The Quest: A story of Phelps' race for Olympic gold history, in 8 parts

"Right now I'm working on fixing my head position in freestyle. It's too high. Even after 11 years, I've never swum it right." Simon Bruty/SI

By Susan Casey

I. THE SWIMMER

Belmont Plaza is an unlovely pool, a beige hulk squatting on a grimy stretch of Long Beach in Southern California. Behind it, on the Pacific horizon, container ships and oil derricks mar the sunset. Across the parking lot a diner called Chuck's displays a sign declaring itself HOME OF THE WEASEL. In the world of sports venues, this is a long way from Beijing's Water Cube, the Olympic swimming complex designed to look as though it's made of glowing bubbles. And yet on this January night, Belmont has all the glamour. In the chlorinated half-light, Michael Phelps stands behind lane 4 adjusting a pair of black goggles, and he's about to do something amazing. Again.

In case you haven't noticed, Phelps, 23, is the world's greatest swimmer. Describing his career requires superlatives that haven't been invented, so let's stick with numbers: When he was 15, he competed in the Sydney Games, the youngest U.S. male Olympian since 1932. He finished fifth in the 200-meter butterfly -- not bad for his first international meet. The next March, still three months from his 16th birthday, he swam the event again at U.S. nationals and broke the world record, making him the youngest male swimmer ever to own one. Twenty-four more world records have followed; Phelps has broken his own 200 butterfly mark five times, once lowering it by an astonishing 1.62 seconds. He won six gold medals at the Athens Games and seven at the 2007 world championships in Melbourne, and now the talk is of eight golds in Beijing. (Not that anybody's counting, but that would be one more than Mark Spitz won in Munich in '72.)

First, though, there is the Toyota Southern California Grand Prix at Belmont Plaza.

Phelps shrugs off his black North Face puffa; removes the hip-hop mainline from his ears. This is a short-course meet, and the pool is only 25 yards long rather than the Olympic size of 50 meters. Short course is intimate and showy; long course is imposing and grand -- the traditional distance of world records. As the fastest qualifier, Phelps is introduced last, and as he steps onto the block he snaps his arms across his chest three times, a prerace ritual. Even though he's sporting a new Fu Manchu mustache, the scene is very familiar.

Except for one thing: This is the finals of the 100 breaststroke.

It's Phelps' Achilles' heel; an event he never competes in. And next to him, in lane 5, is U.S. Olympian Mark Gangloff, whose best event happens to be, well, this one. Like all sports, swimming has its unwritten rules. Here's one: You can win the 100 breaststroke or the 100 freestyle (which Phelps had done earlier in the meet), but you can't win them both. In elite competition the same person has never come close to taking these two events, and for good reason. Of the four strokes -- butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke and freestyle -- breaststroke is the bastard child. It's lateral where the others are linear, a specialist's choreography of power legs, tricky timing and subtle hand position. Breaststrokers and sprint freestylers have about as much in common as kangaroos and leopards.

Phelps bends into his start. He's 6-foot-4 and has size-14 feet that are so flexible, his toes actually wrap around the edges of the block. The starter bleeps, and the field explodes; when Phelps surfaces, he's almost at the opposite wall.

His race is over in 53.41 seconds, Phelps touched out by Gangloff's 53.09. At poolside a pale-haired, midsized man wearing a navy polo shirt and wire-rimmed glasses stands with arms crossed. His face bears no emotion; he's simply watching so hard you can hear the gears whirring. This is Bob Bowman, 43, Phelps' coach. As Phelps vaults from the water and heads to the warm-down pool, Bowman's mouth curls into a Cheshire cat smile. Yes, his athlete lost a race. But everything's relative. Tonight, by almost beating one of the world's best breaststrokers, Phelps has served notice that unlike any other swimmer in history, he no longer has a weak stroke.

"That's one of the most impressive things I've ever seen him do," Bowman says, looking at the clock.

II. THE SPORT

Picture the winter predawn, sometime in January. Somewhere in the East, like Baltimore (where Phelps began his career) or Ann Arbor, Mich. (where he trains now). It's cold, for one thing. And dark. And when the alarm clock shrieks its owner awake at 5 a.m., his bed has never felt so warm. For swimmers, nothing epitomizes their sport so much as the feeling of diving into frigid water before sunrise. The serious ones do it most mornings of their careers. Later in the day, they're back for another two or three hours. Anything else -- school, what passes for a social life -- is arranged around these workouts.

For nonswimmers, the idea of spending that much time going back and forth, staring at the black line on the bottom of the pool as the chlorine eats into your skin, is the definition of hellish monotony. But the swimmers aren't bored.

It's not that they're unfamiliar with the concept of repetition. Rather, it's that they can swim or kick or pull their laps; they can do it with paddles, fins, buoys, weights or surgical tubing; over any distance, on any interval and in any combination of the above. And there are four strokes to think about, each as technical as dressage -- and that's before they consider starts and turns, where the closest races are decided. ("Michael basically lost the 200 free in Athens on turns," Bowman says.) The fine-tuning is endless. "Right now I'm working on fixing my head position in freestyle," Phelps says. "It's too high. Even after 11 years, I have never swum it right. I'm still working on little things that are going to make a huge difference."