Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Michael Phelps = The Man

I've enjoyed so far watching what's taken place at the Olympics. The beach volleyball performances have been great. The "Redeem Team" (which I'll talk more on in another post) beat the host team with about a billion people watching around the world. But the coolest thing has been seeing Michael Phelps in action in swimming. He has gotten off to a great start with three gold medals so far and has produced some memorable moments in doing it.

Probably the best moment (in my opinion) was the performance that he and the U.S. 4x100 freestyle relay team did on Monday morning in Bejing (or Sunday night here). It was considered an event that the U.S. used to dominate for many years but recently had not won in the Olympics. The French were the upstart favorites and even did some trash talking saying they were going to smash the Americans. But as the old saying goes, you don't win on paper.

It was probably one of the best finishes to an event I've ever seen. To come back and win by essentially hundreths of a second is tremendous. I was jumping up and down and yelling when the finish happened. It was definitely a cool moment.

Sometimes we have people that we heavily hype up but they don't live up to the hype. Michael Phelps is a great athlete and I would not be surprised if he ended up with 8 gold medals at this Olympics. It will be worth watching to see how thing play out in the rest of the events.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yeah - Phelps is really living up to the hype - pretty crazy and a lot of fun to watch his clutch swims. I like your top 5 sports - I'm not sure why I can't get into basketball in the olympics, cause I'm a huge NBA and NCAA men's bball fan.