If your time to you
Is worth savin’
Then you better start swimmin’
Or you’ll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin’.
– Bob Dylan
The times are changing in the world of swimming, and those who have visited the OmegaTiming.com homepage this week have felt that onrush in a big way. Gone is the familiar head-on image of the Greatest of All Time Michael Phelps butterflying head-on into your lap. It has been replaced with a similarly posed, but starkly different, image of South Africa’s young butterflier Chad le Clos.
Le Clos skyrocketed to fame and fortune in 2012 when at the London Olympics, he out-touched Phelps in the 200 fly, making him one of a small handful to have done so in the last decade, and the first to do so on the Olympic stage since the year 2000.
Now, with Phelps’ retirement, the 21-year old le Clos has taken the stage as a global superstar, and just like Michael has brought along a larger-than-life-personality parent (in the form of his father Bert) with him.
Every Olympic passing sees a new era in the sport, some drastic change, but never has a bigger torch been passed than since Phelps retired to golf and a more existential mission of growing the sport from outside of the laneropes.
Of course, le Clos has a long way to go to catch Phelps. Compare it to basketball, where one of Phelps’ idols Michael Jordan passed the torch to Kobe Bryant (perhaps best summarized by this image.) There may never be another, but there must always be a next.
Le Clos is up. Who’s got next?
For the wheel’s still in spin
And there’s no tellin’ who
That it’s namin’.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin’.
