One hundredth of a second

Michael Phelps didn’t seem like he was going to win as the swimmers came into the last 25 meters of the 100m butterfly final. Milorad Cavic had a healthy lead, Phelps was running out of room to catch him and the terrible Olympic announcer was screaming something about how exciting it all was.

I hadn’t been watching the Olympics at all since they started. I don’t have cable and usually rely entirely on DVDs from Netflix for my television consumption. I had caught some kayaking at a diner last week, but beyond that, I was following along through the covers of the New York Post.

My roommate, Mark, returned home from his summer in California earlier that day. He had been working in San Francisco for two months and my free rein with the apartment was over. He picked up a bunny-eared TV antennae (he had been watching the Olympics) and positioned it perfectly. He’s good at stuff like that, and that night I tuned in for the first time.

I wouldn’t have thought to reposition the antennae on my own. Those aren’t the kinds of things that I get around to doing. I wouldn’t call myself a lazy person. I work too much to earn that title. But it would be foolish not to acknowledge that I fall somewhere on the spectrum between lazy and forgetful.

It’s the small everyday things that I have trouble dealing with. I will go months never replacing or fixing things that are sort of broken but still work, and I am very tolerant with things that are inconvenient.

The handle of our door takes some shimmying to open and its inner workings are exposed due to an earlier attempt to fix it. But it still works, and I’ll get around to fixing it one of these days, after I replace the overhead light bulb in my room and I buy either a new DVD player or a universal remote.

A friend of mine just moved from his parents’ house into a new apartment. We bonded over the fact that when he got all of his stuff out of storage, his DVD remote was missing. But he’s like my roommate, and by the time the cable guy installed his cable, Internet and phone, he had picked up a new remote, even connected his answering machine and neatly packed up his ex-girlfriend’s stuff into a small box so his new girlfriend wouldn’t have to deal with it when she moved in.

But, I digress.

I haven’t followed the Olympics since 1996 when I was 13 and had a subscription to Sports Illustrated. I remember watching Michael Johnson on TV and can picture him with his gold Nikes winning the 200m and 400m races. He was 29, which seemed ancient.

At 13, everything seemed possible. Watching the Olympics then, I saw myself crouched behind a starting line, clearing a high jump, throwing a javelin and seamlessly cutting the water on a high dive. I would do it all.

For a moment, I was certain that Cavic had it. His arms outstretched, he was gliding smoothly into the wall. Phelps had just about closed the gap and was mid-stroke.

“It all comes down to this!” the announcer screamed.

And then it was over. Both Phelps and Cavic popped out of the water and turned toward the scoreboard.

The replay showed Phelps outreaching Cavic by one hundredth of a second. It was pretty unbelievable, and watching the replay it was unclear exactly how Phelps was able to get his hand to the wall before Cavic.

There is certainly no way that I could have done it.

Phelps is 23 and it’s been 12 years since 1996. I’m about to turn 25. I no longer have a subscription to Sports Illustrated and no longer can see myself winning the Olympics—there was a time when that would have bothered me.

I’m happy now just to watch and wonder. Wonder how Phelps got his hand out in time. Wonder what it’ll be like for Cavic 12 years from now to look back on this moment in time. He was so close.

And wonder how my friend, the guy who thinks of everything, forgot to erase his ex-girlfriend’s voice off of that answering machine he got out of storage. And wonder what his current girlfriend thought when she called it and heard that voice, echoing from a not so distant past.

See, now that’s something I would have thought of.