After winning the 200-meter butterfly and anchoring the 4x200 freestyle relay team to victory, Michael Phelps is now the rightful owner of TWENTY FREAKING ONE GOLD MEDALS. That puts him ahead of a lot of individual nations in the all-time rankings, and his career total could hit 23 if Phelps wins out. If he does, he could give two medals to nearly every member of the original Dream Team (Christian Laettner only gets one, obviously).
Please rise for the national anthem of Phelpsylvania
Twenty-three golds are entirely possible before Michael Phelps is done, which is just absurd.Watch on YouTube | Subscribe to SB Nation on YouTube
And sure, we know that this isn’t a totally fair comparison because there are roughly 78 opportunities for swimmers to win gold medals while other talented athletes only get a couple shots every four years. It’s a reasonable argument and yet it ignores this: there’s not a single other swimmer in Olympic history who even got to ten gold medals.
Granted, if Phelps were doing this for someone other than the United States we’d be saying it was all inflated and didn’t really count. But he’s not! USA!
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