Olympics provide a rare August sporting treat

Normally, August is my least favorite sports month of the year. College sports are dormant. Professional baseball is grinding along, the excitement of the September pennant races still on the horizon. Pro, college and high school football are going through the worst portion of the season: training camp. Coaches pray each day will pass without a major injury, and players quickly grown weary of beating up on the fellow teammates, while fans must suffer through the final days of the offseason by reading practice reports and discussing intrasquad scrimmages.

Good thing 2008 is an Olympic year.

I don’t remember the 2004 Olympics in Athens providing as much excitement as the first week of the Beijing games have. As of Saturday night, two storylines have developed that reminded me what makes that Olympics so much fun as a spectator — the honor of watching world-class athletes perform at their best, and thrill of cheering for the red, white and blue.

SWIMMING

Michael Phelps can now be considered the greatest Olympic athlete in the history of the modern games. Winning eight gold medals in eight events takes a little bit of luck, and Phelps got that when the USA pulled off an impossible comeback in the final 25 meters of the 4x100 freestyle relay to edge France. His victory in the 100-meter butterfly — his seventh gold and the only event in which he did not set a world record — was even more spectacular, and might not have been awarded in previous decades when timing devices could not detect a difference of .01 seconds.

Phelps went to Beijing with what many considered an impossible goal. Olympic glory is magnified because the opportunity only presents itself once every four years. The World Series, the Super Bowl and NBA Finals are held every year, giving players in those sports the chance to claim supremacy every 12 months. For some Olympic athletes, a lifetime of training is followed by just one shot at Olympic gold.

The fact that Phelps was able to win eight gold medals at one Olympic games is amazing. It has never been done before and probably will never happen again. Phelps, 23, could still be one of the world’s best swimmers when the 2012 games come to London, and he would only be 31 years old in 2016. If he is still around, he will probably end his career with more than 20 Olympic gold medals, but the odds of him winning eight or more again are virtually impossible.

I hope everyone can appreciate just how special his achievement this past week was.

GYMNASTICS

Gymnastics may be the ultimate “Olympic sport," under the definition of “a sport that the general public has no interest in for 3 years and 11 months yet everyone suddenly becomes an expert on when the Olympics arrive.”

While Phelps and other swimmers can maintain their world-class status for more than a decade, the lifespan of a world-class gymnast is short. Sixteen is supposed to be the minimum age, and by the time a young woman is 20, the physical pounding and natural maturing of the body is usually too much to overcome. So, for Nastia Liukin, 18, and Shawn Johnson, 16, everything they have worked for in their short-lived lives was on the line Thursday afternoon. Two girls — friends and roommates — had the same goal, and both knew that their own success would mean their friend’s failure.

Where a little girl finds the desire to hurl herself through the air, twisting and contorting her body in ways that don’t seem humanly possible, is beyond me. Where they find the courage to actually put their body through the physical punishment required to master those skills is even more amazing. So, as I sat watching Liukin and Johnson prepare to do their floor exercise, the final event of the all-around competition, I found myself cheering for them. I wasn’t fired up the way TV cameras captured Bela Karolyi inside the NBC studios, but I was on the edge of my seat, pumping my fist and exhorting them to stick every landing.

Part of it was national pride, wanting to see the two American girls finish on top. But the other part of me was cheering for them simply to succeed because they deserved it. Most of us will never know what it takes to have a chance at being the best at anything. Liukin and Johnson were at the Olympics because they had earned it, but now they still had to execute when it mattered most. One mistake, and a lifetime of work would come up short.

Liukin and Johnson both gave flawless performances. With the pressure at its highest, they both met the challenge. Because it was a competition, there had to be a winner, and Liukin took the Olympic gold, while Johnson, the 2007 world champion, had to settle for the silver.

But on that night, there were no losers.