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After winning 6 golds in 2004, swimmer will try to surpass himself in Beijing

It was a telling insight into the mind of one of the greatest athletes in the world, and it came during a far-ranging, one-on-one interview that Lauer conducted with Phelps in Ann Arbor, where he trains with the University of Michigan swim team and his long-time coach, Bob Bowman.

“There’s nothing you can think about there,” Phelps explained, echoing Yogi Berra, the Hall-of-Fame New York Yankee legend who once said, “I can’t think and hit at the same time.” During the heat of competition is no time for thinking. It is a time for doing. “I love to compete,” he said. “I like getting up on the block and racing whoever I have to get up on the block and race … And when I get up there, I can just get in the water and swim as fast as I can. That’s all I can think about.”

Four years ago, Phelps went to Athens as a 19-year-old full of promise and attempting to equal or better Mark Spitz’s 1972 feat of winning seven swimming golds in one Olympics. He won six gold and added two more bronze.

Much has changed since then. He moved from his parents’ home in Maryland to Ann Arbor. He’s gotten more powerful and even faster in the pool. He’s making scads of money from endorsements.

Michael Phelps

Taking on the world

Four years ago, he has said he was like a deer in the headlights, not knowing what to do with all the attention, the  questions, the pressure. Now, he said, he’s more mature and more experienced.

“I’m more relaxed now, more calm. I sort of know what to handle, what to expect. I know what’s gonna come at me,” he said.

What’s coming at him is every other swimmer in the world eager to win gold and take down the mighty Michael Phelps in the process. “You have a target on your back,” Lauer said. “Does that make you swim faster or is it a weight?”

“I don’t think it’s a weight,” Phelps replied. “I don’t really think about what anyone else is doing and how they race their race or whatever. I know that if I train as hard as I can and I do things differently than other people do, I’m gonna be fine. I like to race the best, but I can control what I do and if I’m the best prepared as I can be, then I’m gonna be happy, and that’s all that matters.”

That mindset is characteristic of elite athletes who understand that they can control only how they prepare and what they do. They cannot control what other competitors do or the result.

And no one prepares more thoroughly or trains harder or with a more single-minded pursuit of excellence than Phelps. By the time the swimming competition begins in Beijing, he will have been in the pool every day for more than 300 days straight. That’s Sundays, holidays, birthdays, Christmas, Easter, Super Bowl Sunday — every single day.