Throughout his 23 years, six Olympic gold medals, and six world records, Michael Phelps has generally been seen as the sum of his anatomy. The freakishly elongated and expertly sculpted torso. The flipper-size (14) feet. The wingspan that measures slightly longer than his six-foot-four-inch height. But we're here to talk about Michael Phelps's mind — that elegant swimming supercomputer that processes reams of data and senses time in a way that is alien to the rest of us. It is Phelps's mind, as much as his body, that has made him perhaps the greatest swimmer in history — one who enters this month's Olympics in Beijing with a shot at Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals. It is also a mind that Phelps's coach will tell you requires constant reprogramming lest it go haywire and derail the coronation ceremony.
It's three months before the Games and Phelps is riding in an SUV with his mother, Debbie, in Santa Clara, California. They're here for the Toyota Santa Clara Grand Prix, a swim meet that serves as a tune-up for the Olympic trials. Since Athens, Phelps has spent the past four years competing at the University of Michigan, and has emerged with the reflexive sarcasm of an undergrad. Case in point: His proudest possession these days is not a medal but his Fu Manchu mustache, which, when combined with goggles and a swim cap, makes him look like Ali G. Phelps says he grew it during the grueling boot camp he just completed at the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs. "In Colorado, all the guys grow their hair out. Right before the meets, we shave it into a mustache."
To talk to Phelps is to sift through the preoccupations of youth: Xbox 360 games, his ballin' new mesh hat, hip-hop music (the stuff he pipes into his ears to pump him up before a race), his attempt to learn Chinese, and his continuing quest — familiar to us all — to keep his mom from embarrassing him too much. But this is the public Phelps, the surface-level creature. Stick your head under the water and you'll find, as his mother likes to say, "a whole new level of Michael."
Debbie Phelps raised her son and his two older sisters on a rural tract of land in North Baltimore County, Maryland. She was not a typically overbearing sports mom. She viewed swimming mostly in terms of socialization, a way to get her kids involved with other kids and keep them engaged. Michael needed more engaging than most. Diagnosed with ADHD as a child, he was "like a crazy person," Debbie says, a shotgun blast of energy. On the lacrosse field, he would try to play all the positions at once. When he hung out at the pool with his older sister, Whitney, who was then an Olympic hopeful, his mother would find Michael sprinting across the concrete and pestering the swimmers for money. "Michael was always very social," Debbie Phelps says. "Sometimes so social you didn't want to have him around. He was a social irritant."
