For the first time in days, we saw the sun outside the Water Cube. And inside it, the shooting stars and stripes of a United States squad supercharged by the “Baltimore Bullet” on a mission to make Olympic history: eight gold medals and eight world records in a Games.

“You guys talk about that, I'm just taking one step at a time,” Michael Phelps said, after winning the 200 metres freestyle yesterday, eight years on from his first appearance in an Olympic final, as a 15-year-old who was 0.33sec shy of the podium in the 200 metres butterfly. Eight years to prepare for the last eight notes of a symphony composed in the mind of Bob Bowman, Phelps's coach and a Beethoven fan.

Phelps is at once an entire orchestra and the instrument of success for the US team. Bowman calls his charge the “motivation machine” because “everything you throw at him - good, bad, critical - he'll use it and feed on it to just keep trying harder, getting better.”

Phelps responded again yesterday, with gold and world record No 3, career gold No 9. Next challenge: to crash through the Olympic ceiling of nine gold medals shared by his compatriots, Mark Spitz and Carl Lewis, Paavo Nurmi, the Finnish athlete, and Larysa Latynina, the gymnast from the former Soviet Union.

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Why didn't they ring me up before they decided to hold the Olympic Games in Beijing in August? Don't do it, I'd have said

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In the wake of Phelps's victory yesterday, in a race in which his team-mate, Peter Vanderkaay, won bronze, the US, who apart from Phelps had struggled in the first two days, won five of the other nine medals on offer.