It’s touch and gold for Phelps

After 3,200 metres and 16 races, Michael Phelps came down to a single stroke.

After 3,200 metres and 16 races, Michael Phelps came down to a single stroke. With five metres to go in the 100m butterfly final Saturday morning, Phelps realised he had misjudged the finish.

He had two choices: glide to the wall, kicking like crazy, or take an extra, awkward half-stroke. To his left, Milorad Cavic was having the race of his life. Phelps, who was seventh at the turn, had no room for error.

Most would have impulsively chosen to glide, but Phelps proved by the slimmest of margins what sets him apart. Following his instincts, he took an alligator-arm stroke and touched the wall. Cavic, a California-born Serb, hit the timing pad in full glide.

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Both spun around and stared at the video screen. In the moment it took the scoreboard to unscramble the results, the tension was palpable.

Phelps was timed in 50.58, a personal best and an Olympic record. Cavic, a California-Berkeley graduate, was one-hundredth of a second behind. Phelps had caught Spitz by a whisker. It was his seventh gold medal, tying Spitz’s record haul from the 1972 Munich Games and earning him a $1 million bonus from Speedo.

“I’m really at a loss for words,” Phelps said. “I’m excited. I just don’t know what to say.”

Serbian swimming officials had plenty to say, protesting the result. Officials from FINA, the sport’s international governing body, broke down the video to the 10-thousandth of a second, then upheld Phelps’s victory. “It’s very clear that the Serbian swimmer touched second after Michael Phelps,” the FINA referee Ben Ekumbo said.

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Cavic will never be confused with a shrinking violet. Before this, his claim to fame was getting himself barred from the European championships for wearing a T-shirt on the medal stand that read, “Kosovo is Serbia.”

On Friday, after posting the fastest time in the semi-finals, a 50.92, Cavic said it would be good for the sport if Phelps was thwarted in his bid for eight gold medals. Phelps’s coach, Bob Bowman, read Cavic’s quote Saturday morning and debated whether to share the comment with Phelps.

“When Bob told me, I was like, OK,” Phelps said. “When people say things like that, it fires me up more than anything.”

It boggled Phelps’s mind to think he had won back-to-back Olympic golds in the 100 butterfly by a total margin of five-hundredths of a second.

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For the first time in these Games, Phelps failed to set a world record in a final, falling 18-hundredths of a second shy of the three-year-old mark held by Crocker, who was fourth in 51.13. On this day, touching out Cavic and drawing even with Spitz was plenty good enough.

Adlington smashes mark

Rebecca Adlington smashed the oldest world record in swimming Saturday with her gold in the 800m freestyle. The Brit lowered American Janet Evans’s 19-year-old mark by 2.11 seconds. Adlington won in 8 minutes, 14.10 seconds. Evans set the mark of 8:16.22 in Tokyo on August 20, 1989, when Adlington was six months old.