Michael Phelps ecstatic to be relevant again

SOMEWHERE IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA OR POSSIBLY EUROPE — Michael Phelps was just having a normal Tuesday last week, when something amazing happened.

Phelps, who had started his day with a grueling eight-hour swimming workout, was just sitting at home, watching TV, when the phone rang.

“You’ll never believe who called me,” Phelps said. “It was a reporter! Not just any reporter – a newspaper reporter! He said he wanted to do an interview with me, to really find out how I was feeling, how things were going, stuff like that. It was really awesome.”

The reporter, Marvin Donovan, works for the Poughkeepsie Press. Generally Donovan covers high school sports – mostly women’s volleyball and water polo. However, the Press, which publishes two times every week, was in need of a longer feature story for its Saturday afternoon edition, and so Donovan volunteered to see what he could come up with.

“I thought, ‘Hey, the Olympics are coming up soon, maybe I can reach out to Michael Phelps and see what he’s up to,’ our readers might be interested in that,” Donovan said. “So I just gave him a ring and chatted with him for a few minutes.”

Phelps said that the interview was pretty normal, much like the many interviews that he’s expecting to have over the course of two weeks in August, and the ones that he vaguely remembers from the last time that people cared about him at all, in 2004.

“I can’t really remember back that far with any clarity,” Phelps said. “After all, it’s been a long time since I’ve done one of these – but I seem to recall that they were pretty fun and that they asked a lot of questions about what it feels like to win gold medals, yadda yadda yadda. That’s what this was like. Pretty easy, pretty fun, pretty fast.”

Phelps said he hopes that more people will take an interest in him, but doesn’t want to get his hopes to high.

“I don’t want to be greedy,” he said. “To be totally and completely honest, it was just nice to have someone to talk to.”

It’s going to be tough for this sport to sweep any nations, but it’s still pretty frickin’ cool!