Phelps on short game for 2012

 BEIJING, July 7 (Xinhuanet) -- Olympic gold medalist Michael Phelps is trying a midcareer shift. He has shelved events such as the 400-meter individual medley, which he has dominated for nearly a decade, to involve himself in shorter races, including the 100 freestyle, according to media reports.

    At the U.S. swimming championships that begin Tuesday and at worlds in Rome this month, Michael Phelps will perfect his skills in shorter games.

    In recent warm-up meets, he has won the 100 freestyle once and finished second twice. He has set a personal best in the 100 butterfly but also has finished second twice in the 100 backstroke.

    "It's going to be really difficult for him," says swimming analyst Rowdy Gaines "I think it takes a tremendous amount of courage, swimming-wise, to step out of your comfort zone."

    "I have unfinished business," Phelps said Monday. "When I look back on my career, I want to say I did everything that I wanted to do."

    "In the 100 free, I know I'm not the best. But if I have the opportunity to step up and race the best, that's something I've always enjoyed,"

    At this week's U.S. championships, Phelps is entered in the 100 and 200 freestyle and the 100 and 200 butterfly. The top two finishers in each event at nationals will qualify for worlds.

    Phelps won a record eight gold medals at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, China, four years after he won six gold medals at the Summer Olympics in Athens, Greece. 

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It's not all about Phelps

To the casual sports fan, knowledge of swimming begins and ends with Michael Phelps. I get that.
But there is so much more to the sport, as there is in all sports in which superstars (Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Kobe Bryant and LeBron James) obscure everyone else.
Consider a few of the story lines from Tuesday's first night of finals in the ConocoPhillips USA Swimming Championships at the Natatorium at IUPUI.
-- Cancer survivor Eric Shanteau finished second in the 100-meter breaststroke behind Eric Gangloff's American record of 59.01. Shanteau has been seeing Indianapolis oncologist Larry Einhorn, who led the medical team that treated cyclist Lance Armstrong for cancer in 1996. Shanteau's story overshadowed that of Gangloff, who has a good one himself. Gangloff, 27, has labored for years to break the 1-minute mark . . . and then nearly whizzed right past 59 to 58.
"I've spent a lot of time right at the one-double-o," Gangloff said. "I knew the breakthrough was coming."
Brendan Hansen's American record of 59.13 had stood since 2006. Japan's Kosuke Kitajima set the world record of 58.91 at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
-- Dana Vollmer was nearly shattered by not making the Olympic team last year. At age 16, in 2004, she won a gold medal on the U.S. 4x200 freestyle relay team that broke East Germany's 17-year-old world record. Vollmer said she went home to Granbury, Texas, took a month and a half off -- her longest break in years -- and let her ailing back heal. This year, she has had no back pain. She was the NCAA swimmer of the year for Cal. On Tuesday, she was second in the 100 butterfly to make the world team going to Rome.
-- Ryan Lochte is probably the best swimmer in the world not named Michael Phelps. Without wearing a high-tech bodysuit, Lochte came from behind to win the 400 individual medley in 4:06.40, or nearly as fast as he swam (4:06.08) in pressuring Phelps at the 2008 Olympic Trials. Lochte won bronze in Beijing. It's easy to forget he has won six Olympic medals, three of them gold. Even without Phelps, the 400 IM continues to be a U.S. strength. Lochte barely beat 20-year-old Tyler Clary, whose 4:06.96 put him No. 4 on the all-time list. Phelps and Lochte are two of the three ahead of him.
Not every story was feel-good Tuesday night. The 17-year-old North Dakota phenom, Dagny Knutson, was fourth in the 200 IM and .08 away from the world team. Fortunately, she has other events.
Katie Hoff has apparently not fully recovered from an illness that caused her to leave the Santa Clara, Calif., meet earlier this year. She was sixth in the 400 freestyle.
Phelps, by the way, starts competition Wednesday morning in prelims of the 200 freestyle and 200 butterfly.

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New Champion Emerges in the Grueling 400 I.M.

INDIANAPOLIS — Michael Phelps was gone Tuesday morning when the USA Swimming National Championships got under way.
The black widow of swimming, the 400-meter individual medley, had claimed its most celebrated victim. Phelps warmed up and then left, having chosen not to compete in his signature race, which for years had been the showcase for his versatility and indefatigability.
“I like watching it from the sidelines,” he said.
Phelps showed up to watch the final and was treated to a fantastic race. The favorite, Ryan Lochte, overtook Tyler Clary, who swam the first 250 meters under Phelps’s world-record pace, on the final lap to win. Lochte was clocked in 4 minutes 06.40 seconds to Clary’s 4:06.96. With the victory, Lochte qualified for the FINA World Championships in Rome later this month.
On a night full of photo finishes, two American records fell: Julia Smit of Stanford in the 200 individual medley and Mark Gangloff in the 100 breaststroke.
Phelps, a 14-time Olympic gold medalist, got deeply entangled in the 400 I.M. in 2002 when he set his first world record in the race. In the six years leading to his gold-medal swim in Beijing, Phelps was beaten in the event once.
Phelps came to fear the 400 I.M. for the usual reasons: the muscle aches, the nausea and a temporary paralysis that can make breathing difficult.
“It’s one of the hardest races,” he said, “and I’d like to try other events.”
The last time Phelps swam the race in the United States, at the 2008 Olympic trials, he and Lochte produced a riveting race, with Phelps prevailing and both swimmers surpassing Phelps’s existing world record.
Lochte, who is expected to inherit Phelps’s 400 I.M. throne, missed having Phelps around Tuesday. Misery, after all, loves company.
“It kind of stinks that he’s not swimming it,” Lochte said.
He sounded envious, and sure enough, Lochte plans to follow Phelps to the sideline. “After this summer I’m done with this event,” he said.
Why is the 400 I.M. the event everybody seems to love to hate?
Katie Hoff, the American women’s record-holder in the event and a former world-record holder, said: “It doesn’t matter how hard you train or how many ridiculously horrible I.M. sets you do, the race doesn’t get any easier. It might get a little bit easier, but it’s still going to hurt more than any event out there.”
Hoff and the event are in the midst of a one-year trial separation that Hoff hopes to make permanent. (Her coach, Bob Bowman, is pushing for a reconciliation in 2010.)
“I get the most nervous for it, I have the most pain,” she said. “It’s just not a pleasant event.”
The 400 I.M. is the decathlon and the Belmont Stakes rolled into one eight-lap gut-check. Bowman, who coaches Hoff and Phelps said: “You’ve got to be a distance swimmer, you’ve got to be a sprinter. You’ve got to do all the strokes, you have to have strength. You have to cover every base and that requires a training program which is puritanical.”
In the opinion of the 24-year-old Lochte, the event is best left to the young. “I’m getting too old,” he said.
There is a trick coaches will occasionally resort to when their swimmers are weary and threatening mutiny. They will designate someone to swim a time trial in front of his or her teammates, and if the athlete surpasses a target time, everybody gets to get out.
The men’s 400 I.M. final in Beijing was essentially a time trial with the world watching and medals handed out at the end. Phelps lowered his world record by more than a second to win the gold. He swam fast enough to get out of the event for the rest of his career, while Lochte, who finished third, did not.
Lochte was slowed in Beijing by an upset stomach he came down with after brushing his teeth with water from the tap in the athletes’ village. After nearly pulling off the upset of Phelps at the United States trials with a time of 4:06.08, Lochte faded to a 4:08.09 in the Olympic final.
“I’m sick of it,” he said, “but I didn’t have a real good 400 I.M. at the Olympics, so my coach said I had to swim it this year.”
Clary, who finished fourth in the event at the United States Olympic trials, led all the swimmers in the preliminaries. Upon touching in a personal best of 4:11.29, he hopped out of the pool as if he had just taken a bath.
“It wasn’t a very taxing swim for me,” Clary said.
Clary, 20, said he was friendly with Lochte, the freest of spirits, and it was easy to see why. In his USA Swimming biography, Clay wrote that he was a practical joker who liked “dancing in the car, just basically acting stupid and really shocking other people.”
Both have curly hair and smiles as broad as their shoulders, but they are not hard to tell apart. Clary is the one who embraces the 400 I.M.
“I love the event,” he said, adding, “People will see a great 400 I.M. and they’ll know how much training and straight-up guts it took.”
Lochte said he ran into Phelps and gave him grief about not swimming the 400 I.M. anymore. He accused him of taking the easy way out.
That is how it is with the 400 I.M. The enduring becomes its own kind of reward.

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New Michael Phelps Ad Tries to Capitalize on Marijuana Controversy

Check out Subway's new "Be Yourself" ad featuring Michael Phelps:

The ad concludes "You can always be yourself at Subway." The whole thing is a brilliantly veiled reference to the backlash against Kellogg's that emerged when they dropped Phelps for smoking pot. Better yet, Subway has launched a new promotional website at Subwayfreshbuzz.com. You see what they're doing, right?

The new campaign is already generating tons of press coverage, including positive reactions to the ad's apparent reference to the infamous marijuana incident. It's a brilliant maneuver by Subway and, hopefully, an early indicator that corporate America is finally learning that it makes more sense to wink at pot culture than risk alienating it.

Once again, I'm humbled by the immeasurable impact of the Michael Phelps marijuana saga. I'm seeing discussion of the Kellogg's boycott reemerging in comment threads around the web today and I don't think one can easily exaggerate what a major event that was, and still is, for our cause. Along with the intense and heavily-publicized popularity of marijuana reform questions on the President's website, it's becoming widely understood that marijuana culture has a tremendous and now powerfully intimidating web presence.

In the age of viral web marketing and online-everything, the visible web presence of marijuana culture becomes a potent weapon that's now reshaping the debate right before our eyes. For fear of offending us, the President and his drug czar can scarcely utter more than a vague sentence in defense of our marijuana laws. Meanwhile, the mainstream press is hustling marijuana stories like dimebags in a city park. And Subway is celebrating freedom of personal choice in a new ad campaign featuring the world's most famous marijuana user.

The war remains, but the battlefield has changed. I can smell it, like the aroma of fresh baked bread wafting free from the entrance of the Subway down the block from our office, which I might just visit tomorrow for the first time in a while.

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Michael Phelps Getting Back In The Water

Some athletes might be done after eight Olympic gold medals. Not Michael Phelps. He'll be swimming competitively again Wednesday at the IUPUI natatorium.

Phelps can shoot to improve on his own world record in the 200-meter butterfly today. He recently came within .08 of a second of Ian Crocker's record in the 100 meter event.

The immediate goal in the ConocoPhillips USA Swimming Championships is to win a spot on the US team and with it, the right to compete in the World Championships later this month in Rome.

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