Traditional Chinese detective stories often work to a narrative structure familiar to other cultures of the East. The criminal is known from the start and the storyteller’s skill is revealed by how s/he holds the reader’s attention in getting to that foretold revelation.

Michael Phelps’s method bears kinship to that format. By registering himself for eight events, and thereby for 17 races in nine days, he was not just setting himself up to take more gold medals that any swimmer before — or specifically more than Mark Spitz’s seven golds at Munich 1972. Phelps has never mentioned that he seeks a record, or eight golds.

Like those storytellers in this ancient land, we know greatness has come to Phelps but we don’t know yet the details of how that greatness will be customised to his feat.

On a day after he set the sixth world record while taking his sixth gold medal (200 m individual medley, 1:54.23), he showed the first signs of fatigue. They asked him why he didn’t show emotion after the victory. I must conserve my physical and emotional energy, he said. It’s a tough race tomorrow.

Tough, why? It could be that it is his shortest individual race, the 100-m butterfly today. Or that the toll is telling on him, physically and mentally. Or that it is a race where he has serious competition, Serbian Milorad Cavic and American Ian Crocker who own the two fastest times in the 200-m butterfly.

(This may remain just a factoid but it adds historical context to the race Phelps is enrolled for on Sunday, the 4x100m medley relay. At Athens, after he took gold in 100-m butterfly, and Crocker the silver, Phelps, then 19 years old, declared that he’d cede his berth in the medley relay to Crocker, giving him a chance to get a gold of his own.)

... contd.