A shining feat, a golden future

With 8 first-place medals, Phelps has carved a monumental legacy at the Beijing Games - and he's not done

TIMOTHY CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGESMichael Phelps (right) celebrated with his teammates after winning an eighth gold medal today. (TIMOTHY CLARY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

BEIJING - From here on, after becoming the winningest Olympian in history, Michael Phelps will only be competing against his own gargantuan shadow.

Phelps already was the greatest swimmer in history even before he won an unprecedented eighth Olympic gold medal this morning. When he leaves here, he'll have won more golds - 14 - than any athlete in any sport in the history of the Games.

If he goes on to compete in the 2012 Games - and he says he will - Phelps almost certainly will surpass the record of 18 overall medals set by Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina between 1956 and 1964. Yet medals, he insists, never have been his yardstick.

When he won his first race in Athens four years ago, Phelps pronounced himself satisfied. Anything more was a bonus. "Something I dreamed about since I started swimming was to win an Olympic gold medal," Phelps said yesterday, after he'd tied countryman Mark Spitz's 1972 record of seven golds at one Games with a miracle finish in the 100-meter butterfly. "I was able to do that."

Nor does Phelps measure his success by the millions of dollars he already has made at 23 and the tens of millions more he is likely to earn in endorsements the next few years. "I'm not doing it for money," Phelps said. "I'm doing it because I love what I do. If Bob [Bowman, his coach] and I did it for money, we'd be in different sports."

What motivates him is a list of personal goals that he and Bowman keep to themselves (and that he says never included the eight golds) and the challenge of getting America to think about his sport for more than two weeks every four years.

What intrigued Phelps most about the quest for the eight golds was hearing skeptics say it couldn't be done; that Spitz's record couldn't even be matched. Australian legend Ian Thorpe stated that flatly before the Athens Games and repeated it this time.

"I saw so many quotes saying that it was impossible to duplicate it, that it won't happen," said Phelps, who would have won eight golds at last year's world championships if one of his teammates hadn't false-started in the preliminaries of the medley relay.

Spitz, who swam only the freestyle and butterfly events in Munich, competed in a time before caps and goggles and high-tech bodysuits, a time when there were no semifinals, when his primary challengers were his own teammates, and when the three relay races were star-spangled runaways, with the Americans winning by open water. Until he'd won his fifth gold, Spitz recalled, nobody outside the pool realized that he was making history.

Phelps, who competed in 17 races across nine days, swam all four strokes, including the draining 400-meter individual medley on the meet's first day and faced a daunting array of foreigners - Hungary's Laszlo Cseh in the two individual medleys and the 200 butterfly, South Korea's Park Tae Hwan in the 200 freestyle, and Serbia's Milorad Cavic in the 100 butterfly. His teammates were underdogs in the 4 x 100-meter freestyle relay and needed an extraordinary anchor leg from Jason Lezak, by far the oldest man on the team at 32, to beat the French by eight-100ths of a second.

From the beginning, Phelps's saga here was dripping with uncertainty, which only heightened the prime-time drama back home. He had to come from behind to win the 400 individual medley after trailing midway through the backstroke leg. He won the 200 butterfly by less than seven-10ths of a second after his leaking goggles filled with water and he virtually was swimming blind.

And in the 100 butterfly, in probably the most astonishing comeback in swimming history, Phelps was in seventh place at the turn and needed a mighty lunge to nip Cavic by a hundredth of a second at the wall. It was a finish so microscopically close that timing officials had to examine the video frame by frame to confirm that Phelps had won.

"The word that comes to mind - epic," Spitz told him on NBC after Phelps equaled his 36-year-old record and earned a $1 million bonus from Speedo. "What you did tonight was epic. And it was epic for the whole world to see how great you really are."

What made Phelps's achievements here unique was that the whole world indeed was watching, literally following his progress night and day. For the first time in Olympic history, the swimming finals were held in the morning so they could be shown during peak viewing hours in the States.

Every time Phelps took the blocks, his quest hung in the balance. A false start, a bad turn, a flawed strategy, a slow leg by a relay teammate, a stomach virus, an opponent's longer fingernails - any of them could have undone him. But after eight races, Phelps had won eight gold medals and set seven world records.

If he were his own country, Phelps would rank third in the overall gold medal standings here, ahead of Russia. "Michael is doing amazing things day after day here," marveled teammate Ian Crocker, one of the half-dozen men whom Phelps ran down in the 100 butterfly.

What sets him apart from Spitz, who acknowledges that Phelps is "the best Olympian of all time" is that Phelps has done amazing things at successive Games and still has an appetite for more. Spitz competed in two Olympics and called it a career. London would be Phelps's fourth and at 27, he'll barely be past the prime of his career.

By then, he'll likely be looking for different challenges. Phelps has little more to prove in the events he already has dominated for years. He may want to focus on the backstrokes, which he reluctantly dropped from his overcrowded plate because of scheduling conflicts but are events in which he could win gold medals. He could take on the breaststroke, his weakest event, and one in which the United States was shut out here for the first time in two decades.

Or Phelps could indulge his fantasy and swim the 50 freestyle, which Bowman routinely deletes from his wish list. The only races off the menu are the 1,500-meter freestyle and the 10-kilometer open swim. "Not a chance, no way," Phelps vows. "I won't do open water."

Unless, of course, someone tells him he can't do it. The more Olympian the challenge, the more that Phelps wants to take it on. His personal goals, he says, all are challenges. That's how it has been for him since he began working with Bowman when he was a gawky 11-year-old. That is how the goal of one gold medal grew into eight. "Bob said, 'Dream big, dream as big as you can,' " Phelps said. "It's finally happened."

John Powers can be reached at jpowers@globe.com.