Respect Authority

Olympic gold medalist - fourteen times over - Michael Phelps was busted over the weekend after a photo surfaced of him smoking weed out of a massive bong. Since the pic was taken well after Phelps had traded out his Olympic Speedo for regular clothes, the revelation has no bearing on his gold medal status, but does - for the morally conservative - call into question Phelps’ status as a role model for America’s youth. 

While catching public figures green-handed, so to speak, is hardly new, neither is this sort of typical anti-drug backlash. We know our nation’s politicians, athletes and executives all smoke weed, or have smoked weed, or have been peer-pressured into smoking weed “without inhaling” - but that knowledge doesn’t keep the country’s anti-drug aficionados from lambasting current and/or former potheads for their transgressions. In the great big world of public-figure America, smoking dope is something you do when you’re young, then spend the rest of your life trying to cover up. Unless you’re Barack Obama, and coming clean stands to help you capture the youth vote.

But for me — for someone who has likened dopey-eyed Michael Phelps to John Leguizamo’s sloth character in Ice Age, for someone who finds the superhuman swimmer something of a nuisance with his retarded face, perfect body and unfunny SNL contributions — for me, this weekend’s big discovery makes Michael Phelps, well, kind of alright. In fact, seeing the manfish take an enormous hit — and his subsequent decision to admit it, apologize and move on — makes me downright like him. Celebrities, they’re just like us! They swim 738 laps two times a day, and then smoke a bowl! 

To be frank, the photo also makes me feel a little better about the fact that I counterintuitively exercise two to three times a week, and smoke nearly twice as often. If Michael Phelps doesn’t consider being drug-free a precursor to being Olympic-caliber healthy, then I sure as hell don’t need to worry about weed’s effect on my treadmill skills. In fact, perhaps it’s high time (no pun intended) I started smoking up on the treadmill. 

And although, when it first came out, Phelps’ SNL skit highlighting his ludicrous daily diet made me scoff — “Fuck you Michael Phelps, fuck you and your calorie-burning gill-having fish self” — well now I totally get it. I’d be on the Michael Phelps diet too - after ripping a two-foot bong.