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In the upcoming 2016 Olympics in Rio, Michael Phelps will be swimming his last (he claims) Olympic games. Already the most storied Olympian with 18 Olympic gold medals out of 22 in total, Phelps is not done yet. Phelps started his swimming career in 1992 at the age of 7. For the next 23 years, save for some retirement trial periods, Phelps has been swimming. I aim to celebrate such a colored career through data visualization.

I want the upcoming media attention surrounding Phelps' retirement to understand the ups and downs of Phelps' career. Which events did he dedicated most of his energy to? Where did he exhibit utter dominance and where was he simply great? How did his performance change before and after his 2012 retirement? Were there plateaus in his career?

I propose a visualization tool that allows viewers to go see at a glance the arc of his swimming career. The website usaswimming.org.

The data is unique for several reasons:
*Macro-Micro Perspective: The audience is very interested with the overall arc of Phelps career as well as his individual performances (in the 2008 Beijings Games, for example).
*Quasi-Regularity: Phelps has been to every Olympics since 2004. Phelps has also participated in the World Championships held once every year. 
*Partition in Twos: There are many different axes that partition the data into twos. There are international games (Olympic Games, World Championships, Pan American Games, etc.) and domestic games within the US. There are short course yard events and long course meter events, these being two different pools that competition is held in. There is Phelps post 2012 retirement and Phelps after his reintroduction in 2014; some claim Phelps had different motivations and ambitions before and after retirement.
*Separate Data with Similarities: Individual event times should not be compared. This is because different events (either because of distance, pool type, or stroke) require different amounts of time to complete. However, there are possible confounding factors that may affect Phelps' times in aggregate, over multiple events. I suspect this will be especially prominent in swim data because swimmers usually swim multiple events in the span of a short number of days, by nature of swimming competition schedules. For example, Phelps had to swim many heats for each of his 8 events for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
*Swim Events with Qualitative Life Events: Phelps has had a string of out-of-pool incidents, with no connotation to the word. Phelps has turned pro, achieved numerous endorsement deals, ran into the law, etc. within the time span of the dataset.


Data:
http://usaswimming.org


Sources:
http://www.biography.com/people/michael-phelps-345192#related-video-gallery
http://www.teamusa.org/News/2012/May/07/Michael-Phelps-timeline-May-7-2012
https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-story-of-michael-phelps
