Perfect way to end his quest

Michael Phelps (right) whoops it up with relay mates Brendan Hansen (left) and Aaron Piersol. (CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images)

BEIJING - Things could be better for Michael Phelps.

He could be Chinese.

In this country, 8 is the number, the preferred number, the lucky number. More than 300,000 couples were married on 8/8/08, which was also the Olympic starting date of every Chinese citizen's dreams. So, imagine how big Michael Phelps would be if he were a citizen of China and had just become the first person in Olympic history to win eight gold medals in one Games.

But he'll probably be pretty well taken care of in America, I would think.

"Many said it couldn't be done," Phelps said. "All it took was imagination."

Beg your pardon, young man, but wishin' and hopin' isn't quite enough to do what you've just done. It took a natural swimming talent, combined with hard work and a little bit o' luck, perhaps, but this amazing accomplishment was the product of more than dreaming.

Five, he did by himself, four in world-record time. The fifth was a mere Olympic record. In order to get the magic number eight gold medals, however, Phelps needed some help from his friends. Casey Stengel long observed after one of the Yankees' World Series triumphs that, "I couldn't have done it without the players." Phelps would not have an unprecedented eight gold medals in one Olympics, nor an all-time collective haul of 14 golds, were it not for his teammates, one in particular.

That person is freestyler Jason Lezak, a 32-year-old Californian whose miracle finish last Monday in the 4 x 100 freestyle relay stole a gold for the United States, himself, and Phelps. It will forever seem impossible for Lezak to have made up the distance between himself and Frenchman Alain Bernard in the last few meters of the anchor leg, but somehow, some way, Lezak outtouched his opponent. It's not that seven golds for Phelps would have meant he'd have to slink home in embarrassment. But eight was always the national goal, if not necessarily the one he had set for himself. Remember that in his opening press conference here Phelps said that "you guys" were the ones talking about eight golds. He said he had his own measure of success.

Ah, but today he 'fessed up. "Everything was calculated," he smiled. "What was I supposed to do?"

In other words, his goal was what you and I thought it was. Win every race.

Mr. Lezak was front and center again this morning at the Water Cube. Phelps had handed over a small advantage to Lezak, and he swam a strong anchor leg to hold off Australia's Eamon Sullivan and ensure the gold for all concerned.

"I was really nervous, obviously," confessed Lezak. "Anything can happen in a race."

Where does this achievement rank in the annals of both world and American sport? For some, it will be the greatest thing they've ever seen or heard about. For others, it won't matter at all. It's swimming, you know.

America remains a country that dotes on its mainstream professional sports. Football, baseball, and basketball reign supreme. To be an Olympian in anything is to relegate yourself to a second-tier existence for approximately 1,330 of the 1,460-day interval between Olympiads. With perhaps a month to go before a Summer Olympics begins, the average American sports fan begins to care about the people who've been slaving away somewhere doing something that isn't football, baseball, and basketball.

This year, the name they could hardly avoid was Michael Phelps, who had won six gold medals in Athens and who, they were told, had a legitimate chance of becoming the first person ever to win eight golds in a single Olympics. The name of Mark Spitz was dusted off and resurrected, he being the only person who had ever won seven, which he did in Munich 36 years ago.

We are not a swimming country. Australia may be a swimming country, but we are not. We are a large country that has always produced champion swimmers. Going into these Olympics, the only swimmer most American sports fans could name was Spitz, and then only because of the iconic photo of him with the seven golds dangling from his neck.

But it was pretty hard to ignore Michael Phelps in the past month. You'd have to work hard not to know that we had this swimmer from Baltimore who was being given a real chance of doing something astonishingly outsized. Eight gold medals. That's really something.

So there was a lot of pressure on Phelps to perform over the past week-plus. You can be sure that had he fallen way short of the goal, his name would have been linked with that of Bode Miller, the skier who could not live up to his pre-Torino hype.

That's why what he did is almost beyond comprehension. With all due respect to Spitz, the swimming world is vastly different now. In those days, America and Australia ruled supreme. His toughest races were domestic. Now championship swimmers come from anywhere and everywhere. The winner of the men's 1,500-meter race, for example, was Oussama Mellouli of Tunisia. In the last week, Phelps beat a Hungarian and a Serb. It was exponentially harder in a competitive sense to do what he's done than for Spitz to do what he did. That's just a fact.

It was a downright fictional week, what with that memorable Lezak performance to get the gold in the freestyle relay, to the almost laughable idea that Phelps set a world record in the 200 butterfly with water filling up his goggles, and then to the mesmerizing finish of the 100 butterfly, when he somehow got a hand on the wall a millisecond before Milorad Cavic. It took an Omega camera capable of slowing things down to a thousandth of a second to prove that Phelps had won that race. That's how close it came to being seven golds and one almost.

In the end, it came down to his mates. "I was part of three relay teams that set records," Phelps said. "It was a solid team effort."

Yes, and no. Yes, the teammates helped him go from five to eight. But he had a lot to do with those other three, as well, including this morning, when he hit the water third for his butterfly leg and handed over the lead to Lezak.

Backstroke man and leadoff guy Aaron Peirsol summed it up. "The term 'Spitzian feel' might be outdated. Now it's a 'Phelpsian feel.' "

Eight races, eight golds. What the Chinese could have done with that.