The day before, he had appeared on the “Tonight Show with Jay Leno” in Los Angeles. Slipping out of an ornate boardroom toward the end of a breakfast, at which he and Coughlin and Lochte were being honored, Phelps sank into a leather couch and yawned. In a sea of designer suits, chromatic ties and polished wingtip shoes, Phelps was the one bobbing around wearing blue jeans, flip-flops, a button-down white cotton shirt, a wrinkled black jacket and a weary smile. He was whisked to Manhattan, arriving a little before 8 at the stock exchange, where he was easy to pick out in the crowd. Phelps, who recently received a reported $1.6 million advance to write a book and will have his face on 10 million boxes of Corn Flakes and Frosted Flakes starting later this month, landed in White Plains on Tuesday morning at 6 after an all-night flight. After a two-day recreational side trip to Portugal, Phelps plunged into an itinerary only a pilot could love, traveling over the past 12 days from New York to Orlando to Chicago to San Francisco to Las Vegas to Los Angeles to New York. The hours have blended into days and the days into weeks, so that he might as well be telling time by one of those melting clocks in the Salvador Dali painting.įrom Beijing, Phelps traveled to London, site of the 2012 Olympics, to be the guest of honor at festivities coinciding with the closing ceremony in Beijing.
He has been a flying fish, traveling everywhere, it seems, but Baltimore, the place he calls home. In the 23 days since he collected his eighth gold medal, Phelps has lived up to the nickname bestowed upon him by the Chinese. Time has become blurred beyond recognition since the Olympics when, of course, every hundredth of a second mattered immensely. Phelps wore an expensive watch on his left wrist, a superfluous accessory, like sunglasses on a rainy day. No, but his circadian rhythm was seriously messed up.
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