Michael Phelps gets a day off after setting a world record in the 200 fly; 100 fly still looms

Phelps actually has day off at world championships

ROME — Michael Phelps has a whole day off. In Rome, no less.

Will he tour the Vatican? Check out the Trevi Fountain? Visit the Colosseum?

“I’ve got to try to get as much rest as possible,” Phelps said.

Guess his mother is here for the sightseeing. Phelps is all business, even when he’s swimming a reduced schedule that actually provided him a break on Thursday.

“I’ve got most of the workload over with now,” Phelps said, sounding a bit relieved after a tiring, stressful year.

He’s also got another world record, and this one was particularly satisfying. One night after he was soundly beaten by Germany’s Paul Biedermann in the 200-meter freestyle, Phelps broke his own record in the 200 butterfly Wednesday for his first individual title at these world swimming championships.

For good measure, he surpassed another of Mark Spitz’s accomplishments with the 34th world record of his career, one more than Spitz had during his brilliant run in the pool.

The 200 fly was an appropriate salve on Phelps’ wound. That event produced his first trip to the Olympics in 2000 where he finished fifth as a 15-year-old. That event produced the first of all those world records in 2001.

“I’ve always done well in it,” said Phelps, who’s earned two golds and one silver in Rome. “I guess you can call it my bread and butter event.”

He went out strong, fought off the pain over the last lap and touched in 1 minute, 51.51 seconds, more than a half-second lower than his gold medal-winning time of 1:52.03 at the Beijing Olympics.

Phelps was a lot more relaxed for this race than he was getting ready to face Biedermann.

It showed.

“I actually had a really good night sleep for the first time this whole trip, so I was pretty happy about that,” Phelps said. “I actually woke up this morning after my alarm went off. I hit snooze a couple times before I actually got up.”

He’ll have more time to sleep in. Backing off his eight-event program at the last two Olympics and the 2007 world championships, Phelps is competing in six races at Rome, three of them relays. The reduced scheduled provides a most welcome break right in the middle and sets him up for his final three events: the 100 fly, 800 free relay and 400 medley relay.

His coach, Bob Bowman, said the buildup to the 200 free “was more intense, like really intense.”

“It was probably too intense,” he acknowledged. “I mean, he was like ready for a death match, which it was. (For the 200 fly) he was more relaxed.”

The U.S. will be favored in the relays, which leaves the 100 fly as the most intriguing event left on Phelps’ platter. That was the race he won by a thousandth of a second in Beijing, a margin so close that runner-up Milorad Cavic of Serbia still believes he touched first.

“I’m ready for that event,” Phelps said. “There’s a bunch of guys that are going to be right there.”

For the 200 fly, he had planned to wear a Speedo bodysuit, only to discover during warmups that the one he brought to the Foro Italico was too tight in the shoulders. So he went back to the legsuit, which he prefers in the fly anyway.

Phelps went out much faster than he normally does in the fly, and paid for it on the final push to the wall. His arms were burning. His legs, too. But there was no way he was losing again.

He surged to the wall a body length ahead of silver medalist Pawel Korzeniokski of Poland, with Japan’s Takeshi Matsuda settling for bronze. Phelps whipped around quickly to see his time and held up his right index finger when the “WR” was posted.

“I wanted to step on it in the first 100 to get out there in the clean water, and that’s pretty much what happened,” Phelps said.

On Tuesday, he was the one in stormy waters. Germany’s Paul Biedermann swam away from Phelps in the 200 free and snatched away his world record, too.

Most of the talk afterward was about what they were wearing — and there wasn’t a red carpet in sight. Biedermann was in a polyurethane Arena X-Glide suit, which everyone concedes produces much faster times than Phelps’ year-old Speedo LZR Racer.

Bowman threatened to pull his star from all future international events unless FINA speeds up its timetable for banning bodysuits. The governing body had mandated that male swimmers go back to wearing waist-to-knee “jammers” made from textile materials, but says the new rules may not be fully implemented until May 2010.

Phelps will let others debate those issues, though he’s never real happy about losing. Friends stepped up to help him cope with his first major individual loss since 2005, sending along texts to the effect: “If you want to call me and just yell at the phone and get some frustration out, I have no problem sitting there and listening.”

He took them up on the offer.

“That definitely helped,” Phelps said.

Then he got in on the record-breaking, which shows no signs of letting up. Italy’s Federica Pellegrini thrilled the Italian crowd by winning the women’s 200 free, her second championship and third world record of the meet.

“I feel that my heart is for Italy,” she said after clapping along with the crowd during her country’s bouncy national anthem, “Fratelli d’Italia” (Brothers of Italy).

Germany’s Daniela Samulski and Russia’s Anastasia Zueva got things rolling Wednesday by setting records in consecutive semifinal heats of the 50 backstroke. South Africa’s Cameron van der Burgh broke his own mark in another non-Olympic event, the 50 breaststroke.

Most impressively, China’s Zhang Lin took down Grant Hackett’s four-year-old record in the 800 free by more than six seconds (7:32.12), with Tunisia’s Ous Mellouli also going under the old mark but only getting silver in yet another event not on the Olympic program.

For those who’ve lost count, that’s 22 records in Rome, hardly living up to the label as the Eternal City. Nothing is sacred in these suits, which have already helped surpass the 15 records set at the last worlds in Melbourne two years ago, with four days still to go.

For Phelps, it’s only three.

He’s got a day to rest.