Focus, fitness, physique propel awesome Phelps

BEIJING (Reuters) - Michael Phelps was just 11 when his coach Bob Bowman called in his parents for a serious talk about their son's future. He told them the boy could become an Olympic champion if he just applied himself.

At a very young age it was clear that Phelps, who on Wednesday became the first Olympian to win 11 career gold medals, was destined for great things.

"It was mainly his physical talent and real competitiveness that stood out," Bowman told Reuters, recalling what had caught his eye in his mischievous charge.

Looking at him today, Bowman said Phelps has managed to move beyond great and become a once-in-a-lifetime athlete thanks to his mental strength.

"A number of things make him the swimmer he is, but I think it is largely psychological. He can relax and focus on what he is doing when under pressure and actually, this sort of environment makes him perform better," Bowman said.

"That is highly unusual."

In truth, there are many unusual things about Phelps that have combined to produce the greatest swimmer ever.

Seeing him up close as he emerges dripping from the pool, the first thing that strikes you is his physique.

He has the outline of a cartoon superhero, with broad shoulders and a huge torso tapering down to small hips and strikingly short legs -- a combination that provides minimum resistance beneath the waterline.

BIG PADDLES

Unlike most people, he also has an extraordinarily long arm reach, with his arm span some 3 inches longer than his 6 ft 4 inch height. This effectively means he has extra longer "oars" to propel a shorter body through the water.

Perfectly formed for the pool, he looks less assured on dry land, occasionally stumbling and knocking into things. Indeed last year, he broke his wrist trying to stop himself falling, briefly putting his Olympic adventure in jeopardy.

"He was always a big string bean and he was very awkward," his mother, Debbie, told reporters in Beijing this week.

Safely ensconced in water, he is another animal, cutting gracefully through the pool like an amphibious mammal.

This gift is clearly seen in his signature underwater turn, where he tends to go down deeper to the wall than other swimmers, performing a dolphin kick and rocketing back to the surface, often leaving the rest of the pack in his trail.

"Phelps has been using that as a weapon for a while," Russell Mark, biomechanics coordinator for USA Swimming, told Reuters this week at Beijing's Water Cube venue.

"Logic should say he shouldn't go down deep, but he beats people off that last wall. There is nothing scientific yet to explain why it is effective to take that trajectory."

STAYING POWER

His enormous body strength and affinity with water is obvious when you look at the sheer number of races he enters.

While most swimmers tend to specialize in one or two events, Phelps has entered eight races in Beijing, including the 400 and 200 meters individual medley, 200 meters freestyle and 100 and 200 meters butterfly.

At Beijing, if he makes all the finals as expected, he will swim an astonishing 17 races in just 9 days against the best in the world, a remarkable workload that few, if any, could match.

This astonishing resilience has no doubt been honed during years of incessant, obsessive training.

In a 2004 autobiography 'Beneath the Surface', Phelps revealed how he averaged 75km a week in training and had probably taken no more than four days off in the four years leading up to the Athens Olympics in 2004, none of them holidays.

"There are times in my sleep when I literally dream my race from start to finish,"2 he wrote.

"Other nights ... I visualize to the point that I know exactly what I want to do: dive, glide, stroke, flip, reach the wall, hit the split time to the hundredth, then swim back again for as many times as I need to finish the race."

His mother believes it is this single-mindedness coupled with his fierce ability to focus at race time that has lifted him into the pantheon of Olympic greats.

"It certainly wasn't mom's cooking," she told Reuters. "If someone says, 'What's for dinner?', I say, 'Which restaurant do you want to go to?' Cooking is not my thing."

(Additional reporting by Ken Wills and Alan Baldwin; editing by Miles Evans)

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