No Limits by Michael Phelps Page A

so fast, not tonight. The last 200 meters, I put it on cruise control. I hit the wall, took my goggles off, looked at the clock, and saw 4:07.82.
    An Olympic record.
    I did not expect that at all.
    My prelim time was a full 44-hundredths better than my winning time in the finals in Athens.
    And honestly, while this prelim race didn’t hurt that bad, my strokes didn’t feel the way I quite wanted them to. I could do better.
    Cseh was asked after the prelims if he could win. “That will be hard,” he told the reporter. “I’ll try everything but that will be hard. If somebody wants to win this race, they need a 4:05.” His personal best, as I knew well, was 4:07.96.
    Lochte said, “If I’m right there with him, then there’s pressure. We’ll see what happens.”
    I felt no pressure. My plan was to get some sleep and be ready to go in the morning.
    Amid dreams of 3:07.
    â€¢   •   •
    In the summer of 2001, Jacques Rogge, who at that time was the newly elected president of the International Olympic Committee, had a conversation with Dick Ebersol, the chairman of NBC Sports. NBC, as it had since 1988, would be broadcasting the Summer Games. Beijing is twelve hours ahead of New York. The 2000 Olympics from Sydney, fifteen hours ahead of New York, had largely been shown on tape delay. That had rubbed some critics entirely the wrong way. Now, Ebersol wanted to know, was it possible for certain events in Beijing—swimming and gymnastics, mostly—to be moved around, switched so the finals took place in the morning, Beijing time? If so, they could be shown live in prime time on the East Coast on NBC, which was paying the IOC nearly $900 million for the right to broadcast the Beijing Olympics.
    Rogge said he’d have to get back to Ebersol. The IOC president would have to check with the heads of the international swimming and gymnastics federations. At an Olympics, even though most people think the IOC is in charge of everything, those federations are actually still in charge of running the sports themselves.
    More than three years later, Rogge got back to Ebersol. Yes, he said, swimming and gymnastics would be moved.
    Over Thanksgiving weekend in 2004, Dick Ebersol was seriously injured in a plane crash in Telluride, Colorado; his son, Charlie, survived the crash; a younger son, Teddy, was killed. Several months later, on what turned out to be the very first day that Dick returned to work, my mom and I happened to be in New York. We asked if we could drop by his office; we wanted to see how Dick and his family were doing. With us was Drew Johnson, who, working with Peter Carlisle, is part of my team at Octagon, the agency that represents me.
    It was a very, very emotional meeting.
    Sitting in his office, Dick said at one point, I have something totell you. I want your reaction, please understand it’s going to happen no matter what you say, but I want you to know: the swim finals are going to go off in the morning, the heats at night. Would that be a problem?
    No way.
    I was thrilled.
    For real.
    Swimming being on during prime time is everything I want for the sport, I told him. I’m trying to leave the sport bigger and better than it was when I was lucky enough to have first found it.
    Dick asked me not to tell anyone about the news until it broke, which it eventually did, of course, after which I was asked repeatedly what I thought about swimming in morning finals.
    It’s the Olympics, I responded. If you can’t get up to swim in the morning, don’t go.
    Which I believed 100 percent. Swimmers swim in the morning, anyway. To get to the Olympics and represent your country is an enormous privilege. How could anyone seriously think about not being able to perform? To say that you didn’t want to give your best because it was ten in the morning instead of eight at night was an excuse.
    The Olympics are no place for excuses.
    The morning of