Free Pizza

When training, Phelps swims between two and five hours a day. His routine is straightforward. “Eat, sleep, swim. Play video games. Hang out with friends.” There was much discussion during the Games of the size of his breakfast and the 12,000 calories a day he consumes. “I don’t know where 12,000 calories came from. Growing up my doctor said 10,000 calories would be something you should shoot for because it’s hard for me to keep weight on. He said, ‘Eat whatever you want, whenever you want, as much as you want.’” Now he has “a balanced diet. I do have my junk food, potato chips and French fries and hamburgers. I also have my fruit and vegetables.” It is true that, as a teenager, he would eat three fried egg sandwiches for breakfast, but what he was actually eating before races was a bowl of porridge and fruit, stoking up afterwards with protein and carbohydrates.

He is cagey about the subject of drink. Four years ago, he was fined and put on probation for driving under the influence of alcohol. Does he have a beer now? “If I want to. I don’t need it.” He moved out of the Olympic village, where the partying was reported to have been pretty wild, as soon as he could. “I was just sitting around hanging out with my sisters and my mom. I was just trying to live and capture every moment I could from the Games, whether it was from the pool or the medal podium or playing cards back at the village.” He seems to be catching up a little in London, where he links up, somewhat bizarrely, with Anton Ferdinand, the former West Ham, now Sunderland player, and brother of Rio. Bowman has told him he wants him back in the water on February 1, but Phelps expects he will be doing so much earlier. “I’ve been out of the water a week now. Feels really weird.”

In 2012, he plans to drop some races and try new ones, but will “probably not” attempt another eight. After Athens, he was told he could be the next Mark Spitz. “Not to downplay his achievement by any means, but I didn’t want to be the next Mark Spitz. I wanted to be the next Michael Phelps. I wanted to change the sport. You know, Michael Jordan did things that no one ever did before.” But swimming isn’t basketball – for one thing, swimmers don’t compete very often. Still, Phelps is making a start on building the sport by putting the $1 million he was paid by Speedo for beating Spitz’s record into a foundation to promote swimming. He says he doesn’t feel the pressure to be an entertaining celebrity. “I’m the same person I was four years ago, who likes to compete, who likes to swim, who hates to lose.”

According to some estimates, he could be worth $30 million a year. “Honestly, if it was about the money I wouldn’t love it as much as I do. I’m in this sport because I love being in the water. The money is an extra. I wouldn’t wake up at 6.30 every morning and jump in a freezing pool if I didn’t like it.” Soon he will also move back to a house he has bought in Baltimore. For the past four years he has been in Michigan where Bowman coached. That was “tough. First time living on my own. I can’t cook. Laundry is hard to do. Not hard, I’m lazy when I’m out of the pool. Really lazy, just sitting on the couch.”

He won’t say if he has a girlfriend. In gossip columns he has been linked to Australian swimmer Stephanie Rice, but she said only that “we’ve become quite good friends”. Phelps himself has dismissed as crazy the rumours about British model Lily Donaldson and American swimmer Amanda Beard. There were reports of female athletes at the Olympics trying to wrangle introductions, and I joke that women appear to be throwing themselves at him. “I have a private life and a public life,” he says solemnly.

As he is leaving, I make an oblique reference to the popularity of our location with gay men. “You seem to have a few admirers out there,” I say, as one of Hampstead pond’s devotees self-consciously struts back and forth in front of us, before belly-flopping off the diving board into the cloudy water. But his head is already down in his BlackBerry, and he just grunts as he shuffles towards the waiting car and the next stop on the global marketing money-go-round.