…you probably are wondering why there are sports on during the daytime and not soap operas. Enough with the Phelps as greatest Olympian ever, if you think he’s the greatest Olympian of these Beijing Games, you’re nuts.

Everything you knew about Carl Lewis and Michael Johnson can go to hell. Compared to, everything you knew about this Spitz dude can go to hell. Who really knows Spitz? Chances are, you at least gave a damn about Lewis and Johnson at some point in time.

See, track at least matters, a little bit. Swimming? Tougher? Much more strenuous workout? Sure, sure.

When it comes to competition, however, track and field events are still premium compared to Swimming. The two single toughest races to win at any Olympic games, because you’re always going against the Best of the absolute Best, are the 100m and the 200m on the track.

Not everyone can swim.

I’m not even talking about the level in which Phelps cut through the water. I’m talking swim. Some folks are straight adverse to that notion.

So, what Phelps has done. Yeah, it’s impressive. Damn impressive. When it comes to swimming, who else you got ahead of Phelps? No one.

Contrast that to a sprint. Not everyone gets in the water. But, everyone, and damn, I certainly do mean everyone, can relate to a sprint.

Before you picked up a baseball bat and took a cut, you likely put finger to pavement, grass, beach, whatever surface in front of you. You had someone next to you. Friend, sibling, some jerk, whoever. Someone gave you a start and BOOM, you were running.

Point is, running is done the World over. It is universal and it is to our core.

Most of the Olympics are speciality games. Gymnastics. Diving. How often do you see Volleyball? HANDBALL? Yeah, it looks crazy fun to just chuck a ball and run around and combine soccer/basketball, but if a team rattles off shutouts in every handball game to win the Gold: the GREATEST Handball run ever…it does not suddenly surpass basketball or soccer. But, with Phelps, that’s what we’re trying to do.

Sprinting is not a speciality event. It’s one of the few events at the Olympics of such nature. And, within that, there are three races. The 100m, 200m and the 400m. The 800m and 1500m, while on the same track, take a different type of athlete altogether. So, please, don’t hold it against Usain Bolt that he has less chances to win Gold Medals and can’t rack up a Medal Count as impressive as what Phelps did.

Because Bolt did something that everyone can do and where the competition is at a much higher level than what Phelps faced. If you put 100 people in a building and tell them to work on running the 100m track for a year and 10 people in a pool and tell them to work on swimming for a year, it is likely that the track meet at the end of a year is going to have more intense competition than the swimming. With a large sample size, you weed out the pretenders. Swimming is still working with a small sample size, while sprinting has the largest sample size of any athletic event at the Olympic Games. That means something. When you call Phelps the greatest Olympian of all time, you overlook what that means.

The 100/200 sprint double has not been done since Carl Lewis did so in 1984. The list of athletes to win gold in the 100 and 200 now sits at three: Jesse Owens, Carl Lewis and Usain Bolt. With a list like that, don’t tell me that Phelps is better because he can do the breaststroke and the fly.

Everyone can run and Usain Bolt is better than everyone.

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