On Monday night in Rio, as they sat around waiting to commence the semifinals of the 200-meter butterfly, Michael Phelps and South African swimmer Chad le Clos put on a master class in performative passive-aggression. As my colleague Willa Paskin put it, le Clos “pranced around, peacocking, jabbing the air, shaking out his muscles with all the naturalness of a person pretending not to care if anyone is watching him, desperate to be watched.” Phelps gave le Clos his best “I’m too old for this shit” look. It was great stuff. It was trending. It was #PhelpsFace.
NBC wasn’t going to let a good psychodrama go to waste. In the prelude to Tuesday’s 200-meter butterfly final, NBC went big on the #PhelpsFace phenomenon, advertising the presence of a camera in the athletes’ “ready room.”
The drama the network hoped would materialize—the #PhelpsFaces the network hoped to capture—um, didn’t. I watched the Phelps-cam, which was also at times the Ledecky-cam, for about 20 minutes preceding the 200-meter butterfly. I learned the answer to that age-old question: “Just what do Olympic swimmers do in the minutes before a race when they know they’re being filmed?” The answer: “Absolutely nothing of interest.”
Consider: As the network’s prime-time feed prepared to broadcast the second semifinal in the men’s 100-meter freestyle, the ready-room camera kept a tight focus on Katie Ledecky, who sat on a white folding chair, staring ahead blankly, as if waiting for a doctor’s appointment.* Eventually, she adjusted her swim goggles and took a deep breath, while Swedish swimmer Sarah Sjöström massaged her own yellow-swim-capped cranium. Then, Sjöström took a sip from a bottle of water, then balanced the bottle of water under her chin. Then, Ledecky took a sip of water. #WaterFace!
Looking for something more exciting, the camera operator focused on the rear of the ready room, where le Clos sat on a chair, shaking himself, presumably trying to keep loose, possibly trying to put some sort of hex on Michael Phelps. As Ledecky and Sjöström left to start their race. Phelps entered the ready room, sat down, and started to play with his phone. Behind him, le Clos grabbed a bottle of water. Phelps watched some of Ledecky’s race. A guy started to stretch ostentatiously. Phelps fiddled with his goggles and thought about how he is too old for this shit.
Phelps and le Clos remained apart, on opposite sides of the room. As le Clos shook it out, Phelps played with his phone again. A Russian swimmer drummed on his legs. A guy in an orange warmup wished le Clos well. Le Clos drank more water. Phelps cinched up his swimwear. A schlubby guy in the far background played with his phone. There were no #PhelpsFaces to be seen. There was nothing at all to be seen.
I kept checking in on the ready-room camera throughout the evening. NBC, God bless ‘em, kept it on throughout, including during the night’s final event, the men’s 4-by-200-meter freestyle relay, at which point the room was completely empty except for chairs and spent water bottles. The chairs were giving each other #ChairFaces. It was nuts.
The entire #PhelpsFace camera stunt was, if nothing else, a fascinating televisual experiment, like that Gus Van Sant movie where Matt Damon and Casey Affleck walked silently through a desert for 17 hours.
Let’s look at that Ledecky video again.
You know what it reminds me of? This scene in the movie Birth.
And here’s the Phelps video:
That’s clearly a riff on the “Jessie’s Girl” scene from Boogie Nights.
Would the #PhelpsFace cam have been more interesting if “Jessie’s Girl” had been playing loudly throughout? Yes. Was it cool that NBC hired Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot a bunch of footage of empty chairs? Also yes.
*Correction, Aug. 10, 2016: This post originally misspelled Katie Ledecky’s first name.
