BEIJING – Michael Phelps started the climb up a set of stairs, parting a sea of photographers and reaching upward past a railing for the arms of three women. One by one, his mother Debbie and sisters Hillary and Whitney leaned over and clenched him tight. When it was over, he buried his face in his mother’s shoulder and cried.
At long last, number eight—shared with three of the most important people in his life.
Several grams of gold hanging around Phelps’ neck had finally lifted the cinder blocks of pressure and expectations from his shoulders. Twelve years of buildup, spun forward from the day Phelps’ coach Bob Bowman told Debbie of her 11 year-old son, “He has the potential for greatness.”
Olympic Games, gold medals, world records—Bowman looked at a gangly bundle of right angles and hyperactivity and saw the biggest things.
“I thought he was nuts,” Debbie remembered later. “I told Bob that he was crazy. He was telling me all this stuff, and all I could think was, ‘Bob, I’m raising a middle school child.’ ”
What Bowman couldn’t see at the time, and what no coach truly knows until far down the road, is that Phelps would be the perfect star surrounded by the right constellation of support. A little tight-knit universe that was on public display Sunday, when Phelps climbed into the stands and embraced the three women who have all contributed—in ways small and large—to his greatness.
Three women who helped the middle school child grow into a man, and on Sunday watched him realize more than anyone could have imagined. A planet built in six days was conquered by Phelps in nine, producing eight gold medals, seven world records and one titanic sigh of relief.
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“When we train every day, sometimes there are sets or workouts that you don’t want to do, and Bob is always, ‘This is putting money in the bank, and at the end of the year you’re able to withdraw it.’ I made a big withdrawal,” Phelps said. “I guess I put a lot of money in the bank over the last four years and we withdrew pretty much every penny in the bank.”
But while the coach and star have made the biggest deposits, some of the small ones have been some of the most important.
Many from his mother Debbie, a middle school principal who went to the greatest lengths to keep his life normal when he was living under her roof, making it a point to ask him, “Are you happy? Should we be doing something different?” When Phelps moved to Ann Arbor, Mich., to train and also stretch his legs as an adult, Debbie grudgingly let him go. And when he would return to visit—hair too long, face too scruffy and hat tilted to one side—she bit her lip and let him find his own way.
“Michael is my son,” she said while describing those days, “and I will always love my son.”
And Phelps has returned that love in his own way as a young man, showcasing mettle over the last nine days that can only be found in the sturdiest of foundations. In a way, Debbie had raised her son for moments like these—raised him to be strong enough to accept the criticism and structure of Bowman, but also thoughtful enough to keep close to his heart the goals in his life and swimming career. Goals that Phelps would never openly reveal until Sunday, when he admitted, “They all happened this week.”
In some way, he owes part of this accomplished dream to his two older sisters—Hillary, the eldest and most laid-back, a swimmer who went on to star at the University of Richmond, and Whitney, the middle child who had her Olympic dreams cut short in the pool, but not before displaying the same fiery seed that eventually blossomed in Phelps. Phelps likes to say that Bowman was the one who taught him to dream the biggest dreams, but he does so in the wake of the women who came before him.
Which may be why his career arc is dotted with memories of his sisters, from Hillary taking “little Phelps” to the pool while she went through her own practices, to bounding around Whitney’s Olympic swimming trials in 1996, looking for autographs. He gets his cool from Hillary, who made friends fast and cherished the relationships she had outside the pool. And he gets his fire from Whitney, who at five years old punched her sister’s front tooth out after a shoving match.
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Two women who have been there in the best of times, like Sunday, and the worst, like four years ago, when they witnessed a 16-year old boy taunting Phelps after his DWI arrest: “Hey Phelps! Go have a beer and get behind the wheel!” Hillary and Whitney wheeled around on the kid, their fists balled and eyes filled with lava. His only saving grace came from Phelps’ mother, who preferred to look it at like everything else: a lesson.
“The ups and downs, sometimes you have to have that,” Bowman said. “There will be bitter disappointments, and Michael dealt with those the best way he could. He handled it the right way. You just have to do that and have that support system around you. Michael has had that and he will always have that.”
And that was never more evident than Sunday, when Phelps stood on the medal podium for the last time at these Games, looked off into the distance at his mother and three sisters and finally let the emotion wash over him. Maybe that’s the last lesson he learned in all of this. Sometimes the best things in life aren’t accomplishing the impossible dreams or winning the most inconceivable races.
Sometimes it’s not about the gold medals you collect, but the people who you share them with.
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