Here’s the thing nobody tells you about smashing records and becoming an overnight hero: It actually stinks.
It stinks because you don’t know who your friends are anymore, and every nanosecond of your life is a photo or YouTube op for the schemers and opportunists on the planet. It stinks because no matter how rich you become and how many impossible goals you attain, there is somebody waiting in the weeds with the latest techno gadget set on stun and humiliation.
These are the lessons hopefully learned last week by Michael Phelps, the 23-year-old swimmer who has now given the world 14 gold medals and a photo of himself with somebody’s bong in his mouth. The picture first appeared in the News of the World, a British tab of questionable ethics. But if it hadn’t surfaced there, it would have emerged somewhere else soon enough. You can’t go around setting the world afire in a pool and then expect to light up on your own time.
Fact is, you don’t have your own time anymore.
So Phelps was caught doing something very dumb, presumably smoking marijuana during a November party at the University of South Carolina, and now we get a flurry of damage-control statements from all the expected sources. His handlers tried at first to squelch the story. Phelps himself has come off directly enough with an apology, though like Bill Clinton he didn’t actually admit to inhaling.
His only defense was hormonal insanity, which can be paraphrased as, “I’m still just a kid, really. What do you want?”
“I engaged in behavior which was regrettable and demonstrated bad judgment,” he said. “I’m 23 years old and despite the successes I’ve had in the pool, I acted in a youthful and inappropriate way, not in a manner people have come to expect from me. I promise … it will not happen again.”
The U.S. Olympic Committee said Phelps had “failed to fulfill” his responsibilities, but hoped he can learn from the incident. The International Olympic Committee said, “He apologized … We have no reason to doubt his sincerity and his commitment to continue to act as a role model.”
He may just get away with it, sort of. The lark took place while he was out of competition and training, so the existing World Anti-Doping Agency laws don’t really apply to marijuana in this instance – nor should they. This is a recreational drug that surely will not help him defeat the Serbians and the French at the next world championships.
Phelps may have jeopardized his participation in a politically correct drug accuracy lab experiment in which he has enrolled. But in the past he’s never tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, just for a stupefying one – alcohol, when he was nailed on a DUI in 2004.
This is strike two, in other words. And by acting like a naughty kid, there is a very good chance Phelps will lose at least one youth-targeted sponsor, Kellogg’s Cornflakes, which is unlikely to advertise itself as a cereal custom-made to tame the munchies. Other endorsements with Omega and Mazda appear safer.
His agent at Octagon, Peter Carlisle, issued yet another statement: “Michael takes this very seriously and has spoken with his sponsors to personally apologize. We are encouraged by their support.”
It would seem Phelps has a choice here: He can either become the 24-hours-a-day model of perfect comportment that he tried so very hard to project during the Beijing Games. Or he can go off and have some fun, put mouth to bong during the offseason and lose a ton of money.
There is one thing he can’t do, however. Phelps can’t pretend to be one thing, and then act in a fashion utterly contrary to his image.
Because if he does that, he’s going to get caught again. Those are the rules in 2009, when a young man can’t take a breath of fresh air or stale cannabis without it being recorded, published and analyzed.
Phelps is no longer Phelps, he must realize. He is the man who bettered Mark Spitz, who never once faltered in the pool and told reporters he was here to make swimming a major sport. His life is ours now, until we tell him otherwise.
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