Michael Phelps
National Aquatics Center, 11 Tianchen East Rd, Chaoyang, Beijing, China
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Michael Phelps competed at five Olympic Games between 2004 and 2016 and finished with 28 total medals, 23 of them gold — both figures the most of any Olympian in any sport in the history of the Games, and by a margin so large that no other athlete's total is realistically within reach of either record. His most dominant single Games came in Beijing in 2008, where he won eight gold medals, breaking Mark Spitz's 1972 record of seven golds in a single Olympics. One of those eight, the 4x100m medley relay, came down to a margin of one-hundredth of a second, the closest possible finish in Olympic swimming. Phelps's core events were the butterfly and individual medley, disciplines that reward an unusually broad combination of strength, technique, and endurance across different strokes, and his 6-foot-7 wingspan paired with a comparatively short torso gave him a widely discussed physical advantage in the water that biomechanics researchers have studied extensively since. Phelps retired for good after the 2016 Rio Games and became an outspoken advocate for athlete mental health afterward, discussing his own struggles with depression following major competitions — a topic that's since become a more openly acknowledged part of elite athletes' post-Olympic experience.
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