US swimmer Michael Phelps is aiming to show the world something its “never seen” at the Beijing Olympics and surpass Mark Spitz's long-standing record of seven golds at a single games. Phelps, 23, won six golds at the 2004 Athens Olympics, and is aiming to surpass both that mark and the seven-gold effort of Spitz at the 1972 Munich games. “What he did was the greatest Olympic performance of all time,” Phelps said Saturday from Singapore, where the US team has been getting in its late training ahead of the Olympics beginning Aug. 8. “I'm looking to do something different that the sport has never seen.” The team is scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Monday. Phelps, sporting a Spitz-like handlebar mustache, said he was primed to deliver his best in China. “I've had some of the best training I've done,” Phelps said during a news conference. “I've been swimming well. I've been feeling good in the water.” Phelps will be competing in eight events at Beijing. The five individual events are the 200m freestyle, the 200 and 400 meters individual medleys and the 100 and 200 meters butterfly. He will also compete in all three relays: the 4x100m and 4x200m freestyle and the 4x100m medley. He holds the world record in all those individual events, bar the 100 meters butterfly, plus both freestyle relays. Phelps has broken 25 world records compared to Spitz's 33. They are the only swimmers to have won seven golds at a major international meet. At last years world championships in Australia, Phelps reached seven and was denied the chance to go for eighth victory when a teammate was disqualified from the preliminaries of a relay the US was heavily favored to win. Spitz makes splash Mark Spitz has rounded on Olympics chiefs for failing to invite him to Beijing for swimmer Michael Phelps' quest to break his record gold medal haul in the pool. The American expects his 36-year-old record of seven gold medals from a single Olympics will be broken by compatriot Phelps, and would like to witness the historic moment. But Spitz is not holding his breath for an invitation from Olympics organizers. “Unless I get that invite, I'll be watching on TV,” Spitz, 58, said in a recent interview. “I don't think it's going to happen. It'd be nice if it did. It would seem like the right thing to do.” Spitz, who will be in Hong Kong on business when the Olympics start on Aug. 8, said he had no “hard feelings” about not being invited to Beijing. “But I think that passing the baton ... would have been a phenomenal idea,” he said. A spokesman for the International Olympic Committee in Lausanne said Spitz had not been formally invited, but “I suspect he will be there as he usually is”. Spitz said Olympics organizers had little sense of history, unlike say Major League Baseball in the United States. He recalled that when Mark McGwire broke Roger Maris' 37-year-old record for home runs in a single season in 1998, officials ensured members of Maris' family were part of the festivities. Spitz still swims. He trains before dawn about three times a week, knocking off about 3,500 meters per session. He has pursued various entrepreneurial projects with former NBA player Rick Barry. The married father-of-two also travels the world delivering about 25 lectures a year, and has just written a memoir, “The Extraordinary Life of An Olympic Champion”. But wherever he goes, people just want to talk about Phelps, which is fine with him. “It seems like I'm attached to him at the hip. So every move that he makes, left or right, (people) come and ask me, ‘Is he doing the right thing?' “It's not that easy for Phelps to do what he needs to do, but he has the capacity to do it because you just look at the track record. If you want to handicap the possibilities, I wouldn't bet against this guy.” – Reuters __
