BEIJING – The race is not always to the swiftest. Sometimes, it goes to the guy most in need of a manicure.
Michael Phelps won his seventh gold medal of the Summer Olympics last night (San Diego time) by a margin about as minuscule as a fingernail fragment.
One one-hundredth of a second is a Balkanized blink, a measurement of time so narrow that it defies the naked eye. So when Phelps and Serbia's Milorad Cavic reached for the touch pad at the finish of the 100-meter butterfly, it was virtually impossible to tell whose fingers got there first.
“When I took that last stroke, I thought I lost the race there,” Phelps said. “But it turns out that was the difference. I'm just at a loss for words.”
Two forms of electronic timing showed Phelps at 50.58 seconds, with Cavic at 50.59, but Serbian officials were not so sure. They lodged a formal protest within minutes of the race, forcing officials to study slow-motion replays to reaffirm the result.
The Serbs were prepared to spoil the biggest splash in the history of their sport, but the video was sufficiently persuasive that Kenyan referee Ben Ekumbo reported Serbia's denied protest would not be appealed.
Darned if I could see the difference, but I've only watched the replay five times.
“It was evident from the video (that) it was an issue of strokes,” Ekumbo said. “(Phelps) was stroking and (Cavic) was gliding. According to the rules, we use an automatic timing system, and in today's case, the Omega timing system was working perfectly.”
Thus Phelps' quest to become the first Olympic swimmer to capture eight gold medals in a single Summer Games is an anticlimax now. There's only one race remaining on his schedule, and it's one the United States has never lost in Olympic competition: the men's 4x100 medley relay.
But Cavic had made it interesting. Cavic had made Phelps work. He played Joe Frazier to Phelps' Muhammad Ali, testing the champ in ways no one else had.
“Perhaps I'll always be the only guy in this competition who had a real shot at beating Phelps one-on-one,” said Cavic, formerly of Cal and Tustin High (class of 2002). “It was a real honor for me to be able to race with Michael Phelps and be in this situation where all eyes were on me.”
He had lost a gold medal by the smallest margin imaginable, yet Cavic quickly worked his way through his disappointment to an appreciation of the strokes of genius being made in the adjoining lane. Phelps' seventh gold matched Mark Spitz's 1972 Olympic record, raised his career medal count to 15 and reminded us all of how slight the difference can be between rejoicing and regret.
“It could be anything,” Cavic said. “Maybe perhaps shaving your fingers. . . . Right after my warm-up, my coach came over with some clippers and he cleaned up the back of my neck. He shaved the hair that was below my cap. Who knows, if he didn't do that, it might have been 50.60.
“One-hundredth of a second is something you can't show. It's that fast. If it was a Formula I race, perhaps they could show one-hundredth of a second.”
Michael Phelps is not fast enough for Formula I, but the 100 butterfly marked the first final of these Olympics in which he failed to set a world record. It marked the first time he had made a turn and appeared to be in serious trouble.
Phelps was seventh in the field of eight after 50 meters, 0.62 seconds behind Cavic and 0.34 behind American teammate Ian Crocker, the world-record holder.
“I knew I had to be within half a body length racing against Crocker,” Phelps said. “I race against him all the time (and) with his front-half speed, I'm sort of able to judge where I need to be at 50 meters to make up ground. If I had half a bod length, I knew I would be fine. When I saw Crocker at the turn, I knew Cavic would be somewhere with him. I could sort of see him out of the corner of my eye.”
As the race leader, Cavic lacked that luxury. He fell back on instinct and probabilities.
“I knew (Phelps) would be chasing me down at the end,” he said. “The last 15 meters, there was just no point to look over. I knew he was there. From my recollection, I don't remember actually looking. I just kind of saw his shadow inside my goggle.”
Michael Phelps' shadow is that much bigger now.
Tim Sullivan: (619) 293-1033; tim.sullivan@uniontrib.com
