Great Gold vs Great White: Phelps vs Shark
Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White premiered Sunday night as the marquee event of Discovery Channel's annual Shark Week. And although we scuba divers knew that Phelps couldn't possibly outswim a great white shark, millions of viewers tuned in to see how it turned out — and many of them tweeted.
Phelps, who is retired from swimming as an athlete, is the most decorated Olympian in history, with 28 total medals, 23 of them gold, 13 of them in individual events. That's a lot of hardware, as @TheBusFM noted.
Still, to get in the water with a great white shark? That takes some serious guts and nerve.
There was also quite a bit of poking fun at the whole concept.
And of course, millions of viewers tuned in. Score a point for Discovery Channel and whoever came up with the idea.
If you saw any of the pre-event explanation of the race, you knew Phelps wasn't going to actually be racing head-to-snout against a great white shark. The network put Phelps in a 100-meter stretch of ocean in the Bahamas, had both the great white shark and the 28-time Olympic medalist swim the course, and then compared their timed results. Fans of the show were disappointed to discover this. Really?
The Shark Week production team did film an actual great white shark swimming the course. And this is how they did it:
The hour-long program showed Phelps "swimming" 50-meter races against two other varieties of shark — hammerhead and reef — in order to "train" for the race. He actually beat the reef shark with a time of 18.7 seconds.
The memes and tweets — pre-race, during the race and post-race — were hilarious. Once again, Shark Week managed to light up the internet.
As Phelps explained to Time magazine: “They don’t want to eat us. They’re not trying to kill us and trying to hurt us. They’re out there surviving just like we are on land. Hopefully with some of the lessons that I’ve learned and the do’s and don’ts in the shark world, hopefully, people can learn and hopefully, people can be able to swim free with the sharks.”
