Phelps Does It!

....... I'm going to try to overcome my speechlessness here and actually say something about Phelps and his record 8 gold medals. EIGHT?! Simply unbelieveable. I'm watching replays right now, and... what do you say to that? Words fail to describe it, perhaps the chills I get watching the medal ceremony as the national anthem blares over the speakers comes closer to hitting it. But I'm not sure.

Race number 7, the 100m butterfly, was jaw-dropping. 1/100th of a second. What? Can something actually be that close? I watched that replay over and over and over again. Did he actually touch first? It looked like, all the way up until the very end that Cavic was going to take that race, but then they annouced that Phelps had won... and I'll be honest here, I thought they were mistaken. But you watch the replay, and you realize that he did actually touch first, even if it was by one-one-hundredth of a second. Then of course Cavic's coach had to protest it, which left that little nagging discomfort during the whole course of the medal ceremony, but that was thankfully overturned. Like the announcers said, "magical".

I almost care that he only set an Olympic record instead of a world record on that.

Moving on to medal 8 of 8... I'm always nervous about relays, since it's not necessarily just about Phelps' talent, but also the talents of everybody else on the team. Thankfully though, Team USA came through in spades. Did you see Phelps pull away during the second 50m of his split? That man is simply amazing. Then, during the last split of the race, I was edge of my seat... but Lezak is awesome and we all know it.

Cool stat I pulled from the announce team here: There have been 112 modern day Olympic Games (summer and winter), over 100,000 atheletes have competed... and only one has won 8 medals in a single Olympics.

That certainly is one of the greatest - if not the greatest - moment in sports history. Hell, I'm excited, and I'm never really excited about the Olympics.

Hats off to Michael Phelps. What an amazing accomplishment. So that gives him a combined total of thirty-two world records, tied with Spitz, who was also the previous holder of 7 gold medals in a single Games. 8 gold medals... 7 world records... 1 Olympic record... the best moment in Olympic history.

I think this will be my last Olympic update. Aside from this, there's little I care about, and come on, there's very little that can compare to 8 gold medals. On that note, I'd like to leave with a thought I actually pulled from an advertisement for Visa that ran in Sports Illustrated. I think this is very, very powerful.

Maybe it's not where an athelete's from

that makes us root for them.

Maybe it's not the flag on their back,

or the anthem that we hear when they win

that makes us cheer.

Maybe it's simply that they are human.

And we are human.

And when they succeed, we succeed.