1988).

Others who specialised and endured were Al Oerter, the American who won the men's discus at four consecutive Olympics from 1956 to 1968; and Birgit Fischer, the German kayaker who won eight gold medals over six Olympics, finishing at age 42 in Athens.Coe, who weighed in Wednesday, called the debate over the greatest Olympian "the global pub game."

"I could throw out a whole series of names," he said. "I could throw out Steve Redgrave. I could throw out Daley Thompson." He added: "If I wanted to go back a few generations I think what Jesse Owens did in '36 was unbelievable."

Thompson, the outspoken British star, won the decathlon in 1980 and 1984. Owens, the American track and field star, won four gold medals in Berlin in his only Olympics in 1936. Coe also mentioned Nadia Comaneci, the poker-faced Romanian gymnast who defined perfection in women's gymnastics at the 1976 Games in Montreal and won a total of five gold medals in two Olympics.

Wallechinsky, who is the author of "The Complete Book of the Olympics" and has crunched perhaps more Olympic numbers and anecdotes than anyone, puts Phelps among a group of five greatest Olympians with Fischer, Paavo Nurmi, Emil Zatopek and Carl Lewis.

"I don't think Phelps is the greatest, but I definitely put him in the top five," Wallechinsky said. "Another fact I take into account is the universality of the sport. Specifically, if you go out on the street and ask people, there's a pretty good chance that just about every person you run into has run 100 meters whereas almost nobody has used the butterfly stroke to swim 200 meters in the pool."

Fischer, a kayaker, certainly has challenges in the universality department, too. But Nurmi and Zatopek were distance runners. Nurmi, of Finland, won 12 medals in 12 events between 1920 and 1928, winning nine gold medals. Zatopek, a Czech who made distance running look hard -- which it is -- instead of easy, won the 5,000, the 10,000 and the marathon in the same Olympics in 1952: a feat that will surely never be matched.

Then there is Lewis, the man most frequently mentioned in the same breath with Phelps. He won five gold medals in the sprints and four consecutive long jump gold medals from 1984 to 1996.

Lewis also had more charisma (and a sharper tongue) than Phelps, but that probably belongs in a different debate, as does Latynina's observation that she admires Phelps but believes she still deserves to be considered the greatest Olympian because she also helped the Soviet Union win medals in gymnastics as a coach.

But there can be no doubt from any objective observer that Phelps belongs on -- if not atop -- every Olympic short list. To his credit, aside from his strike rate, is the fact that unlike all-time greats like Comaneci and Lewis, none of the Games in which he competed have been diluted by boycotts.

He has also declined, consistently, to take the path of less resistance. What he accomplished in Beijing alone was phenomenal: winning eight gold medals in eight attempts and with one of those requiring a lunge to the wall to defeat Milorad Cavic of Serbia in the 100-metre butterfly by one hundredth of a second.

The fact that Phelps set seven world records in those eight events in 2008 sounds more impressive than it might look through a historical lens in that they came in an age of performance-enhancing swimsuits.

There has been a sense of aquatic payback so far in London, with Phelps losing the 200 butterfly on the final stroke, this time to Chad Le Clos of South Africa, and with the Americans losing the lead in the 4x100 freestyle relay to the French after coming from behind in 2008. But Phelps, even diminished and on the verge of retirement, has already won three medals here and is likely to leave London with six, bringing his career total to 22.

That would require quite a chase for some future Olympian to match, even more of a chase if he or she is not a swimmer or a gymnast.


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