‘Will there ever be a boy born who can swim as fast as a shark?’

Micheal Phelps’s three-month suspension, which was doled out by USA Swimming after a picture surfaced in a British red-top newspaper showing him inhaling from a marijuana pipe, ended today.

And the freak is back in the circus.

He admits however that he drew up and pros and cons list for both swimming and quitting.

Here he is racing CNN news hound Anderson Cooper not long after the Olympics…

Imagine how fast he’ll go now he’s not sponsored by Cheech and Chong. I wrote about one of the American’s races in Beijing as part of a ‘sporting highlights’ series at the turn of the year.

BEFORE the bells toll on 2008 next week, an extra second will be added to the last minute of the year. Our warming and expanding planet is an unreliable timekeeper and the subsequent discrepancy with our atomic clock causes a world of practical difficulties — like large financial transactions, reliant on precise Wall Street time stamps vanishing.

And for every millisecond the atomic clock is out, global positioning systems are approximately 1,000m inaccurate; that’s a fairly important one thousandth of a second if you’re recuperating in an Iraqi hospital, one kilometre up the road from a US army missile target.

So on December 31, the Director of Time (yes he exists), — a man who measures delicate factors like the wind on mountains slowing the rotation of the Earth — will add that extra second to our year. Only one other man operated in such minute fractions of time this year — and he didn’t need a Sat-Nav to find his way into the history books.

Michael Phelps transformed the Water Cube in Beijing into the centre of the universe in August, stopping time as millions watched his truly historic efforts. He ultimately bagged eight shiny, new gold medals to go with the half dozen already on the sideboard from Athens, four summers previously.

His ascent to the summit of Mount Olympus though was not without its obstacles. His primal scream unleashed after an unlikely US relay win shook the foundations of the Great Wall and conveyed the effort expanded for his team. On the way to nicking his fourth final victory his goggles — strapped on beneath two state-of-the-art swim caps — started to fill with water. Blindly, he was compelled to rely on counting his metronomic strokes to find the wall safely. He found it first.

But his show-stopping turn, and one which will live long in Jimmy Magee’s memory is the finger-tip, heart-in-mouth win in the 100m butterfly over Serbia’s Milorad Cavic to seal the penultimate star in a constellation of gold.

If this Hollywood story will be told and retold for generations, let it be against the backdrop of an equally-memorable US Presidential election, a global financial melt-down, and a muggy Saturday morning in the Orient as China at last threw open its doors to us all. And though set in the east, this was a Western; with two rivals destined to ultimately duel.

Cavic — renowned as the man in this particular event — and Phelps crashed into the wall at what seemed like the same moment. It had been an epic tussle that saw the American reel in the Serb who started explosively. Like a high-pitch call only dogs can hear; the human eye could not separate the two at the finish. The world stopped spinning on its axis — and when we came up for air after what seemed like an eternity, the electronic clock had separated them by that one hundredth of a second. It bares repeating; one-hundredth of a second. A measure of time, we perhaps cannot fathom. But with it immortality for Phelps; nothing for Cavic.

That jaw-dropping, cliff-hanging denouement to the saga has since been played and replayed on TV and online more than JFK’s final moments in Dallas. Sports Illustrated published a series of photographs that seemingly shows Cavic was first to hit the touch pad, which is triggered by three kilograms per square inch of pressure. Keyboard warriors have argued for thousands of man-hours on websites; some claiming the win was a corporate conspiracy to keep Phelps on the yellow brick road to his landmark eight. But there was no grassy knoll from where this plot was hatched. No second gun. Cavic admits Phelps won fair.

With his eastern promise ultimately fulfilled, the unassumingly young lad with the Big Friendly Giant’s appetite and ears was shot into a whole new branding stratosphere. He now orbits in the marketing universe alongside Tiger, Jordan and Becks. He recently revealed his mongrel Herman has been receiving six-figure offers from prospective advertisers. Presumably advertising executives push brown envelopes under the kennel door.

But the hype is merely white noise; the hard yards are made daily in a local pool complex in an earthy city on America’s east coast where the collars are the bluest hue in the spectrum. Here’s a local hero who reflects his hometown’s down-to-earth sensibilities.

The journalist and philosophical writer Malcolm Gladwell asserts in his recently-released book ‘Outliers: The Story of Success’ — which focuses on ‘geniuses’, sporting and otherwise — that for someone to be an expert at something they must first complete 10,000 hours of practice in their chosen field.

How many hours did Phelps spend in the pool many miles from the exalted Water Cube with his chlorine-stained eyes fixed firmly on the prize? And how many of those hours did it take to shave one-hundredth of a second off his butterfly? Not far off 10,000 maybe. Genius.

But one swimmer does not a sporting highlight make. And for every Mozart that Gladwell may put forward as a genius, there’s a wretched and foiled Salieri, toiling in his wake. Cavic though accepts his fate as the ‘nearly man’, the pub-quiz question for all eternity, despite the wafer-thin margin of victory. Though when Phelps recently derided Cavic’s last-instant tilt of the head as both sets of hands reached for the wall, he drew some venom from the erstwhile gracious California-educated Serb.

And so after the penultimate sweaty, snatch at a gold, the 23-year-old — fuelled by a 12,000-calorie-a-day diet now more famous than that of Dr Atkins — went on to achieve the impossible. While usurping Mark Spitz’ record of seven wins in one Games he and sprinter Usain Bolt – who shredded the 100m record on the track later that same Saturday in August – became the twin towers that cast the longest shadow over Beijing.
The Jamaican brought flair, fun and speed, lighting up the Bird’s Nest as he nonchalantly beat the clock; but Phelps made it stop.