(no subject)

[shinytoaster]

I'm not convinced that Michael Phelps is the winningest* athlete and most successful olympian of all time. Not to take anything away from a pretty outstanding achievement, but let's try and put this in perspective. The swimming competition is massive, with loads of events and several different strokes over a variety of distances and with a varying number of actual swimmers. The potential for Phelps to go out and win eight medals is vastly higher due to this. And with three or four good Olympics in him over a 12 to 16 year period, it's quite possible he could get 30 to 40 golds if he stays at the top of his game for London and maybe beyond.

Contrast this to, say, a javelin thrower or a heptathlete, with one event and a comparable 15 to 20 year sporting career, you're only ever going to take away five golds maximum. So a whole bunch of athletes miss out on having a shot at the most successful title, which if judged in the highly objective terms of olympic golds, as the media seems to have decided to do in Michael Phelps' case, is always going to be held by someone with a lot of possible events in their discipline. In other words, a rower, a cyclist or a swimmer.

Anyway, all those swimmers are built like brick shithouses** and don't do it for me with their shoulders as wide as a six-lane expressway and their horrible full-body swimsuits. Give me a nice diver any day...

They're already saying Thomas Finchum is this year's Johnny Weir. So he'd definitely be up for it.





See. Johnny 2.0. So very gay.

* Eurgh, eurgh, not a word, yuckyuckyuck
** That's a deluxe, fully air conditioned eight story brick shithouse with concierge service and a swimming pool on the roof.

Comments

[ias.livejournal.com]

Yep, with you on that one. personally I think it is much more impressive to have longevity, i.e. medals over several games, or breadth, i.e. medals in several different sports than to have lots of medals at one games in one sport.

And I also prefer divers to swimmers but then I have always preferred the starved poet in a garret look in males.

Eta: And i also have a dodgy shift key.

[wheeler.livejournal.com]

Very much agreed on Phelps. Redgrave took just one shot at gold (as far as I know) every four years for twenty years and he got it every time. Phelps just gets another gold for every hundred meters he swims. Oh, another hundred? Well done, have another dog treat. It's very silly.

Of course, I also strongly resent Phelps because he is minging, and I like my sporting gods to be non-minging.

[owlman.livejournal.com]

Redgrave also has a bronze medal in the coxed pairs from the Seoul Olympics (1988). The available events for rowers has changed over the years and I do not think it was realistic after that for anyone to compete in more than one.

[owlman.livejournal.com]

The BBC has an blog item on this subject and covers some of the alternatives.

[jiggery-pokery.livejournal.com]

I have seen "most decorated" offered as a much more pleasant alternative to "winningest".

Your rant is not unreasonable at all, but how much longer does Michael Phelps have to compete at the top level before he exceeds the claims of the other top contenders? If he wins gold medals at five successive Olympics, he clearly ties Redgrave for longevity and beats him when you take the multiple wins into account. To be honest, if he wins golds at four Olympics - just the four! - then the volume pretty clearly overtakes the lack of the fifth Olympics and I think you could make a very strong case for Phelps with just a couple of gold medals at a third Olympics.

If he wins the last three, he's clearly way, way ahead of Spitz, not just in terms of number of gold medals but also in terms of number of races required (with regard to the presence of semi-finals) as well as more recent achivements naturally being more impressive due to the development of the sport.

[nmalfoy.livejournal.com]

WHOA. That picture. HELLO. *stares* I had not seen that. Thanks for the eye candy!!

*molests the picture*