Five historic acts of the champion Phelps

Twenty-one Olympic gold medals, more than twice as many as anyone else in history, maybe more to come.

With Michael Phelps it can all seem so simple, so pre-ordained. A swimmer defined by victory, a man who has always come through.

Except there has been nothing straightforward about the ‘Fifth Act of Michael Phelps’. His 200m butterfly triumph in Rio’s Aquatic Centre deep into Tuesday night may even have been miraculous. For this is a hero who had lost all sense of himself, an obsessive who had long ago begun to hate the gift that defined him.

The first three acts offered little to indicate the fall that would follow.

The 2000 Olympics, as The Kid – 15 years old yet finishing fifth in the 200m butterfly final, the boy with ADHD who had found his perfect focus, a world record holder before his 16th birthday.

Act Two, as The Freak – a 10,000-calories-a-day diet, a wingspan of 2.08 metres, hypermobile ankles, lungs twice the size of the average adult male. At those Athens Olympics he would lose the ‘Race of the Century’ to Australian rival Ian Thorpe but win six other golds, a body designed for water, a boy in love with the pool.

The 2008 Olympics, and Act Three as The Superstar: eight gold medals, no records left standing, the world at his size 14 feet.

And then, around the supposed happy ending of London 2012, Act Four: The Cynic.

It had begun in 2009, when a photograph emerged of America’s clean-cut hero apparently smoking cannabis. It continued through a three-month suspension, through missed training sessions, through a loss of the focus that had once seen him so fanatical he would count each stroke in every final, just in case his goggles ever filled with water and left him unable to judge the distance to the wall.

“I didn’t care,” he said later. “I wanted nothing to do with the water. Nothing.”

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