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racing me. “I always feel like I can beat him,” he said.
    Lochte is a good friend, one of my best friends in swimming. It’s one of those deals where we are hardly alike but like a lot of the same stuff. I call him Doggy. No good reason. Doggy is a Florida surfer dude; I grew up near Baltimore. Doggy’s idol is the rapper Lil Wayne, who is also one of my favorite musicians. Doggy sometimes wears gold chains around his neck, baggy pants, a diamond-encrusted grill in his mouth. Cool that it’s Lochte’s style; not mine. I have a bulldog named Herman. Lochte’s dog, a Doberman, is named Carter, after Lil Wayne, whose real name is Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. In May, Lochte sprained his left ankle when Carter the dog ran out the front door of Lochte’s house in Gainesville; chasing Carter down the street, Lochte said he turned the ankle. At least that was one version of the story. His dad later said it happened after a skateboarding trick gone bad. Who knows? Doggy is a free spirit.
    A free spirit who is a hellacious competitor.
    Lochte had won silver in the 200 IM in Athens. He didn’t swim the 400 IM in Athens because he had finished fourth at the 2004 Trials, 10 seconds behind me. At the 2006 U.S. nationals, Lochte had narrowed the gap to about a second and a half. At the 2007 worlds in Melbourne, I had beaten him again, this time by about three seconds.
    I had not lost a major-meet final in the 400 IM since I started swimming it at the national level. Even so, I knew what I was up against: maybe the second-best all-around swimmer in the world.
    I also knew, though, that I had improved, even since Melbourne, even taking into account the broken wrist. My breaststroke had very quietly gotten way better than it had been. In practice, I had been working on subtle differences: keeping my shoulders closer to my ears, my hands flatter, my fingertips up when I accelerated forward. At that Long Beach meet in January, a short-course event, I raced the 100-yard breaststroke; the field included Mark Gangloff, who had come in fourth in the 100-meter breast final in Athens. Mark won the race that night, in53.09 seconds and, for most, the reporters and the people in the stands, that seemed to be the news—that I’d lost. To me and Bob, that was not at all the news. Instead, to us, it was that I’d finished just behind Mark, in 53.41. I had almost beaten one of the world’s best breaststrokers, only a few weeks after surgery. Bob said later, that was one of the most impressive things he’d ever seen me do.
    At the same time, my backstroke, for some reason, had been giving me fits. I didn’t have the consistency I wanted. And my 400 IM times through the early months of 2008 had been unremarkable. At a meet in Santa Clara, California, six weeks before the Trials, I won the 400 IM in a flat 4:13.47. My backstroke felt horrible that night, as it had for the previous few weeks. I had no tempo. My kick wasn’t there. Instead of 100 meters, I felt like I was swimming a mile on my back. However, two days later, still in Santa Clara, I beat Aaron Peirsol in the 100-meter backstroke. Aaron had won the 100 back in Athens. This was the first time I had ever beaten him in a backstroke event.
    So maybe the backstroke was there, after all. I really couldn’t be sure.
    At some meets, the 400 IM is last on the agenda; that’s the way it was in Barcelona, at the 2003 Worlds.
    In Beijing, as in Athens, it would be first.
    So, in Omaha, at a temporary pool in the middle of the Qwest Center, the best set-up for a meet in the history of American swimming, it would be first, too, as USA Swimming deliberately set up the program for the Trials to mirror the schedule in Beijing.
    My first swim in Omaha, the prelims of the 400 IM, turned out not good. I finished in 4:13.43. Lochte, swimming in a different heat, was timed in 4:13.38, faster by five-hundredths of a second.
    Lochte told reporters