FINA released the following video yesterday via their official youtube channel. The video has a montage of Michael Phelps highlights from over the years. Among the clips there are some facts about Phelps’ career.
The video first states that 2016 will be Phelps’ final Olympics. This is, however, yet to be determined as Phelps must first qualify for the team at the US Olympic Trials in June. Assuming that the greatest swimmer of all time manages to qualify, he’ll also have to find a way to resist another comeback to make that statement true.
Phelps will look to add to his Olympic record of 22 medals in Rio. That total puts him four ahead of the next closest athlete. However that figure is somewhat misleading in that Phelps has a lot more medal chances in a given games than in other sports. Many of the other top medal winners are Gymnasts from a bygone era when careers in that sport more frequently spanned multiple games.
The really crazy statistic for Phelps is that he has twice as many gold medals as any other Olympian. That figure may never be challenged.
One factor Phelps has working for him is that his career spans two eras of swimming. In the early part of Phelps’ career, it was still realistic for teenage males to make the US Olympic team and win multiple medals, whereas that is far less likely in 2016. When Phelps rose to the top of the world in the early 2000s, he supplanted another swimmer who has risen to the top as a teenager (Ian Thorpe).
First he has to make the team…
They should have hired Under Armour.