Comments on: Why Michael Phelps Will Never Swim Faster Than a Dolphin

By: hello

hello — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 06:31:46 +0000

hi that was borning i will tell you agina?

By: Frank Glover

Frank Glover — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 21:07:51 +0000

Um, it helps to be descended from many thousands of generations of ancestors who also had to be good enough at those things to live long enough to reproduce, too. Enough iterations of that process gets you something like a dolphin.

Phelps obviously doesn’t have that going for him, either. The playing field will never be (sea?) level.

By: nick

nick — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 18:42:01 +0000

I hate to be crass (I think I say this a lot) but “duh.”

Dolphins are born in the water and then proceed to spend nearly every moment from that point until they die swimming. They don’t even stop to sleep (last I read, science had determined they put half their brain to sleep for short periods but stay awake with the other half, so they wont drown). Imagine a human who’s ran nearly 24/7 every day of their lives, and imagine how much faster they’d be than a regular human when the time came to race. Their muscles would be bigger and their bones would be stronger from the constant unrelenting exercise.

Get Phelps some hand webbing and some of those flipper that cover the tops of your feet and shins to enhance your natural kicking motions and then we’ll see how fast he can go, seeing as dolphins also have a slight aerodynamic and large thruster-surface advantage over humans in the water.