Skip to main content

Gold makes the man

By



Michael Phelps may have won three times more gold medals than Mark Spitz, but he still doesn't cut as dashing a figure as Mark did after amassing a 7-medal tally at Munich in 1972.  For decades, this record stood until Michael won 8 gold medals at Beijing in 2008, adding to his previous 6 from Athens, and the 7 more he has won in Olympic Games since, making him the most decorated Olympian of all time.

Spitz had a total of 9 golds, including the 2 he had won previously in Mexico City, where he had promised to win 6 golds.  Everyone was anxious to see if he would fulfill his promise in Munich, joining the 4x100 medley relay team at the last minute to win a total of 7 medals, all in world record times.  Even that sparked a bit of a controversy as he bumped another American swimmer for that spot, with accusations that Spitz was being greedy.  Just the same, the poster of Spitz sporting his 7 gold medals was even more popular than Burt Reynolds famous Cosmo centerfold from the same year.  They bore more than a passing resemblance with their moustaches.


Whereas Spitz hung up his speedos after the '72 games, Phelps has swam in an unprecedented 4 Olympics, and who knows may still have it in him for one more.  Bodies have changed considerably since 1972.  Phelps towers over Spitz by 4 inches, giving him an impressive wing span that helped him regain the butterfly title from Chad de Clos yesterday, a full 7 seconds faster than Spitz in Munich.  If nothing else, Phelps can switch to water polo.

There were some sour grapes when Phelps broke Spitz's record, but not as much as Michael Johnson, who seems notably upset by all the attention Usain Bolt has gotten over the years.  Michael says he could take Usain if he was still in his prime.  It would be a close race, as Bolt has only managed to shave 0.13 seconds off Johnson's 200 m time from 1996.  Johnson still owns the world record in the 400, but Bolt doesn't race the 400 so we could only speculate on such a match up.  It's tough to let go of those Olympic moments.

In many ways, Spitz paved the way for such Olympic superstars as there wasn't really anyone before who had capitalized as richly as he did off his success.  Spitz credits his good looks as much as anything else for his fame.  No one looks at a "magazine of uglies," as he put it.  He also amusingly noted that he told a Russian coach his moustache helped reduce drag in the pool, and the next Olympics every Russian male swimmer and maybe a few females were sporting moustaches.  Just pulling our leg, I imagine.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more