U.S. swimmer Michael Phelps has made history, winning his 8th gold medal in the 2008 Summer Olympics on August 17, 2008.  He won his eighth gold medal in the Men’s 4×100 Medley Relay. The United States team won with a world record time of 3:29:34.

It was so surreal to be Michael Phelps here, to listen to people debate whether he is the greatest athlete in Olympic history after he passed a group of athletes including Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi to become the one with the most gold medals.

Phelps is a self-described klutz, a real fish out of water on land, with a surgical scar on his right wrist to prove it. The 23-year-old Phelps took a nasty stumble last October that imperiled his pursuit of Mark Spitz’s single Games record of seven gold medals. He slipped on a patch of ice and fell while climbing into a friend’s car in Michigan and broke his right wrist.

It made for a tough start to the training cycle that carried him through these Beijing Games, but the climax was perfect: On Sunday morning, Phelps was on the United States’ 4×100-meter medley relay that held off Australia for the victory, giving Phelps his eighth gold medal of these Games and his 14th over all. Winning in 3 minutes 29.34 seconds, the Americans set a world record, Phelps’s seventh of the Games.

Spitz’s record lasted 36 years, and it figures to be even longer before the world sees Phelps’s successor. In 1972, Spitz swam two strokes, the freestyle and the butterfly, and none of his swims covered more than 200 meters. Phelps swam all four strokes, at distances ranging from 100 to 400 meters, and was faced with three swims in each individual event, one more than Spitz had.

“It’s mind-boggling,” said Keith Beavers of Canada, who finished seventh in one of Phelps’s events, the 200 individual medley. “The depth of the fields and how long this meet is, the things he’s doing are astounding, to say the least.”

How fabulous was Phelps’s feat? At Sunday’s start, the Person’s Republic of Phelps would have ranked fourth in gold medals and been ahead of all but 14 countries in the medal count.

Source: Eight for Phelps
Photo credit: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images AsiaPac

(L-R) Michael Phelps, Brendan Hansen, Jason Lezak and Aaron Piersol

Much has been made of Michael Phelps’ 12,000 calorie a day diet. Karen Crouse, writing in the New York Times, profiled Michael Phelps’ monastic life — revolving around eating, sleeping, and swimming, along with the songs on his iPod — the extreme focus that has enabled him to achieve this remarkable and historic athletic triumph.

At the 2004 Games in Athens, he arrived in Greece with the stated aim of surpassing Spitz. Phelps came close, leaving with six golds and two bronzes.

Phelps has his prerace routine down pat. Two hours before he races, he stretches for 30 minutes, then spends 35 minutes warming up in the pool, paying close attention to his stroke technique. After relaxing for 30 minutes, he puts on his racing suit and warms up again.

Before a race, he tunes out the world by listening to artists like Young Jeezy, Jay-Z and Rick Ross. The music transforms him. His goofy grin dissolves into a glower, his eyes turn cold as ice. The hip-hop beats have a hypnotic effect on Phelps, who sometimes, after a race, is unable to recall the songs that locked him into his groove.

Source: Phelps Finds the Monastic Life an Easy Fit - NYTimes.com

(L-R) Michael Phelps, Brendan Hansen, Jason Lezak and Aaron Piersol

(L-R) Brendan Hansen, Michael Phelps, Aaron Piersol and Jason Lezak

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Photos: Michael Phelps Wins 8th Gold Medal at Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics