Olympics: Phelps Wins Seventh Gold of the Beijing Games... Just

Only the 4x100 medley relay on Sunday now stands between Michael Phelps and Olympic history after a dramatic victory in the 100m butterfly which kept alive his dream of eight gold medals at a single Games. He has already matched Mark Spitz's 36-year-old record of seven golds and the fates appear to be firmly on his side.

With a few meters to go it seemed Phelps might have to settle for silver as the American-based Serb Milorad Cavic stormed towards the wall in the neighboring lane. It required a desperate final lunge to maintain Phelps' extraordinary sequence, the clock revealing he had beaten Cavic by the slimmest-possible margin of one-hundredth of a second in a time of 50.58sec.

It was the first time in seven events that Phelps has not broken a world record in winning in Beinjing but he will not be remotely bothered by such a minor detail. He did not get the fast start he had spoken about beforehand and was in seventh place at the turn. His final length, however, was a stormer and his telescopic reach just enabled him to pip a downcast Cavic. "When I took that lost stroke I thought I'd lost the race but it turns out that was the difference," said Phelps. " I had to take my goggles off first to make sure the (number) one was next to my name. I'm just lost for words. It shows that anything is possible if you put your mind to it."

In addition to everything else, it also qualified the 23-year-old Phelps for the $1m (£536,000) bonus offered by the swim wear company Speedo to anyone who could match Spitz's haul of seven golds in Munich in 1972. Together with the six gold medals he secured in Athens, the 'Baltimore Bullet' now has 13 golds, four more than any other individual athlete in history.

On another remarkable day of record-breaking action in the Water Cube, Britain's Rebecca Adlington smashed the women's 800m freestyle record to earn her second gold of the Games. Zimbabwe's Kirsty Coventry, who had already broken three world records in Beijing without securing a gold medal, finally achieved her cherished goal in the 200m backstroke while Brazil's Cesar Cielo Filho won the 50m freestyle title.