Welcome to the Hyperbolympics

Good evening from Beijing, where TPC Olympic correspondent Luke Peacock covers the Olympics by reporting on Olympic coverage. True story.

Welcome, readers. Glad you could join us here in the far East. This week's edition (yeah I know nothing's appeared here in over a year; cut us some slack, we're lazy) sheds some light on the craziness surrounding Olympic records and the hubbub over one in particular.

We've seen more than a few handfuls of records fall this week here at the Olympics, where it seems nearly every event shows us that "world record" is a fluid term, bound and almost certain to change at the sound of an air horn, or the drop of a finish line ribbon. The fastest thing at the olympics, however, may not be Usain Bolt or Dara Torres, but the raw swiftness and indiscriminate urgency with which each new accomplishment gets blown out of proportion. Welcome to the Beijing games, the Hyperbole Olympics (or Hyperbolympics, for short).

Now, for prudence's sake -- and to keep from getting our License to Journalize revoked, as per article 489.2a of the Journalism Handbook (the Michael Phelps rule) -- I need to be clear that what Michael Phelps accomplished today and over the last week was, without exaggeration, one of the greatest feats in Olympic history, and he deserves his place among the greatest living athletes. He dominated, with few if any missteps, one hundred percent of the events he entered, demolishing a 30-year-old record in the process, and embarrassing the lifetime achievements of some very notable Olympians.

But reading this article (and hers is just one among many; it was just a good example), you might think Phelps took a week off from redesigning the Sistine Chapel, finding a cure for cancer, and fixing Charles Barkley's golf swing to sweep up eight consecutive gold medals before returning to Darfur to adopt all the limbless babies. I mean, come on people. The guy is a fantastic swimmer, and an amazing athlete. His performance did not, however, reminisce of "God giving us the sun one day and the seas the next," as Ms. Hill would so hyperbolize.

The truth is, two of Phelps' gold medal events -- the 4 x 100 Freestyle relay and the 100 meter Butterfly -- were won by a combined time of less than a tenth of a second, and each could easily have gone the other way. That they didn't is a testament not only to the will of Phelps to win, but also to the strength of the competition and the plain dumb luck that swings from one lane to another throughout a race. This wasn't Tiger Woods winning the Masters by 12 or the U.S. Open by 15; it wasn't Nolan Ryan throwing his record 7th no-hitter at age 44, or Lance Armstrong's 7th Tour de France win after having a ball-ectomy to beat cancer. It was an athlete in his prime, at the top of his sport, doing what an athlete in his prime, at the top of his sport ought to do: win.

Yeah, Phelps won, and it was incredible, and we all stayed up late to watch it. That's what we'll remember years from now, when some phenom sprinter, or javelin-thrower, or -- god forbid -- synchronized diving team is winning its 9th gold medal of a given Olympic games. "We thought he was immortal, some kind of God," we'll all say, and not because we're still hyperbolizing 50 years later, but because, at the time, we were so caught up in the moment, so young and so dumb, so quick on the draw to skid down into the quicksand of exaggeration, that we really, truly, and actually, God bless us, believed it.