Lochte Finds Phelps Is Everywhere but in the Pool

小臭贝

ROME — Ryan Lochte was poised to escape the shadow of his more famous teammate, Michael Phelps, when he glanced up and there, literally larger than life, was a shirtless Phelps.

At that moment, Lochte could have been forgiven for screaming: Michael! Michael! Michael!

Before the final of the 200-meter individual medley Thursday night, the jumbo scoreboard at the Foro Italico showed a crowd shot of Phelps, who set the world record in the event in Beijing but is taking a break from it this summer.

Since 2004, Lochte has played Robin to Phelps’s Batman in the 200- and 400-meter I.M.s. He finished second to him in both events at the 2007 world championships and qualified behind Phelps in the 200 I.M. at the 2004 and 2008 United States Olympic trials. “I looked up at the scoreboard and they showed the crowd, they showed Michael, and I kind of smiled,” Lochte said.

It should be noted that Lochte was not wearing his diamond-encrusted grillz teeth at the time. That adornment came later, during the awards ceremony, when Lochte received the gold medal after making off with Phelps’s global mark.

Lochte, who led the final from the opening 50, was timed in 1 minute 54.10 seconds, 0.13 of a second faster than Phelps’s record and a 0.46-second improvement over his previous personal best. After shedding suits — he switched from a full-body Speedo LZR Racer to the waist-to-ankle leggings model — Lochte returned to the pool and advanced to the final of the 200 backstroke.

No sooner had Lochte finished the 200 I.M. than the phone of Bob Bowman, the United States men’s coach and Phelps’s personal coach, started vibrating in his pocket. Bowman, who was on the deck, looked at the text message. It was from Phelps, and according to Bowman it said: “That was a great swim. I think it’s still breakable.”

Aren’t they all? The world record by Lochte was the first of seven to fall on the fifth night of competition at the world championships, bringing the total to 29 in 42 races. Given how frayed the record book is, when the competition concludes Sunday one half expects the public address announcer to say, “Will the last one to leave please turn off the shredder?”

The times Thursday were so sublime that Eric Shanteau was clocked under the existing world record in the semifinals — the semifinals! — of the 200 breaststroke, and did not even qualify first. He was second behind Australia’s Christian Sprenger.

The sprinters were so fast that David Walters broke Phelps’s year-old American record in the 100-meter freestyle with a 47.33 and finished fifth. César Cielo Filho gave Brazil its first gold medal of the championships with a world-record clocking of 46.91. He touched out two Frenchmen, Alain Bernard (47.12) and Fred Bousquet (47.25).

Cielo Filho and Bousquet train together in the United States, at Auburn University under Brett Hawke, and Bousquet said they push each other in practice to times that are close to records. In that case, the race must have felt like practice as usual; Bousquet, swimming in Lane 8, was first at the 50, three-hundredths of a second ahead of Cielo Filho in Lane 5, who secured the win with a finishing surge.

Before the race, Cielo Filho was so nervous his limbs went numb. In the ready room, where the finalists are sequestered, he slapped his legs to try to return feeling to them. “I never had this before,” he said, adding that he could not feel his face either.

Cielo Filho was wearing the Arena X-Glide, a polyurethane suit that is running neck-to-neck with Jaked in the popularity race. Last year’s leader, the Speedo LZR Racer, is a distant third.

And yet Cielo Filho said he felt neither sleek nor streamlined. How could he when he was dragging all of Brazil behind him? His countrymen, he knew, expected him to win. “If you get second,” Cielo Filho explained, “it’s a big disappointment.”

Bernard and Bousquet were trying to shake off the downer that was France’s third-place finish in the 4 x 100 freestyle relay four nights earlier. Bousquet, who swam the last leg, absorbed a lecture from Hawke afterward. “He told me to stop acting like a boy and start racing like a man,” Bousquet said.

Lochte, 24, is never more mature than when he is racing. He has been known to arrive at the starting blocks on his skateboard and he has an adolescent’s fixation on the rapper Lil Wayne. But once he hits the water, he is as serious as a recession. There are athletes — superstars — who would resent having to share an era with the greatest performer in the history of their sport. Lochte is not one of them.

Asked if he ever wishes he did not have Phelps to contend with, Lochte replied: “Not at all. He did such a good job of making a name for swimming. He kind of put swimming on the map.”

Phelps, Lochte and the backstroker Gemma Spofforth of Britain are the only competitors here to have set world records in the LZR Racer.

To Lochte, the swimsuit wars are just another battle he’s determined to win.

“I mean, everyone’s complaining about all these new suits, blah, blah, blah,” Lochte said, “and I go out there and wear the same suit as last year and I just give it to them.”

The night did take its toll. Lochte, a Floridian, walked into the interview room for a news conference with red, yellow, green and blue wires streaming out of his sweats. He was hooked up to a contraption the size of a computer battery that was sending restorative electrical currents to his tired, tight leg muscles.

“Hopefully my legs can recover after the beating they took tonight,” Lochte said.

He also was wearing nonprescription George Burns glasses, which was perfect, because Lochte is the driest of comedians. All he needed to complete the look was one of the cigars he took home as souvenirs from the Athens Games.

Earlier, Lochte had described his grillz. They were different from the ones he wore on the awards stand at this meet two years ago. “This time,” he said, “the diamonds are bigger so I can shine a little more.”