Please, gods of swimming: let him be real

BEIJING -- The oddly shaped athlete.

The incredibly shaped performances.

The strangely shaped expressions on the competitors who talk about him.

Watching Michael Phelps win six Olympic gold medals while helping to set six world records has become eerily like watching another unusually muscled man perform superhuman feats while resurrecting a sport and capturing a country.

Ten years ago, to be exact.

Guy by the name of Mark McGwire.

This is not an indictment. This is not an accusation. This is a wish.

Please, let this be clean. Please, let this be real.

Please, if Phelps can win his races on Saturday and Sunday to win eight gold medals and complete the greatest single Olympics performance in history, let that be the end of it.

No flunked drug tests. No flunked swimsuit tests. No tell-all books about clandestine doctors and cheating coaches.

America won't be able to stomach it. Swimming won't be able to survive it.

For once, please, let one of our heroes really be a hero.

Right now, I have no doubts, but I do have plenty of memories.

I documented McGwire's home-run chase with Sammy Sosa, and I remember this exact feeling.

You shake your head with every swing, because nobody ever swung that way before. You work your pen with every interview, because none of his colleagues can believe it. You call home with every record, because everyone back home is paying attention.

That is what is happening now, only it's happening in a swimming pool, and I truly hope it's not all wet.

Did you watch Friday morning? Of course you did. Everyone is watching, and everyone is swooning.

Phelps blew away the field in the final lap of the 200 individual medley, breaking a world record that he had set just last month and finishing four seconds ahead of second-place finisher Laszlo Cseh of Hungary.

Four seconds in swimming? That's like four touchdowns in football.

He was competing in his sixth Super Bowl this week and he's still winning by four touchdowns?

Then things really got nuts.

Twenty minutes later, he stepped on the podium to receive his gold medal.

About seven minutes after that, he jumped back into the pool to qualify second in the 100-meter butterfly.

He was so rushed, his gold medal was in his warmup jacket that he shed before the race.

"He was so tired, that 100 fly has been his best swim of the week," said Bob Bowman, Phelps' coach. "It was all mental."