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Swimming wasn't their thing. It wasn't anyone's thing, though.
"A once-every-four-year sport,"is how Michael Phelps himself described it. He was probably being generous. Every time the Summer Olympics rolled around, swimming entered the sporting consciousness, but only for a few days.
Other than the proverbial women' swimmer turned pin-up girl, its impact tended to die in the wake of the final lap.
At a superficial level, swimming is a simple sport to understand – jump in the water and beat the other guy to the wall. The intricacies of how that is accomplished, how speed is maximized, how core strength is developed, don't have to be understood to follow a race.
Yet Americans remained ambivalent until Michael Phelps showed up in a giant blue cube of an aquatics center just north of downtown Beijing last August and claimed he was going to capture a record eight gold medals. Then he proceeded to collect them, one after the other, right in primetime in America.
That's what got a lot of people who claimed swimming wasn't their thing to start watching and, most importantly, wondering.
That's what got Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and some of the other greatest, richest and most famous basketball players in the world to turn out on a Sunday morning to watch a swim race.
"Phelpsian" has entered the sporting vocabulary, not so much because of the number of golds he had hung from his neck, but for the crossover respect of how it was accomplished.
Bryant and James and every other star athlete and studious coach around the globe didn't need to understand lap counts or lactate levels to want to understand how Michael Phelps got so mentally tough. They wanted to know whether they could duplicate it.
"It was just awesome to see," Bryant said of witnessing Phelps in person. "It was incredible."
vt. 理解，懂，聽說，獲悉，將 ... 理解為，認為<
