Olympics: Phelps Might Truly Be Touched With Greatness

Just how good is Michael Phelps? Good enough to stop the traffic in downtown Beijing so George Bush's motorcade could make its way to the Aquatic centre, certainly; and good enough to fill the thousands of seats that line the pool, terraced steeply upwards towards the roof.

But is he good enough to do what all these people are expecting him to do? What they've come to see him do? Good enough to justify the extraordinary hype that's greasing the wheels of all the American media's coverage? Good enough, in fact, to do what no other athlete in the 112-year history of the Games has done and win eight golds at a single Olympics?

I'm not sure he is. To win eight gold medals, to do what has never been done before, an athlete needs to belong in the tiniest percentile of sportsmen, the smallest, most elite group: the greatest of all time.

Well now he's one down, winning gold in this morning's 400m individual medley in a time that beat his own world record by 1.41 seconds. His closest challenger in this event, Hungary's Laszlo Cseh, was 2.32 seconds behind.

The man who had been built up as the main threat before the race, Phelps' team-mate Ryan Lochte, said beforehand that if they were level going into the final 50m of freestyle, he was sure he would win. They were, almost, level, and Cseh was only a sliver behind. All three men had been inside world record pace at that point. But Phelps accelerated away. There was no sense that either Cseh or Lochte could stay with him.

He finished more than a length clear of either. It was a staggering swim, and yes, for the first time I thought that maybe, just maybe, Phelps is touched with genuine greatness, and that our memories of what he does here may echo through all future Olympics, just as those of Mark Spitz, Carl Lewis and Jesse Owens do.

The odds are against it. We're always too ready to anoint the athletes of our own moment as being "great", but history is a more severe judge.

The US needs Phelps to be great; he is at the very center of the huge business that is American broadcasting and the media have used him as the hook on which they've hung their coverage. If you're American, Phelps is the biggest reason you have for watching the Games. But you can't award him the title before he's won.

What Phelps is attempting is as hard as any athletic feat in history, but he shouldn't get to wear the laurel until he's done it, and he's an awful long way from doing that. He'll be hoping that the abrupt manner in which the Star Spangled Banner cut out moments before its climax as he stood on the rostrum wasn't an omen for his own progress.

Crucially, Phelps' achievement will hinge on his ability to inspire his team-mates in the relays to follow him through in his race to greatness. That may be what undoes him. His next event is the 4x100m freestyle final. The Americans will be pitched against the Australians and, more worryingly for them, the French, who have four of the fastest 15 free stylers in the world in their squad, including world record holder Alain Bernard.

If Phelps is great, he will need to inspire his underdog team to success. It is a huge task. But it is exactly the kind of thing he needs to do to prove that he is not just the finest swimmer at the Games, but one of the greatest athletes in history.