One in a series of occasional articles on Michael Phelps and his path to the 2004 Olympics.
When he swam in the 2000 Olympics, Michael Phelps was 15, the youngest American to earn a trip to Sydney, Australia.
Now that Phelps is 18 and a young man atop his sport, does he have any more input into his training routine?
"Nope," Phelps said.
That job belongs to his coach at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club, Bob Bowman, a bespectacled 38-year-old who has applied a rigorous regimen to a rare talent.
Phelps' path at the 2004 Athens Olympics could include a run at the record seven Olympic gold medals won by Mark Spitz in 1972.
After receiving some editions of Sports Illustrated from that year that chronicled Spitz's exploits, Bowman read them, but didn't pass them along to Phelps. Avoid the extraneous. Schedule the vital, such as having Phelps' wisdom teeth removed so that they aren't an issue during the Olympic year.
A sign reading "Beware of Bob" used to greet visitors to Bowman's office, but the man who steers Phelps is considerably mellower than the one who used to bounce from job to job. Bowman needed experience to grasp the dynamics at the sport's grass-roots clubs, where not all have global aspirations.
"It took me a while to realize that parents were part of the equation and that I wasn't the sole owner of knowledge in the universe," Bowman said. "After I figured that out, that maybe I didn't know absolutely everything, it got a lot easier."
Developing a prodigy requires a touch both delicate and demanding, and Bowman's college major, child psychology, was one of the fortuitous choices that linked him to Phelps. He is a taskmaster, albeit bolstered by the belief that he'll never be as hard on his swimmers as he was on himself.
Phelps was in diapers in spring 1986 when Bowman passed on his final year of swimming eligibility at Florida State. Having made a mess of his own competitive mind, he was eager to move on to coaching.
Given a month's worth of reading on management, motivation and technique by a coach, Bowman sped through the material in a single all-nighter.
"I really loved swimming as a sport, and I loved the people in it, but I overdid the whole cognitive analysis thing, and that hurt my swimming," Bowman said. "I came from a club [in Columbia, S.C.] that stressed a hard work ethic. I should have trained as a sprinter when I got to college, but I insisted on working with the milers. More work means better, right? I should have rested more."
