A Machiavellian grin broke out on the face of Bob Bowman, mastermind behind the eight gold medals won by Michael Phelps, as he revealed the truth: “At the Melbourne World Cup in 2003 I stepped on his goggles deliberately,” he said. “I knew he had only one pair with him. Just before he came to race, he said, 'Hey, someone broke my goggles.' I said, 'Michael, you're just gonna have to go without them.'”

Welcome to the world of a man who started to build the perfect competitive beast when Phelps was 11. That was the year that a scrawny, gangly boy raced at his first national junior meeting in the United States. Bowman, Phelps's coach, noticed his goggles. “I could have taken the goggles to him, but I decided to keep them and see what he could do,” Bowman said. “So he swam and won the race without the goggles, just like he did here [in Beijing] in the [200metres] butterfly when his goggles filled with water.”

In his last interview in China before heading home to Maryland, Bowman said that Phelps had been trained to win against the odds. “I've always tried to give him adversity in either meets or practice and have him overcome it,” he said. He took Phelps, 14, to an evening competition and asked the driver to turn up late. “That way there was no dinner - he had to deal with it,” Bowman said with a chuckle.

He learnt some of his tricks from Bill Sweetenham, the former British Swimming performance director. “I was at the AIS [Australian Institute of Sport] when Bill was training a squad of juniors,” Bowman said. “After one session, they all complained that the water in the water fountain was too hot. So the next day, there was no water fountain.” It had been removed.

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In Phelps, Bowman found the raw materials that he had been looking for at the North Baltimore Aquatic Club. “He was so fast, he had to swim with older swimmers, but by the end of the practice I saw a little cap moving to the front of the line with each swim,” he said. “It was remarkable, I'd never seen anything like it. When I went home that night I couldn't sleep, I was so excited, but I didn't tell him that.”

Bowman piled on the challenges. After one particularly bruising practice, Phelps leapt out of the pool and started throwing water at girls standing nearby. “I said, 'You should be very tired, that's the hardest practice you've ever done,'” Bowman said. “I'll never forget, he looked me straight in the eye and said, 'I don't get tired.'” He took Phelps to junior meetings, where “he would race three times in the morning, three in the afternoon”.

Phelps also had a built-in clock. Bowman asked him to write down the times he wanted to achieve in three races. “He was just 11, but six months later he swam those exact times, to the one hundredth of a second,” Bowman said. “I don't know how that's possible, but it's true. He always had a very good sense of finding where he wants to go and how to go there.” As we discovered at the Water Cube.