Michael Phelps On Making Olympic History

What happens after you win an historic eight gold medals in a single Olympic Games? Only one person in the world can answer that question: Michael Phelps.

Since Beijing, Phelps has enjoyed his longest break from training ever. He's on a victory lap of sorts, touring the country and building the Michael Phelps brand. He let us tag along with him, and gave CNN's Anderson Cooper his most extensive interview since the Olympics.

He explains how he won in Beijing, how he almost didn't, and what life is now like for an unassuming 23-year-old swimmer who's also the greatest Olympic athlete ever.

The next day, he had an appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, then a red eye flight to New York, where he helped open the stock exchange the next morning.

But Phelps was starting to show the wear and tear of a tour that had taken him from Beijing to Portugal, and to San Francisco among other stops.

By mid-September, he had not been home for three months. 60 Minutes caught up with him in New York, between a commercial shoot and a rehearsal for Saturday Night Live.

Asked if he worries he's doing too much, Phelps told Cooper, "No, cause I'm having fun. You know, it's like (yawns), excuse me, you know, after I…"

He has no trouble sleeping, telling Cooper he can fall asleep within seconds. "Probably within a minute I could, I could be out cold."

Sure enough, Phelps started nodding off. "It took you 50 seconds to fall asleep after we stopped. We actually timed it," Cooper pointed out.

"I was exhausted that day," Phelps replied, laughing. "I was really tired that day."

"Are there moments when you're like, 'This is just nuts?'" Cooper asked.

"There have been a few times where I'll be like, 'Wow this is, you know, more than I expected or more than I thought would happen,'" Phelps admitted.

What's happening is a just reward for a guy who's been training non-stop since age 11. His teenage years were spent swimming lap after lap, thousands of hours staring at a black line on the bottom of a pool.

"For about five years he did not take one day off," explained Phelps' coach Bob Bowman.

Bowman said Phelps even trained on Christmas Day and on his birthdays.

"How do you do that every day?" Cooper asked.

"To be honest, it's not wanting to lose, wanting to do something no one's ever done before. That's what got me out of bed every day," Phelps explained.

The workouts were so intense, Bowman became known as the mad scientist. The toughest workouts, he said, were swimming 10,000 meters for time, which takes about two and a half hours.

"Two and a half hours of full-out racing?" Cooper asked.

"Just swim as hard as you can for two and a half hours," Bowman explained.

"Like horrible, horrible workouts. When you see them on paper, you're like, 'I can't do this.' He makes us do it so we're more confident and we know that we can do anything that we put our mind to," Phelps said.

Payoff came at the 2004 Athens Olympics. Phelps won six gold medals, an extraordinary achievement but he just missed Mark Spitz's record of seven golds.

Then came Beijing and a chance to make history. To win eight golds, Phelps needed to swim 17 times in nine days. So many things could go wrong in Beijing - and they did. In the 200-meter butterfly final, his goggles filled with water virtually from the start.

"They started filling up more and more and more. And about 75 meters left in the race, I could see nothing. I couldn't see the black line. I couldn't see the T. I couldn't see anything. I was purely going by stroke count. And I couldn't take my goggles off because they were underneath two swim caps," he remembered.

Somehow, he not only won his fourth gold medal of the games, he also set a world record.

But after winning his sixth gold, one short of Spitz's record, Phelps now admits for the first time, he was whipped. "I remember saying, 'I got nothing left.'"

"Yeah, I could just see it in his face. If you look at the pictures right after the race, and even when I was standing there, and he was in the water, I thought, 'Wow, he is really tired right now,'" Bowman said.

With little left in his tank, and an historic seventh gold medal on the line, Phelps was behind Serbia's Milorad Cavic in the final of the 100-meter butterfly with just 35 meters to go.

"I was like, 'Please get your hand to the wall first. Please get your hand to the wall first,'" Phelps remembered. "I remember like the last two or three strokes that I had misjudged the finish. I thought that was the race."

But he was victorious. "As soon as I hit the wall, I saw I had won, I looked up, and saw it was by one one-hundredth. And you know that's where the emotion came out. You know, that's where the big splash in the water, like the big roar. I mean you could tell that I was pretty intense after that race."

A photo finish if ever there was one. Phelps was on the left, Cavic on the right. Looking at photos of the finish, Phelps noticed something. "He's picking his head up," Phelps explained, examining the photo. "So it's acting like a speed bump. So he's coming up and then trying to lift his head before he touches the wall. And now mine's in a straight streamline. So that's the difference in the race. If his head's down, he wins. Hands down, hands down wins the race."

A tilt of the head helped Michael Phelps become an Olympic legend.

The cover shoot for Sports Illustrated was the kickoff to a marketing frenzy few other Olympic athletes have ever experienced.

Phelps had nine major sponsors even before Beijing. Now he is overwhelmed with proposals. While visiting Visa's headquarters, 60 Minutes caught him backstage as his agent Peter Carlisle showed him a big offer on his BlackBerry.

It was rejected - $5 million turned down. "Sometimes I get a little frustrated but in the long run I know why he rejected it and why he does stuff like that," Phelps said.

"These types of things were happening so frequently. The number of offers like that that just obviously didn't fit in. It was astounding," Carlisle said.

Carlisle's office receives about 300 calls a day regarding Phelps, but he's only looking for companies that fit Phelps' lifestyle.

Ten restaurant chains offered Phelps deals, but he signed with Subway, in part because they plan to market Phelps overseas. A car endorsement in China will soon follow. To entice more kids to swim, he's set up a foundation, and a Michael Phelps video game is in the works.

He also appears in a commercial for the video game "Guitar Hero." A new book will be out shortly, as will a documentary with behind the scenes footage of Phelps.

Carlisle predicts that Phelps will earn tens of millions of dollars, perhaps even more than $100 million, in his lifetime. "It's pretty good for a swimmer," Phelps said, laughing.

Pretty good for a swimmer, and for his pet: even Phelps' dog Herman may cash in. Carlisle says there have been several sponsorship proposals for the dog.

And Michael's mom Debbie got so much airtime at the Olympics, she made a commercial for Johnson & Johnson, and struck a deal with the clothing company Chico's.

When she heard someone was interesting in having a sponsorship with her, Debbie Phelps says it was "crazy."

Her life may have gotten crazy, but Debbie has not quit her day job. She's a principal at a middle school in Baltimore. Her only complaint? One echoed by mothers everywhere: her son doesn't call enough.

She told Cooper their main form of communicating is texting. "I found that he always didn't return phone calls. But I know he's always texting all the time. So, I taught myself how to text," she explained.

He may be too busy to call, but he is quick to tell you what his mom did for him as a single parent. "For everything she's done for me growing up, I'm happy. I'm happy that she's getting recognized for everything she's done 'cause it's been so much of a big impact on my life."

"I owe her the world," he added.

Her reaction to that statement? "You made me cry Anderson. That's a lot. I was a parent that wanted my kid to do well," she said, tearing up.

Michael's success has allowed him to buy a $1.5 million apartment in his hometown Baltimore.

What is so remarkable about Phelps is how unremarkable he is outside the pool. Take a tour of the apartment, and you quickly see he is at heart a 23-year-old kid. Asked if he even has food in the apartment, Phelps said, "We have some stuff, mostly drinks, cereal, chips."

"Rice Krispie treats, Nutri Grain, Reese's peanut butter cups. Definitely a bachelor's pad," Cooper remarked, taking stock.

His prodigious appetite remains in tact. Over a breakfast of Eggs Norfolk with crab meat and a quesadilla with sour cream he was anxious to dispel one myth: he says it's not true he eats 12,000 calories a day.

So how much does he eat? It's a mere 8,000 to 10,000 calories - when he's training. "Like how much I work out, you know, I have to always just constantly shovel food in because I can lose anywhere from, you know, five to 10 pounds in a week," he explained.

When Cooper interviewed Phelps, he said he weighed in at 205 lbs. - the heaviest he'd ever been. "I've never been over 200 pounds," Phelps said.

Phelps plans to resume training again in January for the London Olympics in 2012. When 60 Minutes was with him, he took a swim - only the fourth time he had been in the pool since Beijing. While there, he and his coach Bob Bowman brought out a secret list.

The list was put together the year before the Olympics. On it were the times Phelps hoped to achieve in Beijing. It turns out he was off by nearly a second in the 200-meter butterfly, when his goggles filled with water.

Phelps says he didn't consider that a successful race.

"I think a lot of people would be surprised that that you left Beijing a little disappointed," Cooper remarked.

"There were two races I didn't hit. The 100 and 200 fly. Those are the only two where I didn't hit my actual goal time of what I wanted," Phelps explained.

"So it was disappointing?" Cooper asked.

"Not as a whole," Phelps replied, laughing.

Since he was in good spirits, and relatively out of shape, 60 Minutes decided to see how the world's greatest swimmer would do against a middle-aged mortal - Anderson Cooper - but there were conditions.

"How 'bout if I get to dive and I do freestyle, one lap. You go underwater the whole way. You can't breathe and you can't take a stroke," Cooper requested.

"Let's go, let's do it," Phelps agreed.

"What does it feel like to race Michael Phelps? I couldn't tell you. He moved by me so quickly I never even saw him," Cooper said after the race. "All right, so I got beat by Michael Phelps, not too bad."

Phelps is not one to brag about his victories. He showed 60 Minutes his eight gold medals, but only because we asked.

He keeps them in a safe place, but has never brought them out just to admire them. This was only the second time he had seen them together. The enormity of his achievement still hasn't completely sunk in.

"I mean it's amazing to see them all at once. It's even more remarkable when you think you have six others," Cooper remarked.

"I was just thinking about that," Phelps said. "I was just thinking about what six more would look like on the table."

"And maybe even more than that some day," Cooper said.

"We'll see," Phelps replied, laughing. "I hope. We'll see."

Produced by Draggan Mihailovich