Michael Phelps: they call him the Baltimore bullet, and he's aiming for Athens—not to mention the record books

There are eerie similarities between Michael Phelps, the 19-year-old American Olympic swimming hopeful, and Mark Spitz, the winningest swimmer in any single Olympic games. They are the last two swimmers to capture the imagination of the sporting public, they both won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation's top amateur athlete, and after the Athens games, both will have participated in Olympics overshadowed by terrorism and conflict in the Middle East.

There is, however, one important difference between the two: Spitz emerged from his Olympics as a household name, while Phelps will likely enter his as one. The son of a Maryland state trooper father and a schoolteacher mother, Phelps recently maintained that he is just a normal teenager. Which, in some ways, he is: He likes French vanilla ice cream served in waffle cones and covered with Butterfinger chips, and he pumps up before races by listening to DMX's "Party Up," particularly the extended version, which runs for nearly nine minutes. What sets Phelps apart is that he holds five world records in swimming (set at one meet, the 2003 FINA World Championships) and more than a half dozen endorsement deals totaling seven figures.

A full two months before Phelps hit the Olympic pool in Athens, his agent was able to declare, "We've had to turn down media.... Every fifteen minutes in his life right now is accounted for." If Phelps wins seven gold medals, as Spitz did in the '72 Munich games, he may have to start listening to shorter rap songs.

Allen Barra's latest book is Brushbacks and Knockdowns: The Greatest Baseball Debates of Two Centuries (St. Martin's Press).

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