An Inglourious Start...
LONDON -- Here was a jarring and incongruous sight. It was just a few minutes past 7:30 p.m. Saturday night at the Aquatics Centre in the sprawling Olympic Park on the outskirts of London, the very first medal event commencing eight nights of swimming. From a set of starting blocks in Lane 8, Michael Phelps dove into pale blue water and began slashing toward the opposite wall in butterfly, the first of four strokes that comprise the grueling 400-meter individual medley. It is an event in which Phelps has won the gold medal at the last two Olympic Games, and in which he has been internationally dominant for more than a decade.
But more than any of this esoterica, to the broad audience that knows Phelps as the Subway pitchman/Aquaman celebrity/TMZ target who emerges every four years to take up a place in living rooms across America as the star of a weeklong mini-series on NBC, this was his re-emergence on the Olympic stage. And it was a very different Phelps than the one who won eight gold medals in Beijing (and came to London with 14 gold medals and 16 medals in all, the second most in history). This Phelps struggled even in the opening leg, and fell further behind with each stroke: third after the backstroke, fourth after the breaststroke and then, most jarringly, a fading, struggling fourth after the finishing freestyle. This Phelps looked a little like Joe Montana playing for the Chiefs or Michael Jordan for the Wizards.
More than four seconds in front of Phelps, teammate Ryan Lochte, the other half of a wildly hyped rivalry, swam away to a gold medal in 4 minutes, 5.16 seconds, the second-fastest time in history. It was more than a second off the world record that Phelps set at the 2008 Olympics, but in the apples-and-oranges world of swimsuit technology, it was the fastest time by any swimmer in the event since high-tech suits were banned early in 2010. It was the fourth career gold medal for Lochte, 27, and his seventh medal overall, and his winning margin of 3.68 seconds was the largest ever in an Olympic 400 IM, exceeding Phelps's 3.55-second margin in 2004.
And in just those four minutes, the swim world was tilted ever so slightly on its edge. Swimming cognoscenti had expected that we would see a different, less dominant Phelps in London than the machine who tore up Beijing, and that Lochte would challenge Phelps's status at the top of the sport. After all, Lochte had beaten Phelps handily in the 400 IM at the U.S. Olympic Trials last month in Omaha, Neb. But the decisiveness of Phelps' defeat was jarring, even more surprising than the margin of Lochte's victory (3.68 seconds over silver medalist Thiago Pereira of Brazil).
Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/olympics/2012/writers/tim_layden/07/28/ryan-lochte-michael-phelps-400-im/index.html#ixzz21yO7vNwy
