Phelps Grabs Record in 100 Butterfly

小臭贝

ROME — The 100-meter butterfly final Saturday night at the 13th FINA World Championships was billed as a collision of opposing styles and personalities, but who knew that Michael Phelps, in his excitement, would take it all so literally?

Phelps was warming up in an indoor practice facility next to the Foro Italico competition pool an hour before his showdown and ultimate victory against Milorad Cavic when he pushed off the wall for a sprint and slammed head-on into the Australian sprinter Cate Campbell.

At impact, the nosepiece of Phelps’s goggles snapped. Campbell, who was swimming the backstroke, sustained a bump on the back of her head.

Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, witnessed the collision, the kind that is a blight on the scene at age-group meets but is rarely seen at the sport’s highest level. He said he screamed “No!” and rushed over to check on Phelps, who said that his vision was blurred and that his left shoulder felt funny.

It turns out that it was nothing serious, but trying to conceal his concern, Bowman said he told Phelps: “It’ll be O.K. Just take a deep breath.”

Bowman also told Phelps he did not have to swim in the race if he was not feeling up to it. “He just looked at me like I was crazy,” Bowman said.

Nothing was going to keep Phelps from answering the bell against his heavyweight opponent, Cavic, who was one-hundredth of a second from ruining his bid for eight gold medals in the 100 butterfly final in Beijing.

It was for races like this that Phelps returned to training after a six-month break after the Olympics rather than retire.

Cavic said he had been denied the gold medal in Beijing because of a faulty timing machine, and Phelps burned to set the record straight. He did, emphatically, stopping the clock in 49.82 seconds to take back the world record Cavic had snatched from him a day earlier. Cavic was timed in 49.95. They became the first swimmers to break 50 seconds in the event.

The world record was one of four that fell on the penultimate night of competition, raising the total to 39.

“Michael Phelps is Michael Phelps,” Cavic said, “and he does what he does and he did.”

The 17-year-old Campbell did not fare so badly herself. She set a championship record in her semifinal heat of the 50-meter freestyle, causing Ian Hanson, the Australian team’s media liaison, to quip, “Maybe they should run into each other more often, because they both swam so well.”

This is Phelps’s gift. He has a head that is even less permeable than the polyurethane swimsuit that Cavic offered to buy him Friday. No distractions penetrate his prerace cocoon. No negativity slips through. After the collision, Phelps said, “We were all a little freaked out about it,” but, he added, “I tried to really just get it right out of my head.”

At the United States team training camp before the Beijing Olympics, some of Phelps’s teammates made him the butt of their practical jokes. They left a dead fish in his room, short-sheeted his bed and arranged a bucket of water above his door to get him drenched when he opened it.

Were they jealous? Jesting with him? It did not matter. Phelps let it roll off him like water off his Speedo LZR Racer. “He kind of blows that stuff off,” Bowman said.

Phelps has a bloodhound’s nose for victory, and he smelled success Saturday after making the turn.

“I felt so good coming off the wall,” said Phelps, who covered the first lap in 23.36, his best-ever split by a half-second.

Cavic was the leader, at 22.69, but he was worried. “He was much closer than I had expected,” he said of Phelps. “He was too close for my comfort.”

As was the case in Beijing, it came down to the finish. This time Cavic hit the wall in stride. “Tactically, I didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.

Only the wind could have beaten Phelps on the final 50. He swam a split of 26.46 to Cavic’s 27.26. When Phelps saw that he had won, he slapped the water, let out a roar and pounded his heart, just as Cavic had done before the race. He rose like a water polo goalie making a save and pulled at his supposedly inferior suit.

He swam over the lane line that separated Phelps and Cavic without looking at him. Phelps said he did not intentionally snub him; he was simply trying to make eye contact with his mother, Debbie, in the stands.

“I don’t think I have ever been that emotional and fired up after a race,” he said. “You could tell by my reaction how much I wanted that.”

In the postrace news conference, a Serbian radio reporter asked a lengthy question, directed at Phelps, that Cavic kindly translated. Turning toward Phelps but avoiding eye contact, Cavic condensed the question into this: “A couple of days ago where was this same emotion when you lost to Paul Biedermann, and what does this race mean to you?”

Cavic must have known the answer even as he was asking the question. He had pulled that emotion out of Phelps, who had been upset by Biedermann in the 200 freestyle, with his comments in the days leading to the race.

After the race, Cavic walked past Bowman, then stopped. He turned back, patted him on the shoulder, puffed out his cheeks and gave him the thumbs-up. Without saying a word, he had summed up the race perfectly.