Olympics: Michael Phelps Wins Two More Golds As Records Tumble

Michael Phelps has sealed his fourth and fifth gold medals of the Beijing Games, winning the men's 200m butterfly final in a world record time of 1:52.03 before helping the US team set another world best in winning the 4x200m relay.

On a morning in which records tumbled at the National Aquatics Centre, the American pipped Laszlo Cseh of Hungary by 0.67sec in the butterfly final, with Japan's Takeshi Matsuda taking the bronze in 1:52.97. Early challenger Moss Burmester of New Zealand came in fourth.

Phelps led from the halfway point but was pushed hard in beating his own previous best by 0.06sec ahead of Cseh and Matsuda. An hour later Phelps was back in the pool with his American team-mates to win the men's 200m freestyle relay in a world-beating time of six minutes 58.56 seconds.

The victories keep the 23-year-old on target to win an unprecedented eight gold medals in the Chinese capital, and his overall tally of Olympic golds now stands at 11, making him the most successful ever athlete at the Games. Even more remarkably, each of his five medals so far in Beijing have come in world best times and he is within reach of Mark Spitz's record of seven golds in one games. All of Spitz's 1972 golds also came in record times.

Phelps' reaction to his first triumph of the day was characteristically nonchalant, and he added that he had been disturbed by a problem with his goggles. "My goggles filled up with water all the time and I had difficulty seeing the walls," he said afterwards. "I wanted a world record, I wanted a 1.51 or better but under the circumstances, it's not a bad result."

Earlier France's Alain Bernard and Australian Eamon Sullivan traded world records in the men's 100m freestyle. Bernard clocked a time of 47.20sec in winning the first semi-final, beating the previous mark of 47.24sec set by Sullivan in the 4x100m relay earlier this week.But Sullivan promptly surpassed the Frenchman's time in the second semi-final, registering a time of 47.05sec to reclaim the record and set up a tantalizing final showdown tomorrow.

Another world record was broken in the women's 200m freestyle, Italian Federica Pellegrini taking gold in a time of 1:54.82 to better her own mark set earlier in the week by 0.63s. Slovenia's Sara Isakovic took the silver ahead of home favorite Jiaying Pang with Britain's Caitlin McClatchey sixth in a time of 1:57.65.

In the women's 200m butterfly, Britain's Jemma Lowe and Ellen Gandy failed to qualify for tomorrow's final, Lowe missing out by only 0.14sec. Lowe was inside world record pace after 50 and 100m before fading in the closing stretch to finish third in the first semi-final in 2:07.87.

That still looked good enough for her to advance but six swimmers were faster in the second semi-final in which Gandy finished eighth in 2:10.60. Ruing her failure to progress, Lowe said: "I've gone out under world record pace before, I died a lot on the last length and on the last few meters my arms were really struggling."