ATHENS LOCKER ROOM/ TOM HUMPHRIES: A couple of years ago, at the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, I began a column by noting how little I expected to enjoy the speed skating spectacle of Apolo Ohno. He was too hyped, too good-looking, too oddly named, too much. And too American.
A day later my screen melted. A man, short of temper and patience with my ilk, had read the first few paragraphs and dashed off some volcanic lava in the form of an email. I was denounced as more un-American than a passel of ayatollahs.
I was what was wrong with society today. I was a threat to the modern world. The sort of person who made all right-thinking people sick to the cores of their wholesome beings.
Great joy. I feigned not to understand. He read the remainder of the column. There was an exchange of emails. Me baffled, wounded. He contrite.
I liked Apolo Ohno. He was sporting and funny and, frankly, I wouldn't have gone to the speed skating if he hadn't been in it.
That's America and the Games for you. The Yanks are what you most expect to dislike yet occasionally most appreciate about the Olympics.
They are the superpower. Their money may have turned the event into a corporate theme park, and their communications media largely pay for and decide how we see the Games (which is generally America versus the World).
They carry it well, though. Every time, every Olympics, they seem to come up with somebody with enough chutzpah to steal the limelight and hold it for a while.
Since Mark Spitz, the first American Olympian I am old enough to remember, there's been the haughty Carl Lewis, the loveable Ed Moses, the imperious Michael Johnson, Marion Jones, the Dream Team, Flo-Jo and so on and on: people with enough talent and enough ego - and sometimes enough dope - to stand up and fill the big stage.
Often they fail. Often we cheer their failures. That's cool. That's the risk they took. They put the pressure on themselves. We jacked it up. Telly helped. They told the world what they were going to do. The drive for five. The golden spikes. The long fingernails. The boasting. They put some show into the business.
This time it's the turn of Michael Phelps, a long, skinny kid from Baltimore who hit the pool this weekend touted as the guy who could beat Spitz's record of seven golds.
Even though he looks as natural as a dolphin in the water, there's not a chance. Still, Speedo, in the spirit of Barnum, have offered a million bucks if he wins seven golds. The kid says he'll be happy with just one, but the marketing has been clever.
Phelps is everywhere. This first week of Olympic activity is Phelps Time. He's up against Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband, among others, and he is in at least one relatively weak US relay team (in fact, neither freestyle relay team is especially fancied), but who cares? He'll provide entertainment.
He's 19. What's to lose? Life is still ahead for him. He'll be wealthy and experienced and have astonishing memories before he knows where he is.
He seems able to carry it. The shiny American mags are full of him, carrying pictures of him endorsing just about anything that sells. Cadillacs. NBC. Argent Mortgages. Buy.com. Speedo, etc, etc.
He seems genetically designed for the pool. Perfectly aquadynamic with a natural style. He's 6ft 5in long and when he spreads his arms he has a span of 76½ inches. His technique has artists going back to the swimming manuals to make the style look less clunky.
And he has the versatility of the true natural. He'll contend for butterfly, freestyle, backstroke and breaststroke, and he'll look good doing each.
That will be a big part of the first week here. Watching him go for it. Watching him strive towards the targets set out for him. Enough modest heroes for a while; let's watch somebody aim for the sky. That's entertainment.
On Wednesday, he will swim the semi-final of the 100-metre fly just 21 minutes after the final of the 200-metre individual medley.
Without the involvement of the opposite sex, could there be a more thrilling half-hour in a 19-year-old's life?
All going well, he'll swim 20 races this week. It's for drama like that we watch the Games.
And we trust him. We have to, really. A 19-year-old kid with a coach who's known him since he was paddling?
Swimming, we hope, is coming out of the moral trough cheats have kept it in for decades. Phelps seems a defiantly ordinary young kid. His freestyle rival, Ian Thorpe, is aggressively anti-drug. Between them they might produce some theatre we can believe in.
The last few Games have been bad times for swimming. The East German wündermädchen, the Chinese, the poison of Atlanta. Even Sydney was horrible, the atmosphere polluted by doubt and questions which had to be asked. It was nasty and ugly and a low moment for a sport founded on purity but existing on denial.
Athens will have its cheats. They'll huff and they'll puff and they'll threaten to call their solicitors and lawyers. They'll come over all indignant when asked about dope and they'll make the right noises about what the solution is. We've seen it so often. We'll know, though. They'll know.
Athens, though, will have Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe and a handful of others. Sure, some of the cheats will be Aussies and some will be Americans, but that pair are worth believing in.
Once again America, which runs the show, has given us a star, a headline act to make the show worth watching. And watching him, you can't help thinking that, love him or loathe him, it's necessary to the future of the Games and his sport that you always believe in him.
It's that important.
