No one like him, but this was already known. A shark, a cannibal: in two words Michael Phelps, who yesterday won his twentieth and twenty-first Olympic gold medals. Behind him, the athletes who have won the most are Larisa Latynina, Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis and Paavo Nurmi, still at nine.
An abysmal difference, between the greatest Olympic athlete in history and all the others, because Phelps, by now, is part of an empyrean in its own right, that of a cannibal who has devoured all the records, starting from that of the 7 golds in only one edition of Mark Spitz, narrowly beaten at the Beijing games.
What is surprising, having reached the age of thirty-one, is the sporting longevity of an athlete who began collecting gold in Athens in 2004, and has never stopped since.
Perhaps, at this point, it would be easier to start comparing the Baltimore shark medal table with that of the Nations: alone, Phelps would be in 35th place in a hypothetical historical ranking of countries, ahead of, to name a few, Jamaica, Argentina and North Korea.
The man of the Olympic records, yesterday, also indulged in the whim of beating his rival Chad Le Clos, who in London had slipped the gold in the 200m butterfly from his neck by just 5 hundredths of a second. Then, just to please, he won the 4 × 200 with the US national team, ahead of Great Britain and Japan. They make 21, as mentioned, and the taximeter runs.
