bdmetronews Desk ॥ Michael Phelps felt “very safe and comfortable” during his “race” with a great white; something else made him nervous.
Phelps vs. Shark: Great Gold vs. Great White is already the most talked-about hour of Shark Week 2017, which kicks off July 23 on Discovery. In the opening night special, which was filmed last month (spoiler alert: he lives!), Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, with 23 Olympic golds and 39 world records in the pool, tests his speed against that of different shark species, including the ocean’s most efficient and feared predator.
Any fan of Shark Week should know that Phelps wouldn’t really race a great white in open water — if you swim fast away from a shark, you look like prey — but it’s still the No. 1 question people had after Discovery announced “the race is on!” last month. To confirm the format of the epic showdown, Yahoo TV phoned Phelps, who, after laughing, explained.
“We were off the tip of Cape Town in South Africa and set up, almost, a lane where I was able to swim in a straight line. We were in open water, but we did not have a shark literally next to me swimming,” he says. When it was time for his competition’s turn, “The challenge of trying to get a white to swim in a straight line was difficult, because when a white attacks a seal on the surface they come from under the surface to build speed to be able to get that natural breach that we all see from great whites. But I think with some of the tests that we were running out there on the boat, we were able to see what they can do. It’s a speed burst that they reach up to 25 mph, so in a 100-meter race, they might be swimming at 16 mph. Don’t look at me to try to figure out formulas, but I know we have people that are smart enough to be able to figure the formulas out to then project the speed that they would swim over the course of 100 meters. That’s what we were able to do, and it was crazy — just watching them naturally breach and then watching them come down with the amount of force that they have when they are going to see what something is.”
