Industry News: Exclusive Excerpts of Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion

PHOENIX, Arizona, October 22. THIS week, Swimming World Magazine will feature three exclusive book excerpts from Bob Schaller’s newly-released book Michael Phelps: The Untold Story of a Champion.

Michael Phelps is an American sports hero, perhaps the greatest Olympic athlete the world has ever known. His unprecedented eight gold medals in the 2008 Summer Olympics have made him a superstar. But his journey to Olympic immortality is every bit as compelling as his achievements in the pool. From learning to cope with ADHD to the story of how Phelps became the greatest swimmer ever, Phelps’ tale is told in full detail here for the first time.

The author, Schaller, has known Phelps and his coach for more than eight years, and has extensively interviewed him, along with his mother, sisters, coach, and teammates. Filled with revelations, career statistics, photographs, and insightful analysis of how Phelps achieved the seemingly impossible, this is a must-read for anyone who wants to learn the complete story behind the legend.

Purchase the book now!

From Chapter 10:

Ben Wildman-Tobriner was coming off a big 2007. While Phelps won seven golds at the 2007 World Championship, Ben was another who got a lot of attention for winning the 50 freestyle against the fastest field in history at Worlds.

“My goal was to final,” he said of the 2007 gold medal at Worlds. “I mean, I didn’t necessarily expect to win that title, if you want to call it that, but I knew I could potentially medal. So I exceeded expectations.”

Before the Olympics, Wildman-Tobriner was finishing up his studies at Stanford and applying to medical school. In fact, in its “coverage” of the Beijing Olympics, the celebrity news TV show, “Inside Edition”, showed him working out shirtless, and called him a “real-life Dr. McDreamy.”

“A real life Dr. McDreamy, huh?” Wildman-Tobriner wrote on Facebook after hearing about the show. “I’ll have to try to get my hands on a copy.”

Wildman-Tobriner admits he was shy as a child. He started out slow in swimming, and is not a fan of two-a-day swim workouts – called “doubles” – for children, because it burns them out and causes swimming to dominate their lives. Ben was a lefty pitcher and first baseman in baseball, though he had to stop in middle school when he chose to pursue swimming at an elite level. Now, he can be seem strumming his guitar, which worked out well when he first got to Stanford and played music written by his roommate.

Though he is “book smart” to the highest degree, as a child, he was also artistically inclined in some ways, and made as an elementary student a picture frame and decorated it – inside it is a picture of little Ben in front of a mural he made with his class, and that picture still sits on his father’s bureau.

He said his time at Stanford was not the academic cut-throat atmosphere that many top schools are thought to harbor. He said he liked hearing new ideas from a diverse crowd of bright people. He said it was not unusual for him to walk into his dorm and hear a concert pianist practicing, and remembers another student who worked for the web browser company FireFox, and then Netscape. As a biochemistry major, Wildman-Tobriner liked studying medical device innovation, though he was unsure that, even after medical school, whether he’ll be a doctor or be a researcher and work in development.

While swimming is different from medical school, Ben said he expected that his swim training would help him In the future.

“First of all, it’s nice to see hard work pay off,” he said. “That gives you more motivation to train hard and do things you believe in. The translation as far as the skills go is that as you move from the pool to the real world, you know how to be calm under pressure, stay focused for a long period of time – characteristics that are helpful in the world in general, not only in medicine.”

In a prophetic moment that would make Stanford proud, before the Olympics Wildman-Tobriner said he was so impressed by Jason Lezak’s “kick coming home,” that he could not imagine someone catching Lezak in the final meters of a race.

While his parents no doubt take pride in his studies, they always put more emphasis on being a good person. At a Stanford event when Ben was an upperclassman, Ben had already made the U.S. National Team, and was winning races everywhere he went collegiately. But at the school swim team event, the parent of a Stanford freshman swimmer pulled Ben’s dad aside and said that Ben had helped his son, and both he and the young man’s mom were very grateful that Ben stepped in and gave their son some compassion and wisdom.

Purchase the book now!

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