Well, we all knew this "Mark Spitz" pose was coming and "Sports Illustrated" got it first.From the New York Post: "... This one being the first [photo] of him with all eight medals, we hope that our cover will stick in everyone's mind," SI's managing editor Terry McDonell said yesterday.
Phelps' pose is reminiscent of the well-known 1972 photograph of Spitz with his seven gold medals draped across his chest.
Phelps, who also beats Spitz, 5-3, on the number of SI covers on which he's featured, posed in front of a bright-red Chinese screen.
Spitz's famous photo - which never appeared in a magazine but was shot for a poster - netted him $1 million. ..." [Link]
Also, the amount of medals he has is incomprehensible. He has won more gold medals than many nations put together.
3 comments:
For those of us who follow swimming closely, it's hard to fathom how much impact these Olympics have had on the public at large, thanks largely to Phelps. We always follow it closely, so it was easy to miss how much non-swimming folks got into the Games this time around, but they did. I've heard from any number of nonswimming friends about Phelps, we've all heard that statistic about the number of his Facebook fans, etc. Hopefuly this will translate into larger numbers for out sport in every sense, not just in terms of participants, but also in terms of TV time, college programs, and financial incentives for other top swimmers, including even cash prizes for big meets. Unfortunately, this time around it looks as if only one guy is going to hit the jackpot, but that could translate into more opportunities for other swimmers further down the road.
In Los Angeles, I think Dara Torres has been more of an influence getting bodies into the pool than Michael Phelps and consequently fin sale spreadsheets are cracking the sky. ;-)
Jason Lezak could be possibly the new "Dara Torres" in 2012 but he would need a sponsor who would be willing to spend as much money on his training as Dara Torres or even Lance Armstrong had.
He would need minions stretching him several times a day, blood work done daily for lactate levels and such... In fact, if I were Lezak's agent, i would cut a deal with the Discovery Channel as both an experiment and media product.
Who is Jason Lezak's agent? Seriously. I want to suggest it.
I don't think Lezak would go for that; he seems to be a quiet, modest, low-maintenance kind of guy. Which made the 4*100 all the more magical.
Thanks for the blog, Tony! It's so much fun to read.
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