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maybe the best short-course racer in the world.
    I remember going to a meet in Long Beach, California, in early January, and being asked there about the broken wrist. The scar on my wrist was still fresh, still purple.
    The accident, I said, had made me refocus on 2008, which was going to be the biggest year of my life, and my goals.
    I told a pack of reporters who were there, “If I could live in a bubble right now, I probably would, so I couldn’t get hurt, Icouldn’t get in trouble, I couldn’t do anything. Just swim, eat, and sleep. That’s it.”
    I also said, “I think I’m more excited now than when that happened.” I added, “I plan on not screwing around anymore until after the Olympics. I have pretty hefty goals this year. It’s going to take a lot to get there.”
    â€¢   •   •
    To get there meant placing first or second in my individual races at the Olympic Trials.
    The Trials are never a formality.
    It didn’t matter that I had won eight medals in Athens. That was then. The fact that I had won the 400 IM at the 2004 Olympics would have absolutely no bearing on whether I would, for instance, again enjoy the privilege of representing the United States at the 2008 Games in the same event. I had to earn it.
    Different countries allocate spots on their Olympic teams in different ways. Some, for instance, do it based on results over the preceding years; some allow coaches to pick; some pick by committee.
    That’s not the American way, at least in swimming. There are no picks.
    In the United States, there’s only one way to make the Olympic swim team in the individual events: first or second in that race at the Trials.
    Third gets you a four-year wait to try again. If you can.
    Hayley McGregory finished third in the 2004 Trials in both the 100 and 200 backstrokes. She would go on at the 2008 Trials to set a world record in the 100 back in the preliminaries; in the finals, she finished third. In the 200 back, she finished third. She did not make the team.
    It can be like that. So cruel.
    â€œIf I’m third at the Olympics, it means I’m on the medal stand in a few minutes. If I’m third at the Trials, it means I’m on the couch for a month,” Gary Hall, Jr., one of the most accomplished American sprinters of the last twenty years, once said. Winner of ten Olympic medals between 1996 and 2004, twice the gold medalist in the 50-meter sprint, Gary would finish fourth in the 50 in Omaha. He did not make the 2008 team.
    Our selection process is without question the most difficult in the world, far more nerve-wracking than the Olympics, actually, because the depth in the United States in swimming is unmatched anywhere in the world.
    And the 2008 Trials were going to be the deepest in history.
    During the same week the swim Trials were going on in Omaha, the U.S. Trials in track and field took place in Eugene, Oregon. All over Eugene—at the airport, on buses, on highway billboards—advertisements declared the U.S. track team the “hardest team to make.”
    Wrong. It’s the swim team.
    In track, the top three in each event to go the Games.
    In swimming, only two.
    It figured that, in the 400 IM, those two would be me and Lochte. But nobody was handing us anything. And Lochte was hardly ready to concede first place to me.
    A couple months before the Trials, the U.S. Olympic Committee holds what’s called a media summit. It gathers a bunch of athletes it figures are good candidates to make the Olympic team and, for the better part of a week, allows hundreds of reporters to have a crack at asking questions for the features their editors want before the Olympics start. Then the athletes can go back to training without being pestered by reporters for the duration.
    The 2008 media summit took place in Chicago, at one of the city’s landmark hotels, the Palmer House Hilton. At the summit, Lochte was asked about