Graphic: The anatomy of a champion

In 1935 Jack Sieg, a swimmer from Iowa, realised that if, instead of spreading his legs outward as was traditional in the breaststroke, he beat them in unison like a fishtail, he could propel himself faster through the water. He later realised that he could go faster still by bringing his arms forward together out of the water. The swimming authorities responded by banning the action from the breaststroke event and creating a new discipline. The “butterfly” had been born.

At these Olympic Games in Beijing, butterfly takes its place alongside three other “disciplines”, two of which also have a set of complex and geometrically exacting rules on how, precisely, the arms and body may move in relation to each other and the water. Only freestyle, as the name suggests, is bereft of restrictions, short of using the lane dividers to haul oneself towards the finish.

Give Fina, the sport's world governing body, another 50 years and it will doubtless have subdivided swimming into yet more weird and wonderful methods of getting from A to B - and if it is able to persuade the IOC, they may even find their way into the Olympics. Not that that is a bad thing. They will doubtless be popular on television, pull in vociferous audiences and enable a latter-day Michael Phelps to win 12, 14, even 16 gold medals at a single Games. And, if I am alive to see it, I will say: “More power to you, big fella.”

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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

Simon Barnes

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But please do not tell me that he is any better than the man who won “only” eight gold medals in Beijing, if that is what Phelps finally achieves. Do not tell me that he is the greatest Olympian who drew breath because he has won more medals than any person in history.

If we are being honest, even the diversity of swimming disciplines has more than a touch of the absurd about it. Translated into track and field, we would have the 100metres sprint (renamed freestyle), the backward dash, the sideways shuttle and the sprint for those who like to run while rotating their arms like Mick Channon. I would make a fair bet that Usain Bolt, the Jamaica sprinter, would be nifty at all of them because, after all, fast-twitch muscle fibres are fast-twitch muscle fibres whether you are running flat out or doing so while wiggling your left ear lobe.

There is a lot of debate about whether Phelps is the greatest Olympian. I have tended to respond by invoking Milton Friedman, the economist who warned governments that printing lots of extra banknotes would not make a nation any wealthier because the cash would simply generate extra inflation.

The problem is that Friedman's insight has never made it into the consciousness of many of those who watch and write about sport. We tend to think that a gold medal is a gold medal, without recognising that if the IOC doubled the medal allocation for, say, badminton, it would halve the value of the prizes on offer.

I am not arguing that Phelps is a talentless nobody, merely that if swimming was about getting from A to B as fast as possible over a limited number of discrete distances, we would not be drooling quite as much over his (admittedly considerable) achievements.

He is, without question, one of the great Olympians and his performance in Beijing has been among the most brilliant in recent times, but to describe him as the greatest on the basis that he has won the most gold medals derives from the kind of blinkered thinking that ruined the economies of Latin America. But Phelps is a mere sideshow compared with the greatest beneficiary of what we might call Olympic hyperinflation.

Yesterday I had a drink with an esteemed colleague who has got it into his head that Sir Steve Redgrave is a few notches above Superman for having won five gold medals in rowing. Sure, there is a bit of subjectivity in the handling of a notion as abstract as “greatness”, but it is surely not wide enough to accommodate the former rower.

It is not only that all rowing events are conducted over the same distance (2,000 metres) or that the IOC continues to demonstrate its outrageously patrician bias by allocating 14 medals to the sport. No, it is the fact that rowing is so elitist that it attracts only the rich or those who are subsidised (why?) by rich governments. Redgrave is the best from such a small pool of talent. That the accolades continue to rain down upon him are nothing less than insulting for those, such as Daley Thompson and Steve Ovett, who are serially overlooked.