Michael Phelps left the Athens Olympic pool with eight medals from eight events, six of them gold and two bronze. The 19-year-old American tied the record for the most medals won by any athlete at a single Olympic Games, a mark set by Soviet gymnast Aleksandr Dityatin in 1980.
Seventeen races, thirteen firsts
The Games opened with a statement. Phelps won his first Olympic title in the 400m individual medley, stopping the clock at a world-record 4:08.26, three seconds clear of compatriot Erik Vendt. Two bronzes followed in the 4x100m freestyle relay and the 200m freestyle, a race won by Ian Thorpe. Phelps then reclaimed the top step in the 200m butterfly in an Olympic record 1:54.04.
Across the full programme he swam 17 races including preliminaries and won 13 of them. The workload did not compromise the collection. By the final evening he held five golds and two bronzes and stood one relay away from a place in the record books.
The final starter and the teammate
The last medal turned on a gesture. Phelps had qualified for the 4x100m medley relay butterfly leg by defeating Ian Crocker in the 100m butterfly final. The margin was just four-hundredths of a second. Crocker had struggled in Athens, missing the 100m freestyle final and swimming below his standard in the bronze-medal 4x100m freestyle relay.
Phelps swam the butterfly leg in the morning preliminary, then gave his finals place to Crocker. The American quartet of Aaron Peirsol, Brendan Hansen, Crocker and Jason Lezak delivered the gold in a world-record 3:29.34, slicing more than a second off their own previous mark. Phelps watched from the deck as his eighth medal was confirmed.
"It's everything I wanted and everything I dreamed of and I've had a blast doing it," he told reporters afterwards. "Being back where the modern Olympics started, in Athens, Greece with the crowds they had here, it was incredible and I couldn't ask for anything more."
He fell one gold short of Mark Spitz's 1972 tally of seven, and with it a million-dollar sponsor bonus. The total that remained set a benchmark he would return to again and again.
