Michael Phelps: Big Fish in a Small Pool?

by Randy Shaw, 2008-08-19

Winning eight gold medals in a single Olympics is an achievement for the ages. And given Michael Phelps’ prior success in the 2004 Games, there is little doubt that he is history’s greatest competitive swimmer. But before proclaiming Phelps among the world’s greatest athletes, should we not ask: how many potentially great athletes seek to become competitive swimmers? Few African-Americans pursue this goal. Nor do we see young boys from Latin America, who now fill Major League Baseball rosters, seeking to become great swimmers. Competitive swimming is a sport that attracts an infinitesimal percentage of potentially great athletes when compared to basketball, football, soccer, baseball, tennis and golf. Phelps’ great triumph is an historic milestone, but it occurred in a particularly small pond.

The first week of the 2008 Summer Olympics will long be remembered for Michael Phelps’ unprecedented success. Some estimate that Phelps increased television viewership so much that NBC generated an additional $1billion in ad revenue.

But as Phelps’ accomplishments have led to talk about him being either the greatest living athlete, or even the greatest ever, seemingly forgotten is the incredibly small pond in which he achieved his success: competitive swimming.

When I was growing up, I knew young people who played a wide variety of competitive sports. Swimming was not among them. In fact, I didn’t learn about the whole competitive swimming industry until I moved to Northern California, where Olympic swimming champions were produced in droves.

Many young people are on swim teams, but extraordinarily few even attempt to train to become competitive swimmers. Contrast this with the millions of kids around the world trying to become pro basketball players, and the millions in Latin America who enter baseball academies soon after elementary school in the hopes of making the major leagues.

Odessa, Texas, home of Friday Night Lights, is not the only place in the United States where young people dedicate themselves to becoming football stars. In fact, there are hundreds of cities where football is king and whose youth gravitate toward that sport.

The same can’t be said about competitive swimming.

Go to Brazil, Argentina and much of the world and you will see kids playing soccer late into the night. There are tens of millions of young kids who are trying to become the next Maradona’s and Renaldo’s; most of these aspiring World Cup participants never tried to make it in competitive swimming.

Phelps, Woods, Jordan

It is hard to identify the “world’s greatest athlete.” There is disagreement over what constitutes an “athlete,” and over the difference between a “sport” and a “game.”

But greatness is perhaps best measured by one’s superiority over their competitors, and by the pool of participants.

For example, Babe Ruth is likely the greatest athlete in United States history because he was dramatically better than any of his contemporaries at a time when baseball commanded the largest talent pool of any sport.

Michael Phelps is not dramatically better than his contemporaries, if that term is defined as winning each of his events by large, noticeable margins. Phelps’ greatness lies in having the strength and mental discipline to excel at multiple events, rather than his historic preeminence in any single contest.

As noted above, Phelps’ pool of competitors is exceedingly small. While competitive swimming is international, no country sees a meaningful percentage of young athletes train to be competitive swimmers.

Tiger Woods is also dramatically better than any of his contemporaries, winning major tournaments by a record setting number of strokes. This is his chief mark of greatness. Woods has succeeded in a talent pool that is nearly worldwide, but the pool of aspiring professional golfers is nowhere near the percentage of athletes who sought to be major league baseball players either today, or in the days of Ruth.

Michael Jordan was dramatically better than any of his contemporaries, and excelled in a sport which sees millions of talented young men from around the world aspire to join its professional ranks. Jordan did not excel over his fellow players to the extent of Babe Ruth or even Tiger Woods, but his greatness in the face of such a large potential talent pool is striking.

Phelps and Jesse Owens

Phelps has won fourteen gold medals, but is he a greater Olympian than Jesse Owens? Or is he more like Eric Heiden, a now forgotten speed skater who also won multiple golds through record-setting skill in an event with a small talent pool.

Jesse Owens used the 1936 Olympics to establish he was the world’s greatest athlete, and to disprove the Nazi government’s argument for Aryan supremacy. This was the Olympics where the United States Olympic Committee kept a Jewish sprinter off its team to pacify Adolph Hitler; Owens excelled despite the hostile environment.

Swimming lends itself to multiple medal winning, as Mark Spitz showed when he won seven golds in 1972. Many swimmers have won multiple golds, and winning multiple medals has gotten so commonplace that Natalie Coughlin’s winning of thirteen medals in the past two Olympics barely gets mentioned.

So while billions across the world watched Michael Phelps, and he proved himself the greatest swimmer ever, he has not eclipsed Jesse Owens as the greatest Olympian. And there are many stars in other sports who are more deserving of the title, world’s greatest athlete.