Keith Dugganwatches as the Water Man writes another chapter in swimming history at the Water Cube

A HARD, smouldering rain fell across Beijing yesterday morning when Michael Phelps, the Water Man, began his remorseless pursuit of gold-medal immortality.

This was no ordinary morning in the Water Cube. The strange and beautiful blue square was locked down like a modern-day Forbidden City for the arrival of the Bush family to cheer on what was always destined to be an American coronation.

Word broke in the West by breakfast time: Phelps shaved his own world record by almost a second and a half in the 400-metre individual medley.

There were other elite swimmers in his slipstream, Hungary's Laszlo Cseh and Phelps's sometimes rival Ryan Lochte pounding the water for the silver and bronze honours. But it was Phelps's pool. All eyes were on him.

Even Bob Bowman, normally inscrutable and scientific about the successes of his prodigy, seemed a little bit stunned by what he had witnessed.

"It might be his best race," acknowledged the coach. "That time is so fast we might have a hard time topping it. To swim like that with all those expectations is something special."

Bowman is a self-confessed racing buff during those rare hours when he is not fine-tuning Phelps into a swimming marvel. Once he likened his pupil to the totemic 1970s thoroughbred Secretariat and yesterday the comparison seemed apt.

Phelps's brown eyes widened in joy and even surprise when he saw his record time of four minutes and 3.84 seconds on the electronic clock. Earlier, he had strolled onto the pool deck with his mind plugged into a music device, seemingly oblivious to the significance of the moment.

But afterwards, he looked like a man whose skin was tingling.

In the water, he had simply done what he does better than anyone else, falling into the old routine, all power and grace in the butterfly and then like a man lying back on his bed and watching television during the backstroke, when he briefly surrendered the lead to Lochte.

It hardly mattered. In the breaststroke he powered ahead, and at the turn for home in the freestyle, he had opened a gap that should best be measured in decades between his fiercest competitors.

It was a stunning performance, and though there were other medal races afterwards, it was Phelps's pool.

Hours afterwards, as the fans melted into the sultry, soaking noon and the swimmers flip-flopped back to the bus, Eddie Reese, the head coach of the USA swim team, stood alone on the footpath and took a deep breath of the soupy air and tried to place what he had just seen in the context of his long decades of watching the best swimmers.

"If you look at how far ahead of everyone else he was when he finished, it is hard to imagine a better race," he sighed happily.

"It was over by the second 50 of the breaststroke.

"Michael is talented, he works hard and he knows where he stands in all of this.

"He is aware of the history and he is aware of every up-and-coming 16-year-old out there as well. He is going to write his own chapter in swimming history. He has it all."

That is why he can command the presence of the Bush extended family and tycoon Bill Gates among his audience. The American president arrived in the loud, clamorous arena minutes before the beginning of Phelps's race.

There is something faintly preposterous about the sheer scale of all Olympic operations, and smuggling the US leader in and out of the Water Cube involved a huge number of cars and officials.

After Phelps and Lochte stood, hand-clasping hearts as a tinny version of Francis Scott Key's composition bounced around the arena, attention turned to Bush. A large crowd pressed against wires awaiting the briefest glimpse of the president as he emerged through the glass-cased Olympic Family entry.

He gave a brief wave to the people before he was ushered into the armour-plated presidential car by chisel jawed McBain cut-outs from the secret service. Ten smoked-glass cars formed the presidential motorcade.

There was a short and comical interlude when an excited Chinese cameraman wandered out onto the road in his eagerness to frame the perfect shot. It wasn't quite Tiananmen Square 1989, but for a few seconds a lone pedestrian managed to stall an imperious display of pomp by a superpower.

The impasse was broken when an electronic window was opened a few inches and a voice called out: "Hey, do you mind not blocking our cavalcade?"

It was the kind of rebuke you hear in fast-food queues, but it worked. Within seconds, the shimmering line of black cars had disappeared into the city mist.

All this for one young swimmer.

Michael Phelps has travelled a long way in a short time. This is his third Olympics and despite his transformation into the undisputed superstar of swimming, he has retained a likeably open and unaffected nature.

It is not so long since he was an anonymous child for whom the water was an escape from the everyday trials of adolescence. It was a theme he touched upon last year as he used his Facebook site, the litmus test for popularity among his generation, as an example of the way everyone loves a winner.

Phelps's page has been bombarded since he became famous. And though he kept his tone neutral, there were surely a few stinging memories of those times when he was neither hailed nor sought after, when he was, to many of his peers, invisible.

"It's funny. Every now and then you get on Facebook and you have people you see and you're like, wow, I went to school with them and they never said a single world to me and now they're trying to be my friend. I think it's funny."

He is not the first world champion to have felt the chill of school corridor meanness. Maybe that is one of the reasons why Phelps has always looked more comfortable in the pools than out of it. In the water, nobody can ever touch him. Cseh, the man who came closest here, admitted as much.

"Every time you think you are close to reaching him," he said, "he jumps to another level."

Early this morning, he returned to the Water Cube for the 100m freestyle, where the US team were hot favourites for gold. Two gold down for Phelps. Mark Spitz may well have company before the week is out.