(Sports Network) - So much about Michael Phelps is a numbers game. Splits. Times. Medal Count. Age.

So much about Phelps is a numbers game that it's easy to forget there's a young man underneath all those records, those unbelievable times, the TV ratings, that promised $1 million bonus from Speedo.

We are carried by our geekdom towards conversations of what record the 23- year-old American swimmer will break next, what number he will pass next, as if this were baseball.

But this number? This one is different. This one means something. It's tangible.

You can actually touch Phelps' nine gold medals.

When he won the 200-meter freestyle by more than a body length Tuesday morning for his third gold of these Beijing Games, Phelps joined an elite collection of the winningest Olympians of all time.

His nine gold medals moved him into a five-way tie with U.S. swimming great Mark Spitz, American track and field star Carl Lewis, former Soviet gymnast Larissa Latynina and Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi for the all-time career gold medal record.

Five athletes out of the thousands upon thousands who have competed since Frenchman Pierre de Coubertin founded the IOC and pushed us all towards the first modern Olympics in 1896.

One for every ring on the Olympic flag.

"It is a pretty amazing accomplishment," Phelps said. "It's definitely an honor. I have met and spent time with Carl Lewis and exchanged words with Spitz, (so) it is pretty amazing."

Praise, as it always does, poured in for Phelps. You can set your watch to it here: he swims, we swoon. It's as punctual as the start of every race at the National Aquatics Center.

Australian swim coach Alan Thompson said he'd never seen anything like Phelps' dominance of the 200 free, in which Phelps lowered his own world record by nearly a full second.

He beat 400-meter gold medalist Park Taehwan of Korea by 1.89 seconds.

"He made a field of great swimmers look ordinary," said Thompson. "You get those world records where you stand and cheer and you get those where you go, 'How good is that?'

"This was a 'How good is that?'"

Rebecca Soni, the replacement swimmer for Jessica Hardy who won a silver medal in the women's 100-meter breaststroke on Tuesday, took some time to talk about Phelps as well.

"Every time he races he gets better and better," she said.

And while Phelps' nine gold medals may only be a stop on the way to the record we're all waiting for -- passing Spitz's mark of seven gold medals in one Olympics -- it's worth thinking about for at least a day.

Because that's all the time we'll have to think about it. Phelps is set to swim in the men's 200-meter butterfly Wednesday morning Beijing time, and he will win it. He equaled his own Olympic record in the event on Tuesday, about an hour after winning the 200 free.

In fact, as he charges towards a meeting with Spitz's record, Phelps may have his three toughest tasks out of the way.

At the 2004 Athens Olympics, where he also chased Spitz on the way to winning six gold medals as a 19-year-old under the same kind of pressure, Phelps settled for bronze twice to come up short.

He finished third in the 400-meter freestyle relay and was beaten by two of the greatest 200-meter freestyle swimmers of all time -- Ian Thorpe and Pieter van den Hoogenband -- in a race he entered just for the hell of it, just to swim against the best.

Now Phelps has a gold in both events -- saved by Jason Lezak's thrilling anchor leg in the 400 freestyle relay on Monday and an easy winner Tuesday in the 200 freestyle.

Phelps has also made it through the grueling 400-meter individual, winning it in world-record time on Sunday for his first gold here.

If he goes on to break Spitz's Holy Grail of Olympic records -- or even if he wins eight medals of any kind at these Games -- Phelps would be the all-time winningest medal winner among male Olympians with 16.

He will also have more gold medals that anyone in history, which he figures to accomplish sometime in the morning.

But that's all for tomorrow.

Five athletes in 112 years.

Take some time to think about that today.





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