Whoa! Self-Important Much?

An illustration of why it’s important to have people in your life that ground you…and would throttle you if you ever forgot that the world revolves around the Sun and not you.  

US swim legend Mark Spitz won’t be on hand in Beijing if Michael Phelps breaks his record of seven gold medals at a single Olympics—because, he says, no one bothered to invite him.

“I never got invited. You don’t go to the Olympics just to say, I am going to go. Especially because of who I am,” Spitz told AFP in Hong Kong.

“I am going to sit there and watch Michael Phelps break my record anonymously? That’s almost demeaning to me. It is not almost—it is.”

Spitz became one of the most famous athletes in the world at the 1972 Munich Olympics, winning seven gold medals—with seven world records—in what many consider to be one of the greatest achievements in all of sport.

“I won seven events. If they had the 50m freestyle back then, which they do now, I probably would have won that too,” he said.

Spitz said it would have been a great idea if he could be the one presenting the gold medals to Phelps, who has for years been candid about his ambition to eclipse the mark of seven golds.

And Spitz thinks Phelps will succeed—for one very good reason.

“He’s almost identical to me. He’s a world-record holder in all these events, so he is dominating the events just like I did,” Spitz said. “He reminds me of myself.”

(Source: AFP)