The current Sports@Large

Here's the script from my radio essay, which aired yesterday afternoon and again this morning. If you'd like to hear these essays live, be sure to tune into WYPR-FM 88.1 each Monday afternoon at 5:30 p.m. or during Maryland Morning Tuesdays at 9 a.m. If you live outside the Baltimore area, you can listen to WYPR via streaming audio.

If what you hear over the next few minutes offends you or at least your sensibilities as a Baltimoreans, well, I apologize in advance. And if these few hundred words seem like the predictable reaction to the overreaction, then again I’m sorry. But someone in this city, this area, this country, heck, this planet needs to say this, so I might as well be the one. And here it comes:

Michael Phelps is not the greatest Olympian of all time. Not by a long shot.

Don’t get me wrong, folks. The 23-year-old from Rodgers Forge wrote one heck of a narrative over a magical nine days in the pool in Beijing. Add the eight gold medals from the Water Cube, with seven of them coming in world record time, to the six golds and two bronzes he collected in Athens four years ago, and you have a pretty amazing athlete.

And, even more astonishingly, Phelps has gone about the business of wiping Mark Spitz off the first line of the Olympic swimming record books with unfailing good grace and humor. He has never gone diva and has answered every question from all comers. And it’s a testament to the reservoir of goodwill that Phelps has built up that, in these times, when any accomplishment out of the norm, much less of a superhuman nature, there is no hint that what he has done has come in any other way than the right way. No shortcuts whatsoever.

But hero worship, not to mention the desires of a television network, a local station, and a newspaper to bring more customers into the tent, can’t rewrite history, and to call Michael Phelps the greatest Olympian would be doing just that, rewriting history.

Let’s start with the concept that as great as Phelps was in Beijing, his was not a solitary effort, as he was a member of three relay teams, with Jason Lezak literally snatching victory from the jaws of defeat in the 4 by 100 meter freestyle.

Then, there’s this: Perhaps the world’s most accomplished Olympics journalist, Philip Hersh of the Chicago Tribune and formerly of the Baltimore Evening Sun, has said that Phelps is, at best, the sixth best Olympic athlete, behind such icons as Carl Lewis, who won nine gold medals, including four in the 1984 games and four straight in the long jump, and Finnish track star Paavo Nurmi, who also won nine golds in three Olympics at distances from 1,500 to 10,000 meters in the early 20th century. Hersh’s opinion is shared by Olympic historian David Wallechinsky, and I would add the name of Eric Heiden, who won five gold medals in the 1980 Winter Olympics, capturing races at five different lengths, from sprint to distance.

But the best reason not to send Michael Phelps to Mount Olympus quite yet is that he has only been a force in two Olympics, though he was on the 2000 team in Sydney. The waters he churned in Beijing have barely stopped roiling and we’re ready to proclaim god status upon him. It’s understandable to want to do it. The past is no longer prologue, but mere annoyance, words on a page. Let’s let Michael Phelps write a few more pages in the Olympic history book in London in four years before we rename the entire library after him.