Swimmer Michael Phelps won his twentieth Olympic medal last
night when he defeated fellow American Ryan Lochte in the 200-meter
medley. And his Olympics haven’t yet ended. Should he qualify,
Phelps could extend his medal record in the 100-meter butterfly
later today and the 4x100-meter medley relay on Saturday.
“I thanked [my teammates] for being able to allow me to have
this moment,” Phelps explained after his 200-meter relay victory
earlier this week broke the all-time Olympic medal-record of
eighteen. “It has been a pretty amazing career but we still have a
couple of races left.”
Despite verbal graciousness toward teammates and all the “we”
talk, Michael’s message is loud and clear: I accomplished all
this.
The 29 “individual” world records that the swimmer holds all
feature the name “Michael Phelps” and no one else’s in the books.
For the ten “individual” Olympic gold medals won, Phelps stood
alone atop the podium. And 2008’s Sportsman of the Year
camera-hogged the cover of Sports Illustrated,
appearing with hands on hips and eight shiny gold medals hanging
around his gloating head.
If Michael Phelps has been successful, he didn’t get there on
his own. I’m always struck by Olympians who think, ‘Well, it must
be because I was just so athletic.’ There are a lot of athletic
people out there! ‘It must be because I worked harder than
everybody else.’ Let me tell you something: there are a whole bunch
of hardworking athletes out there!
If you were successful at swimming, somebody along the line gave
you some help. There was a great coach somewhere in your life.
Somebody helped to pay for your swimming lessons that have allowed
you to thrive. Somebody built the pool. If you’ve got a medal —
you didn’t win that. Somebody else made that happen.
A modest proposal to counteract Olympic arrogance: share the
gold.
When you spread medals around, it is good for everybody. There
are enough grains of gold to go around. It isn’t fair that Phelps
was born with an 80-inch wingspan, size fourteen flippers, and the
ability to metabolize 12,000 calories daily and still look like an
Abercrombie & Fitch model. Nature endows him with gifts; man
further endows him with awards. The Olympics is an elitist affront
to egalitarianism.
In the Olympics, the rich get richer. The haves feast on the
have-nots. Unfettered competition leaves the “1%” with all the
silver and gold and the “99%” with nothing. Rampant discrimination
against the obese, no head starts for underprivileged athletes, and
a hierarchical winners-losers dichotomy characterize the London
games. Occupy the Olympics.
To bring a relic of 8th-century B.C. Athens into the 21st
century global village, everyone, as some enlightened soccer
leagues in the northeastern part of the United States understand,
should get trophies, or, in the case of the Olympics, medals. The
elitist practice of placing “winners” on pedestals should be
immediately abolished. We all stand as one on the planet pedestal.
And competition, which brings out the worst in people, should be
replaced with cooperation. If a strongman can’t clean-and-jerk 500
pounds, how about another athlete lends him a hand?
Snobs might say that abolishing victory’s incentives, and
compelling athletes to work together, will inevitably bring slower
times. But we will place burdens on the most advantaged for the
purposes of fairness. When everybody wins, we all win.
Because Michael Phelps is so extraordinary, swimming requires
extraordinary measures to maintain social justice against the
scourge of individual “accomplishment.” Throwing a life preserver
to the trailing swimmers, or pooling resources in the pool, simply
won’t cut it. The Baltimore Bullet’s gaudy gold too conspicuously
flashes his sins against equality, fairness, and all that is
good.
Tying fifty-pound dumbbells to each limb should achieve the
desired results in the pool. This may have the effect of forcing
Phelps underwater, putting him out of the swimming business
forever, and literally drowning him with an excess of rules. But at
least the summer games would be fair.
