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    Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion
    Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion
    Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion
    Ebook216 pages3 hours

    Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion

    By Bob Schaller, Rowdy Gaines and Jason Lezak

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A revealing biography of the Olympic champion swimmer Michael Phelps that includes exclusive interviews with his family, teammates, and friends and never-before-revealed details about his life.

    Michael Phelps is an American sports hero, perhaps the greatest Olympic athlete the world has ever known. His unprecedented eight gold medals in the 2008 Summer Olympics have made him a superstar. But his journey to Olympic immortality is every bit as compelling as his achievements in the pool. From learning to cope with ADHD to the story of how Phelps became the greatest swimmer ever, Phelps' tale is told in full detail here for the first time.

    The author, Bob Schaller, has known Phelps and his coach for more than eight years, and has extensively interviewed him, along with his mother, sisters, coach, and teammates. Filled with revelations, career statistics, and insightful analysis of how Phelps achieved the seemingly impossible, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn the complete story behind the legend.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateOct 21, 2008
    ISBN9781429976893
    Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion
    Author

    Bob Schaller

    Former journalist Bob Schaller has written numerous articles for USA Swimming and its magazine, Splash. He is the author of several books, including NEVER STOP PUSHING: My Life from a Wyoming Farm to the Olympic Medals Stand, about Olympic gold medalist wrestler Rulon Gardner and WHAT THOUGH THE ODDS: Haley Scott’s Journey of Faith and Triumph.

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    • 4/5
      This book gives you a glimpse of how Michael Phelps functions, even if it is just a small part of the book. The many swimmers that have been competing together with Phelps were mentioned and their stories told. It was a very big part in the book. So many might not like that. Still to know Michael Phelps and how it did what he did in Beijing is just remarkable and I feel this book was a joy to read.

    Book preview

    Michael Phelps - Bob Schaller

    Introduction

    by Rowdy Gaines, three-time Olympic gold medalist and NBC commentator

    In one amazing week, he made history—history that may never again be repeated.

    Michael Phelps is a name that has become synonymous not just with the sport of swimming, but with the highest level of perfection achieved in all of Olympic history. A total of eight gold medals in the 2008 Beijing Olympics is an awesome feat that will be nearly impossible to match. And added to his six golds in Athens, Michael has become the most prolific Olympic gold medalist in any sport.

    Even with my more than twenty years of covering swimming, I wondered if it was possible for Michael to win all of his events in Beijing. After all, it would require almost twenty races and would depend on teamwork in three separate relay events. Now, I can say that it was my greatest honor and privilege to have broadcast all of Michael’s races for NBC at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. Along with my partner Dan Hicks, I witnessed a performance that our sport and the Olympic movement may never see again, eight gold medals and seven world records. And it wasn’t just the two of us; more people watched the 2008 Beijing Olympics than any in history, more than 214 million in the U.S. alone.

    If you had asked a Hollywood scriptwriter to produce a screenplay for a motivational movie on swimming, he couldn’t have created more drama than we saw: How does Michael swim the 200 butterfly with his goggles filled with water, literally swimming the final fifty meters completely blind and counting his strokes to the wall—and still break the world record while winning?

    How does Michael win a race by 1/100th of a second, the very slimmest of margins in the sport of swimming—a race so close that it has to go to photographic proof to confirm his victory?

    How does Michael inspire Jason Lezak, the thirty-two-year-old long-time sprint anchor, to finish the 400 free relay with his fastest split ever by more than a second?

    How does he do it? Because his whole life has been history in the making. When Michael finished the 200 butterfly at his first Olympics in Sydney, the youngest U.S. male Olympian in sixty years, I saw in his eyes that there was so much more he wanted to accomplish. That very young man had a hunger like no one else I’d met, and I will never forget Michael telling me in Sydney that he had a purpose in life … to change the landscape of our sport forever.

    Four years earlier in Athens, his six gold medals and two bronze showed that landscape changing, but it was only the beginning. Now I know what he meant in Sydney. What he has accomplished will change his life and swimming forever. Michael is doing for swimming what Tiger Woods has done for golf; he has generated immense interest in the sport with people around the world, many of them new enthusiasts. And among them are future Olympians who see him as the tremendous role model he will always be.

    Part I

    Chapter 1

    Raised by a Single Mom and Two Amazing Sisters

    While Michael Phelps was worrying about the things most nine-year-old boys do—what sports he should play, how come he had so much homework—the Phelps as a family had moved into a nice home in the Baltimore suburb of Harford County.

    However, when his parents, Fred, a state trooper, and mother, Debbie, at the time a home economics teacher, divorced, the kids and their mother moved to a townhouse in Rodgers Forge, a middle-class suburb of Baltimore.

    His oldest sister, Hilary, was only a couple years from heading off to college. The middle child, Whitney, was closer to Michael in age, so she spent a lot of time with her little brother, especially as their mother worried about running a household, building her own career—she was headed for a job in administration before becoming a middle-school principal—and taking care of getting her active kids to all their sporting

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