Michael Phelps was born on June 30, 1985 in Baltimore.
Son of a school principal and a policeman.
He began to take an interest in swimming through his sisters, as he liked to watch them swim.
He was diagnosed with attention deficit and hyperactivity.
His "career" started at 7 years old. Phelps found swimming the sport that helped him to fight both problems.
He until 9 years old did not like to put his face in the water but when this discomfort was overcome he started to detach himself from the rest of his age swimmers.
At the age of 10 Phelps broke the national swimming record in his category. At that moment he realized that all records could be broken.
In 2000, Phelps was 15 years old, debuted at the Olympic Games in Sydney and became the youngest Olympic swimmer in US history.
In his first adventure in the Olympic games he reached the final of the 200m Butterfly and finished in 5th place.
The USA won 33 medals in swimming from the 48 swimmers in the delegation but Phelps was one of 17 who did not win any medals.
In 2011 at the age of 14 and 9 months old Phelps set his first world record for the 200m Butterfly style with a time of 1 minute, 54 seconds and 92 cents.
Becoming the youngest swimmer ever to break a world record.
After this feat Bob Bowman, Phelps' trainer, focused on making Phelps a swimming machine.
One of the things that both did in training was to define the time they wanted Phelps to do for each style without measuring efforts to achieve it.
In 2004, Phelps participated in the Olympic Games held in Athens.
This time he won a total of 8 medals, 6 of which were gold and 3 of bronze, and he also broke several Olympic records, for example in the 200m Meddley style (1:57.25) and in the 200m Butterfly style (1:54.04).
However, he was not satisfied with his performance, he wanted more, he wanted to be the best in history.
At the 2007 World Water Sports Championship held in Australia he won 7 gold medals and continued to break records after records.
In 2008, at the Olympic Games in Beijing, he won 9 gold medals in 8 events he participated in and he also broke 7 world records such as the 200m freestyle (1: 42.96) and the 200m Butterfly (1: 52.03) style.
The hardest test he had was the 100m butterfly where he won gold for un hundredths of seconds.
The 8 gold medals won in this edition broke the record, which was already 36 years old, of the highest number of medals and gold won in the same edition of the Olympic games, which were 7.
Here he became a swimming legend.
In 2009, Phelps was suspended for 3 months after he was caught smoking a drug.
He returned to competition in a race in Charlotte which he won.
However, in the World Cup held in Rome, Phelps was second in the 200m freestyle losing to the German Biedermann. He had never lost in this style in the past 4 years.
In the following tests he ended up shutting the critics by winning the 200m and the 100m Borboleta breaking the world record and becoming the first man to swim under 50 seconds.
In this world championship he won 5 medals (4 gold and 1 silver).
At 27, Phelps decided that the London Olympics in 2012 would be his last Olympic participation and the end of his career.
He had two well-defined goals for these Olympic games:
- overcome Larissa Latynina's record in total Olympic medals won;
- winning a third Olympic title in one of the styles;
The goal of the total number of medals was easily beaten, as Phelps added 6 more medals to his collection making a total of 22 Olympic medals.
Regarding the third championship in one of the Phelps styles, he was not only able to be three times champion of one style, but of two styles (200 Meddley and 100m Butterfly).
In addition to having managed to win another 8 medals (7 gold and 1 parata) he was the first swimmer to recover an Olympic title (200m freestyle) and the first to achieve the tetra in a style (200m Meddley).
Its total number in terms of Olympics forms 5 Olympics, 63 competitions, over 11800 meters swam and 28 gold medals.
