Phelps the Olympian

Timothy Dalrymple is a blogger I read from time to time. In mid-August he wrote a two-part post arguing that Michael Phelps is not the clear-cut greatest olympian of all time. (Part 1 here, Part 2 here)

If you're at all interested in sports in general or the olympics in particular, they're both entertaining reads. Dalrymple's main point (among many) is that not all gold medals should be weighed equally when it comes to determining history's greatest olympian. Put simply, swimmers have many more medals available to them than all other sports. He gets pretty detailed, and if you like reading interesting stuff that doesn't, in the end, mean anything (which is pretty much the case with everything sports related), it'll be fun for you.

I didn't read his second part until recently, and it appears comments have been closed on that post, so I'm writing here to share a few of the thoughts I would have written in comment form if I could have.

I don't think I flat-out disagree with hardly anything in either of Dalrymple's posts, except I do believe Phelps is the greatest olympian ever. Dalrymple's most troublesome piece comes at the very end when you realize that he doesn't have anyone in mind who is the greatest olympian, he just doesn't think it's Phelps. That's a problem for me. It's easy to argue against the "greatest-ness" of anyone or anything. It's much tougher if you actually have to make the case for another. I could give you a hundred reasons why Tom Brady is not the best quarterback ever. It's much tougher for me to tell you who is. And that's what I was waiting for from Dalrymple, but he never got there. He made many good points, and brought up some important limitations to declaring Phelps the greatest olympian simply because his medal count is highest. But the weakest arguments he made were always when he brought up other olympians by name. He named many extremely impressive and accomplished olympians who would deserve to be on any "top 10 olympians" list, but none of them were properly or exhaustively compared to Phelps, and they all have as many arguments against them as Phelps does.

If you asked 100 olympic enthusiasts of varying ages from around the world to name the top 3 olympians of all time, is there any doubt that Phelps' name would show up on 100 ballots? It's a subjective thing to try to determine, but it has a more clear-cut answer than many other subjective sports questions.