Matthew Syed Yawns at Michael Phelps' 8 Wins & Reveals Olympic Sexual Feats

Matthew Syed is to Olympic coverage what Michael Phelps is to swimming, and now he’s bursting the Phelps worshipping bubble. Syed’s really had enough of the fainting over Phelps’ eight wins and argues that because swimming includes about a hundred barely distinguishable events, Olympic swimming medals just aren’t as valuable as medals in other events.

Wrote Syed:

Do not tell me that he is the greatest Olympian who drew breath because he has won more medals than any person in history.

If we are being honest, even the diversity of swimming disciplines has more than a touch of the absurd about it. Translated into track and field, we would have the 100metres sprint (renamed freestyle), the backward dash, the sideways shuttle and the sprint for those who like to run while rotating their arms like Mick Channon. I would make a fair bet that Usain Bolt, the Jamaica sprinter, would be nifty at all of them because, after all, fast-twitch muscle fibres are fast-twitch muscle fibres whether you are running flat out or doing so while wiggling your left ear lobe.

There is a lot of debate about whether Phelps is the greatest Olympian. I have tended to respond by invoking Milton Friedman, the economist who warned governments that printing lots of extra banknotes would not make a nation any wealthier because the cash would simply generate extra inflation.

The problem is that Friedman's insight has never made it into the consciousness of many of those who watch and write about sport. We tend to think that a gold medal is a gold medal, without recognising that if the IOC doubled the medal allocation for, say, badminton, it would halve the value of the prizes on offer.

I am not arguing that Phelps is a talentless nobody, merely that if swimming was about getting from A to B as fast as possible over a limited number of discrete distances, we would not be drooling quite as much over his (admittedly considerable) achievements.

He is, without question, one of the great Olympians and his performance in Beijing has been among the most brilliant in recent times, but to describe him as the greatest on the basis that he has won the most gold medals derives from the kind of blinkered thinking that ruined the economies of Latin America. But Phelps is a mere sideshow compared with the greatest beneficiary of what we might call Olympic hyperinflation.

If writing were an Olympic sport, anyone that compared Michael Phelps to the ruined economies of Latin America would deserve a medal. Almost as significantly, Syed has confirmed what we always suspected: Olympians get it on. A lot.

The former Olympian admitted: 

I am often asked if the Olympic village - the vast restaurant and housing conglomeration that hosts the world's top athletes for the duration of the Games - is the sex-fest it is cracked up to be. My answer is always the same: too right it is. I played my first Games in Barcelona in 1992 and got laid more often in those two and a half weeks than in the rest of my life up to that point. That is to say twice, which may not sound a lot, but for a 21-year-old undergraduate with crooked teeth, it was a minor miracle. 

Now if only you could perfect that badminton serve...