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The greatest swimmer the world has ever seen — and the greatest Olympic athlete in history, if gold medals are anything to go by — is something of an imposter.

Elite athletes in this hypercompetitive era are supposed to be more machines than mortals, separating their oversized bodies from the rest of us by virtue of their finely calibrated physical regimen, psychological sense of superiority, and blinding compulsion to win at all costs.

So what's Michael Phelps doing hanging out in a basic Beijing dorm with five other guys, as if he weren't a waterborne multimillionaire, cheering on his fellow relay racers like they're the stars of the show, and pigging out on gargantuan breakfasts that cover the middle-American wide-load menu from fried-egg sandwiches topped with fried onions and mayo via sugared French toast to an all-you-can-eat fantasy of chocolate-chip pancakes? Doesn't he realize he's supposed to be making history?

Instead this unparalleled Olympian, this 23-year-old god who walks among us, has been living in an ultra-simplified dream world of his own improbable creation (while also competing in 17 separate races for the eight events that will define his legacy). "Eat, sleep and swim, that's all I do," the monosyllabic icon told the world, quite contentedly, in one of his more chatty outbursts.ď

For Canadians, Wayne Gretzky has long served as the supreme example of a seemingly simple and uncomplicated person who doubles as a sports genius. Phelps is his equal in casual greatness, an extraordinary athlete whose apparent ordinariness ("That's all I do") is one of the most remarkable things about him.

Sports fans feel a powerful need to connect with the objects of their affections, who are, after all, simply playing the games of our childhood. But it is one of the ironies of the modern world that as TV networks pay hundreds of millions of dollars to make these Olympic superstars seem even more up-close and personal, their single-minded devotion can make them appear more remote and unreal.

Phelps is a telling exception, and not just because his streamlined but relatively scrawny 6-foot-4, 195-pound frame looks closer to nature than to the mad scientist's lab — and that's with the 15 pounds of weight-training bulk he packed on after winning a mere six gold medals as an overwhelmed "deer-in-the-headlights" teenager at the 2004 Athens Olympics.

On the pool deck, waving those massive arms (he has a 6-foot-7 wingspan), stomping about with those flipper-like size-14 feet, or just chilling out in his headphoned way to rapper Lil Wayne — mere seconds before the race begins — Phelps definitely stands out. But only because the camera can't keep away, and can't quite reconcile the difference between his ritualized Zen-like focus (including precisely 21/2 arm flaps on the starting block) and the violent physicality that's about to erupt as he sets out to swim faster than anyone has done before.

In person, he tends much closer to the norm, by choice as much as by nature's design. For the past four years before Beijing, the Baltimore native has been training with his long-time coach (and self-described "business partner") Bob Bowman in Ann Arbor, Mich., where he is widely celebrated as a high-achieving Everyman who depletes the city's eateries while kitted out in a baseball cap, hoodie and jeans.

"He doesn't try to hide who he is," says pizzeria manager Mia Donoghue, "but he also doesn't stand around and expect people to stare at him."

While the concentrated week in Beijing has been just eat/sleep/swim, the everyday Phelps is an easy-going guy who signs autographs without complaint between bites of his half-pound Angus-burgers, makes a point of watching the Baltimore Ravens games at sports bars, invites friends to play video games (Madden NFL, Tiger Woods PGA Tour), listens to Garth Brooks, invariably reveals a dry-land clumsiness that is far from God-like ("He's the kind of guy who would trip over the crack walking down the sidewalk," jokes friend Scott Meinke) and resolutely avoids the kind of trouble that got him tagged with an impaired driving charge while tooling around in his sport utility vehicle after the Athens Games.

Like every other misstep in a life devoted to relentless self-improvement, even the impaired driving charge has been artfully remade into a learning experience. "I didn't have my goals locked in mind," Phelps said with the self-serving wisdom of a seasoned sports psychologist during his round of mea-culpas. "If I did, that definitely would not have happened."

Goal-setting is a key to Phelps's success, a process that has turned his simple way of life into an amazing quest shown around the world. This is a $5-million-a-year career, after all, that began when he was a mere 11 years old, the point at which he was identified as a future world-beater by Bowman, a classical musician and child-psychology student turned swim coach who mapped out for Phelps's now-divorced parents, a teacher and a state trooper, the 15-year path that would lead to Olympic glory in 2004, 2008 and 2012.

The competitive streak that Bowman saw in Phelps was even fiercer than predicted. At 15, the boy with the whippet body was competing in the Olympics in the 200-butterfly, where he finished fifth. Within a few months, he was the world-record holder in one of the sport's most demanding events, and since then has been the standard by which all-round swimmers are measured.

In his seven-day-a-week training routines, which start with a 5 a.m. alarm-clock call, and can include up to 15 kilometres of repetitive lengths and sprints each day, he is not so different from the hundreds of elite swimmers left in the wake of his double-jointed dolphin kicks. Where he manages to outdistance his rivals, according to expert observers, is in the blending of his body's rare gifts with the intensity of his planning and concentration.

"It's his physical ability, it's his ability to race," says USA swim coach Mark Schubert, rhyming off Phelps's clear advantages, "it's his ability to get excited when he needs to and to come down when he needs to come down."

Finding that balance has not always been easy for Phelps. As a 9-year-old, he was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder and treated with Ritalin. Like many future athletes, he wasn't able to sit still within the confines of a classroom, and his hyperkinetic manner frustrated teachers who complained to his mother, a teacher herself, about his inability to focus. She knew otherwise — at swim meets, he could sit still for hours at a time, waiting for his five minutes in the water, his element. Years later, he could watch videotape endlessly to spot flaws in his freestyle head motion.

These days, the calm Phelps finds in the water comes more readily than the excitement. "When I'm in the water, everything seems at peace," he has said, a feeling TV viewers recognize as they compare his apparently effortless progression through the pool with the uncontrolled thrashing exhibited by his desperate pursuers. This is a man who faced disaster when his goggles filled with water in the treacherous 200-metre butterfly, and yet he calmly kept his rhythm, knowing that his innate feeling for the event and affinity for the water allowed him to swim blind.

To find the excitement in his competitions, the man who is now a prohibitive betting favourite for most races (and who managed to judge a Miss USA contest in his spare time) often has to rely on more artificial motivation — like the prediction from one-time rival Ian Thorpe that the competition at Beijing was too great for one swimmer to win eight gold medals, a reasonable enough observation that Phelp taped to his locker in order to stimulate his inner rage. Bowman, perhaps fearing that Phelps's calm in the water might become as laid-back as his out-of-pool style, has done his bit to rouse the beast, repeating some French-team trash talk just before the 4ƒxƒ100-metre freestyle relay in which Phelps swam a best-ever opening leg (and still relied on his teammate Jason Lezak to pull off the unlikely last-stroke victory).

It was that relay, oddly enough, and not an individual event, that provided Phelps's signature moment at the Games thus far — screaming Tarzan-like in bare-chested ecstasy as Lezak touched the wall. Some commentators criticized this display, mistaking his spontaneous expression of joy for triumphant macho aggression. But Phelps in his frequent individual victories is surprisingly restrained, even stoic — team accomplishments seem to release his pent-up inhibitions and make his delight more pure.

Certainly his fellow swimmers don't resent his many victories, and appreciate what he has accomplished for the rest of the field. "He's been great for our sport," said Canadian freestyler Andrew Hurd earlier this week, "because everyone has stepped up in every one of his events to get better, just to stay close to him."

And even if the rest of the world is willing to grant him superhuman status, fellow swimmers can still recognize his human side. When the 4ƒxƒ100-metre relay ended with the U.S. victory, as the Stars-and-Stripes waved madly in the stands, Phelps calmly walked over to the distraught French swimmer, Alain Bernard — the man who had earlier trashed the U.S. side — and began to console him. For the greatest swimmer of all time, the gold medal was not enough.ƒo

With reports by Matthew Trevisan in Toronto and Allan Maki in Beijing