Swimming: World champs provide Phelps with wakeup call

MONTREAL - Michael Phelps will leave the world swimming championships tomorrow not in a blaze of glory but quietly, having failed to achieve his own lofty goals.

The winner of an unprecedented eight medals, including six golds, at the Athens Olympics, Phelps' final race of the championships will be in the qualifying heats for the 4x100m freestyle relay in front of a sparse Sunday crowd and not with his US team mates battling it out in the meet finale.

Failing to secure a spot on the relay squad brings a disappointing end to what has been a sobering event for the 20-year-old American who had arrived in Montreal a week earlier having set himself a target of eight medals -- something no swimmer has ever achieved at a single world championship.

Phelps will still leave as the meet's most decorated athlete with at least four gold medals and a silver but his tame performance left some questioning, for the first time, which direction his career was headed following a year on the celebrity circuit that saw him arrested for drunken driving.

"This year, this world championships has been a big wakeup call," Phelps said.

"I don't think this past year has been a normal year for me and I don't like the feeling of not doing a best time.

"What happened here I'm going to use as motivation in the coming year to get back to my best times."

Many of the challenges Phelps faced in Montreal were of his own making.

The Olympic champion and world record holder in the 400m individual medley and 200m butterfly, Phelps dropped both events from his world championship programme and replaced them with the 100m and 400m freestyle, looking to experiment during his buildup to the 2008 Beijing Summer Games.

Those experiments would be seen to have failed as Phelps could not advance out of the qualifying heats in the 400m and finished a well-beaten seventh in the 100m.

He won just two individual golds -- 200m individual medley and 200m freestyle -- which will be viewed as a hollow victory after his two greatest rivals, Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband, skipped the competition.

"I definitely would have liked to swim faster than I have but things are how they are and there's nothing I can do about it now," Phelps said.

"What happened, happened. It happened for a reason. This year wasn't the best training year for me and it showed.

Phelps refused to blame his commitments and distractions outside of the pool on his performance.

"It goes back. I had 1,000 decisions this year and 600 of them were made for swimming reasons and the other ones weren't and that's the difference in my swimming over the past few years to my swimming now," Phelps said.

"I don't think it has anything to do with what goes on outside the pool, it's more how I have approached things over the last year and how I'm going to approach things in the coming year."

New Zealand results from the world swimming championships

Heats:

Women 50m freestyle: Nichola Chellingworth 25.59 18th; Alison Fitch 26.60 31st.
Men 50m backstroke: Scott Talbot-Cameron 26.30 14th.
Women 50m breaststroke: Zoe Baker 31.30 4th; Annabelle Carey 33.04 23rd.
Women 4x100m medley relay: New Zealand 4:08.01 11th (H McLean 1:01.53, Carey 1:10.73 Coster 1:00.36 Fitch 55.39)

Semifinals:

Women 50m breaststroke: Baker 31.58, 4th (7th qualifier for final)
Men 50m backstroke: Talbot Cameron 26.23s, 7th in semifinal (14th overall, equal NZ Record)

Final:

Women 50m butterfly: D Miatke (AUS) 26.11, 1; A-K Kammerling (SWE) 26.36, 2; T Alshammar (SWE) 26.39, 3; E Coster (NZ) 27.23, 8.

- REUTERS