Greatest of all time

Twenty years after he first began to swim in suburban Baltimore, as a seven-year-old boy whose mother thought a pool might be the one place where he could conquer his chaotic excess of energy, Michael Phelps officially became the greatest Olympian in history.

Twenty years after he first began to swim in suburban Baltimore, as a seven-year-old boy whose mother thought a pool might be the one place where he could conquer his chaotic excess of energy, Michael Phelps officially became the greatest Olympian in history. At exactly 9.04on Tuesday night, during a tumultuous session at the Aquatics Centre in Stratford, Phelps won his 19th Olympic medal, and his first gold of these Games, in the 4x200m relay.

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He had finally broken the record held by Larisa Latynina. The gymnast from the former Soviet Union was awarded the last of her 18 medals in 1964. But Phelps's extraordinary feat was layered with the ambivalence of earlier shock and disappointment - as a much younger and uncelebrated rival stripped away his old invincibility.

Drawing level
Phelps had equalled Latynina's tally an hour before he swept past it. But a twist was buried deep inside a moment that was meant to be swathed in glory. The 200m butterfly, the event that has belong-ed to him for over a decade, ended in defeat and a silver medal when the South African Chad le Clos produced a blistering finish that just beat Phelps to the wall. It was a conclusion that defined the exhilaration and pathos of sport. One of his greatest triumphs as an Olympian was entwined with a loss in a discipline in which he was meant to be indestructible. Undefeated at every Olympic and world championship final in the 200m butterfly since 2001, Phelps had not found the expected refuge from recent doubts and disappointments. The familiar embrace of his old supremacy had been ripped away from him the 20-year-old Le Clos.

Mixed emotions
This has been a strange and often uneasy Olympic Games for Phelps. He had cut a dejected figure on the opening night of London 2012 when he finished in a dispiriting fourth place in the 400m individual medley. The winner of that race, his team-mate Ryan Lochte, was hailed again as the new king of the pool. Meanwhile the old monarch, Phelps, reacted bluntly. "It was just a crappy race," he said.

It was the first time Phelps had failed to win a medal in an Olympic final since his debut at the age of 15 in 2000. At those Olympics in Sydney, Phelps's mother, Debbie, knew that his diagnosed ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder) was helped by a total immersion in swimming. His anger towards his father, Fred, who had separated from his mother, was also soothed in the pool.

"I've always felt most at home in the water," Phelps once said at the height of his powers. "I disappear from the world. That's where I belong."

Slow buildup
The long slow buildup to these Olympics had suggested the opposite. In the years after the record haul in Beijing in 2008, it often looked as if Phelps had grown bored of laying waste to rivals. Clearly, he was sick of the unremitting training schedule that underpinned his great prowess. The boy who once could not concentrate for long on anything had become a man of singular focus — but, in the wake of Beijing, and the six gold and two bronze medals he had also won in Athens in 2004, Phelps had almost had enough of a fixation with victory.