Gold Mind

Before the rest can begin, however, maximum performance first demands maximum training—in other words, for the taper to work, there must be work from which to taper. In Phelps's regime, this is not a problem. Bowman has a Marquis de Sade knack for adding twists of difficulty to his workouts, things like hypoxic training, during which swimmers may turn their heads for air only at certain points during a lap. There are grueling sets of 30 × 100-meter repeats that require Phelps and his teammates to hoist themselves out of the pool at the 50-meter mark and then start the remaining 50—the butterfly—from the blocks. (Climbing out of the water over and over adds an extra aerobic component to a regimen that's already doing just fine in that department.) "It's horrible," Phelps says, shaking his head with distaste. "By number 20 you get out, you're holding on to the blocks, your head's spinning, you can't even stand up."

"One of my favorite sets," Bowman says, with a mischievous lilt to his voice. Though his other passion is training thoroughbred racehorses, the coach admits that there isn't much crossover between humans and equines: "If we trained the horses like we did the people, we'd kill them."

YET FOR ALL the emphasis on an athlete's body, a large part of Olympic success lies between the ears. By the time an Olympic swimmer emerges from the ready room and walks out on deck to stand behind his block, the equation is far more than physical. He's spelunking deep into his psyche, emptying his mind of all the clutter. He is singularly focused. "I try to go into my own little world," Phelps says. And though, like Phelps, a swimmer may be momentarily accompanied in that world by Young Jeezy or Jay Z, when the headphones come off, the only voice he's left with is the one inside his head. And that voice can be friend or enemy.

During the 4 × 100 final, for example, Lezak recalls, "I saw how far ahead [Bernard] was, and it crossed my mind for a split second: There's no way." But in the next instant he was able to scratch that and replace it with, "This is the Olympic Games. I'm representing the United States of America."

If Phelps entertains any self-doubt during races, it isn't apparent. "This is the thing I love the most," he says. "I love to race." But when Phelps talks about competing, his entire energy field changes. He morphs from laid-back dude into quietly ferocious predator. There is no braggadocio in this. It's simply the knowledge that his talk is firmly backed up by results, the same kind of certainty one would expect when hearing, for instance, Tiger Woods holding forth on chip shots.

"That's why I'd never let him go to a sports psychologist," Bowman says. "You don't want anybody messing with that."

ALONG WITH the physical, psychological and emotional considerations of swimming, toss in a few technological ones, which play an increasingly important role and which are at least partly responsible for the sport's constant parade of world records. High in the Water Cube, tucked under the rafters, you'll find the former South African world-record sprinter Jonty Skinner, now USA Swimming's performance science and technology director. While the Phelps camp likes to refer to Bowman as "the mad scientist," Skinner could also lay claim to that title.

"I'm looking at the race in terms of mathematics," he says, flanked by laptops. "How many strokes and how fast the strokes are, all about the turns, those kinds of things. Every meter in the pool is covered in terms of analysis." Camera feeds from above and below the water are also gathered, and all of this data is compiled and fed to the coaches and athletes in the warm-down area within 20 minutes of a race's completion. And then, Skinner adds, "we do a comprehensive blood analysis on them to look at what I would call the metabolic cost, the energetic cost of the performance as well as how they recover."

For Phelps, with his 17 races, recovery is key. Exertion creates lactic acid, the athletic equivalent of kryptonite, and there are perfectly legal ways to minimize its residency in the body. Longer warm-downs, for one. Three minutes after Phelps's race, or theoretically when lactic acid production is at its highest, someone will prick his ear with a needle and that blood will be measured to see how many millimoles of muscular waste must be cleared from his system. Phelps will then swim easily until the readings drop to an acceptable level.

"We're mapping him all the way," Skinner says. "With so many races, we really want to stay on top of things to make sure he's staying on track and not getting too fatigued."