Michael Phelps driven by desire to prove doubters wrong

[undeterred]

IT is strange, the moments that change history. In 1997, a shy, "problem" schoolboy from a working-class family in Baltimore, Maryland, was told that he would "never achieve anything in life".

It was the kind of throwaway remark that many school teachers -- over worked, over stressed, underpaid -- make about disruptive students. But for Michael Phelps, at that time and place in his young, faltering life, it changed everything.

"I still remember the way I felt," Phelps says during an end-of-year interview in Manchester. "I had just started swimming seriously and those comments from my teacher seemed to burn deep inside. "I was often made to feel like an outsider at school because I had attention deficit hyperactive disorder and struggled to fit in. But I thought to myself, `You can think whatever you want, but I am going to prove you wrong'. I am not sure why it fired me up so much, but it did."

...

"If you are passionate about something, you are going to get there come what may," he says. "People say that I have great talent, but in my opinion excellence has nothing to do with talent. It is about what you choose to believe and how determined you are to get there. The mind is more powerful than anything."


http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/sport/michael-phelps-driven-by-desire-to-prove-doubters-wrong/story-e6frg7mf-1225813674176


Nice article on a great athlete who is having a good weekend.

[MineralMan]

1. And Fred Phelps is driven by some pretty strange brain chemistry.

[xchrom]

2. Yay! Michael phelps is truly wonderful. Nt

[virgogal]

3. What bothers me is that any teacher (or anyone else)would say that any child

will "never achieve anything in life.

Awful.

[undeterred]

4. When I saw the headline I thought the "doubters"

would be the people who bashed him for smoking pot on his own time.

[Kolesar]

5. With ya' eom

[msongs]

6. want to win a bunch of gold medals? smoke pot lol nt