I agree on Phelps. I have some more specific reasons, but they still basically amount to speculation. However, I do think of Phelps as a "generational talent." Which I think is important, because if you believe Phelps to be a generational talent, it makes it that much harder to justify a lot of the other folks whose names get trotted out with that same phrase. When you start having people trying to convince you that, all of a sudden, we've just got boatloads of generational talents - and in the same sports no less - that raises my eyebrows.
Really, really special athletes simply do not come around that often. And, most of the time, being a generational talent in no way precludes doping.
For me, with Phelps, it comes down to a couple things.
- Bob Bowman identified him really, really early as a physiological special athlete. He said something to Phelp's mom along the lines of, "your son will be an Olympic champion some day." This was when he was like 9 or 10. So it was obvious pretty early he was special.
- Per the above, Bowman has never (to my knowledge) been implicated in any sort of doping scandal, or even any sort of "shades of grey" (a la Team Sky). He's also had very good success with other athletes. When you have a coach with a proven track record of success who also has not been implicated in scandal, I think that goes a really long way.
- Phelps was a phenom even before he started winning everything. He made the final for the 200m fly at the 2000 Sydney Games as a 15 year old. He was the youngest male swimmer in 68 years to make the US Olympic Team. That's extraordinary. Especially in a (relatively) long event like the 200m fly. Contrast this with any number of athletes who "appear out of nowhere."
- Phelps has himself talked about just how long his development cycle was. One of the most salient points Phelps made in his Congressional testimony - something that was, I think, lost on most non-athletes - was when he talked about one of the tell-tale signs of doping being how quickly certain athletes improve. He talks about athletes making the sort of gains in 1/2 or 1/4 of the time it took him. I think this is still not really understood that well even by people on this forum. The biggest hallmark of doping is NOT the performances. It's the development cycle - and the speed of recovery.
One of Trevor Graham's Sprint USA group that turned informant for USADA spoke about this. She said that on THG they went from doing maximal effort sprint workouts once every 10 days to once every three days. The workouts themselves were unchanged. What changed was how often they could do them.
- Phelps peaked, at most, once a year. And really more like once every four years. And he was a notorious "homebody." He trained with Bowman basically 24/7/365. Compare this to some athletes who seem to be able to peak repeatedly. Or to maintain a peak across an extraordinarily long period of time (e.g. they are racing A-performances repeatedly from March to October, or and sometimes even longer...). And in some cases they do it all while traveling from Europe to South America to Australia to the USA, etc, etc.
Phelps was extraordinary. But the way he achieved his success was not. Great coach. Hard work with remarkable consistency. Outstanding physiology.
There's no really weird stuff. You don't ever hear reports of Phelps having a bad race, going back and doing 2-3x as much training, and then decimating up a world record. Whether he had a good race or a bad one, he was fairly consistent with his training and approach to preparation.
- Swimming is also, knowing some elite coaches, pretty open with regards to training. Like, there were a lot of other athletes who trained with Phelps. I know that Bowman was pretty open about sharing workouts. Maybe not Michael's performances in those workouts (though he shared even quite a lot of this). But the actual workouts. And I don't know anyone who said, "oh, that's crazy. Nobody can do that..." Contrast that with some athletes where the fundamentals of their training programs simply defy belief.
I think what's most shocking is the suspension of disbelief that you see for any number of reasons. People come up with so many reasons not to suspect the performances of athletes that they "like" (for any number of reasons). Forget the backstory. Look at the fundamentals.
But that's incredibly non-romantic. It's super depressing to think that way. And what does a fan really get out of knowing (or thinking) that a performance is suspect?
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