Athens letter: When Michael Phelps returned to his room late on Monday evening, he must have been wishing he had never heard the name of Mark Spitz. Those seven gold medals, wrapped up in the time warp of the distant Munich games of 30 years ago, have come to represent a torment for the teenager, whose aquatic feats have been more or less drowned in the shrill hype.

The sensational and reductive comparisons with Spitz helped to sell the Phelps story. America willingly held its breath and bought into the notion that the gawky Baltimore teenager was racing not against other swimmers but against the ghost of 1972, when Nixon ruled America.

The tagline insured Phelps prime time on the cover of SI and Time magazines and brought in the dollars but it also made a mockery of what his colleagues believe is his sheer genius in the water.

Monday night's 200-metres freestyle final was one of those rare sporting occasions when the race was so pure and elemental and compelling that all the drum rolls and portentous statements that preceded it seemed cheap. The greatest race ever?

Whatever about that, it was deemed to be the most important. So when Ian Thorpe celebrated in the water, the Americans groaned at the sudden and deflating end of Phelps's dalliance with the Spitz legacy. It was as if his bronze placing was treasonous and nothing Phelps does for the rest of the week will diminish the perception he failed in his ultimate Athens goal.

By the time the Baltimore teenager appeared in the press conference room in the underbelly of the swimming arena, many among the American press corps had grown belligerent. The vast disappointment of the night overshadowed the thrill of witnessing a truly great race. Their story was that Phelps had bombed. In that crowded room, bedlam reigned.

The Dutch swimmer, Pieter van den Hoogenband, appeared for an interview after spending an hour with the drug testers. Because of that, his arrival clashed with a conference given by the Xuejuan Luo, who won gold in the 100-metres breaststroke final. Wearing her garland of laurel leaf and her gold medal, the Chinese girl tried to civilly conduct a conference in her own language as the predominantly American contingent clamoured for news about Phelps. When the Dutchman attempted to leave the podium, there was a general uproar, drowning out the Chinese girl as she spoke about what is presumably the defining moment of her sporting life. It was a disgrace; an Olympic Committee spokesperson had to twice formally demand that the attending media extend the courtesy of respect to the victor.

His rebuke, though stinging, was met with general indifference. One Olympic volunteer, whose responsibility it is to hold the door open for those arriving and departing, was told by a disgruntled US press man: "You guys had seven years to get this thing right and you still screwed up."

The sour taste of that moment was the general consequence of the obsession with Phelps. Immediately after the great race, when the swimmers moved through the media zone, van den Hoogenband stopped to say, "We are even now." As he grinned and walked on, another American wanted to know if that had been Thorpe. Such was the fixation on Phelps that his opponents were regarded as little more than props.

For the first two nights, Phelps walked past his rapt American audience as if they did not exist. Such aloofness was fine as long as the big show was still on the road.

When Phelps finally spoke, his tone was one of contrition.

"I said all along if I won just one medal I have been successful. I did do something nobody else has done before - I qualified for the Olympic games in six individual events. I had an opportunity to match what he (Spitz) did and I tried to do that.

"I am a goal-orientated person and if it doesn't happen, I just go back and try again. You never know what is going to happen over the next four years."

The problem was Phelps had entered into a contract that demanded success or his soul. Above all the other Olympic sports, swimming is the most ephemeral and precious. Olympian swimmers have, to the larger world, the life span of butterflies. They are defined and coloured by their deeds on these sultry summer nights. Phelps allowed these games to be distilled to the 100-odd seconds he shared the water with the great Australian Thorpe and van den Hoogenband. Apart from those few glamorous and patriotic Olympic nights, the American audience regard swimming as a pleasure pursuit. Kids like Phelps with the physique, talent and forbidding application are essentially an underground sect.

When Phelps first presaged what was to come by lowering his 200 butterfly time by five whole seconds at the US championships in Seattle in 2000, becoming one of the fastest swimmers in the world at just 14, there were about 10 people in the stands. It was not enough that he was demonstrating unnatural affinity with radically differing strokes, mastering the backstroke, the breaststroke and the freestyle to add to his master event, the 200 butterfly. In an age of one-stroke specialists, Phelps established himself as the man with perhaps the most complete repertoire of strokes in history. In losing on Monday night, he set a national record and, as his coach Bob Bowman noted, swam as well as he humanly could.

Thirty years ago, Spitz swam technically similar events in the freestyle and butterfly when he made history in Munich and was guaranteed three gold medals as part of America's untouchable relay team. Phelps moves through more complicated waters that are filled with sharks dedicated to perfecting one stroke. Phelps must physically and mentally adapt for each discipline and his ability to do this is what makes him such a phenomenon.

"He is incredible. He is probably the greatest all-round swimmer in the world right now and will be for a long time to come," said Aaron Peirsol, whose own gold-medal swim in Monday night's 100 metres backstroke was just a footnote to the evening. As with another Californian, Natalie Coughlan (who could conceivably leave Athens with more golds than Phelps), Peirsol's brilliance has been shamefully ignored in the frenzy that has followed Phelps's gamble on Olympic godliness.

"No, no, I don't think it is fair," Peirsol said when presented with that truth.

"I don't think it is fair, especially for Michael. He is capable of going on to win seven medals anyway and to try and make out that that is somehow a failure is going way too far."

But by voicing the word failure, Peirsol - something of a free spirit and a loose talker in these bland times of choreographed responses - was acknowledging that over their waffles and orange juice, Americans would be taking in the news that the kid had bombed. Time to move the road show on to the pixies in the gymnastics hall or the spoiled and tattooed NBA stars now in danger of becoming the whipping boys of international basketball. Phelps didn't deliver and for the first time in his young life, he felt the cold wind of America's media turning its back on him.

As Spitz himself remarked in the months before Athens: "Let's face it, Michael is NBC's meal ticket." That was the crux of it.

Spitz, silvery and lean, will probably go to his grave without ever witnessing another swimmer match his haul. After Munich, he quit swimming and it took 17 years before he recovered the heart to even go to the pool for social swims. That was the effect of the sport on its ultimate winner.

How it takes its toll on Phelps, who gave his childhood and adolescence with Athens as the vague and dreamy spur, remains to be seen. But when he flies out of Europe and poses for photographs with his array of medals, the shame is that most people will only be counting the ones that are not there.