Our very own doe-eyed Merman, Chad le Clos, goes up against his arch-rival Michael Phelps in the Rio Olympics today. Here’s something I wrote about the Baltimore Bullet a few years ago.

THAT poor, dumb brute, Michael Phelps. He never stood a chance. He hasn’t stopped swimming since his mother was talked into having a water birth in 1985. He has won 14 Olympic gold medals and holds seven world records. As if that’s not enough, just months after winning Sports Illustrated’s Sportsman of the Year award, he walked off with High Times magazine Bong Smoker of the Year award. Is there nothing this man cannot achieve?

Who among us can forget that image of our hero at the Beijing Olympics after winning the 100m butterfly, his long face – freakishly elongated after having to doggy paddle down the birth canal and then back stroke to the surface of his parents’ jacuzzi in Baltimore 23 years earlier – lit up with the realisation that he is the world’s fastest swimmer?

I can. I forgot that image the moment it flitted across my television screen. A highly trained world class athlete who does nothing but swim and who keeps on winning swimming races? Outrageous. Unthinkable.

The image that does stick in my mind, though, is the photograph of the human dolphin at a party near the University of South Carolina, his piscine mouth wrapped tightly around the end of a cylindrical device that could have been a plastic didgeridoo but instead turned out to be a $2 bong packed with primo marijuana.

The photograph, taken by a student with a bright future in the DEA, was published in Britain by the News of the World, a tabloid edited by a misshapen creature whose presence is preceded by the sound of weeping children and the overpowering smell of sulphur.

Oh. My. God. Michael Phelps gets high. No wonder he managed to … er, hang on. Smoking anything at all isn’t likely to enhance lung capacity, is it? If it did, half of Jamaica would be swimming off to Miami every weekend.

The cry went up. Michael Phelps is setting a bad example. Oh, fuck off. He’s not. If you look at the picture closely, you will notice that he has a textbook grip on the bong in question. This is a man who knows what he is doing.

I suspect that the mole who leaked the photograph did so because he never got a chance to have a hit. He brought the last of his stash to the party, primed the bong and then made the mistake of asking Michael to bust it. Possessing lungs bigger than the Hindenburg, Michael only stopped inhaling when the host’s Chihuahua was sucked into the bowl. His exhalation looked like an Australian wildfire.

Michael apparently had several health scares after an unusual growth spurt at school. He hit the 2m mark in grade nine. What the hell was his mother putting in his lunch? It certainly wasn’t dope cookies because I went to high school with boys who were cannabis fiends and when I bump into them today they are so small that I easily step right over them. Okay, so it was just this one guy. And he might have been unconscious. But still.

I suspect that Michael’s mother fed him on Kellogg’s, a nutritious breakfast cereal that helped turn him into a well-rounded kid afflicted with nothing more serious than Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. Michael loved Kellogg’s but Kellogg’s loved Michael even more when they became his sponsor and he started getting super hyperactive in the freestyle events.

But then Michael got distracted by a passing bong, as is the wont of the attention deficit, and Kellogg’s just plain cold turkey dropped him. “We didn’t do it,” said a company spokesman. “Sugar, yes. Artificial flavourants, yes. Liver-curdling colouring, yes. Cannabis? No way, José.”

Michael is also sponsored by Subway, a company with more than 30 000 restaurants in nearly 90 countries. Right now, as we speak, the chain is promoting a hefty twelve inches of heart-stopping cholesterol on a roll for only $5.

“Hey, folks. I’m Michael Phelps and damn, have I got the munchies! Give me four of them fabulous foot-longs!”

But, no. Instead of taking advantage of the situation, Subway said, “We are disappointed in his behaviour, but we accept his apology and he remains in our plans.”

Michael, if you’re reading this, I would advise you to dump those mealy-mouthed weasels over at Subway. You might not be averse to putting twelve inches of something else in your mouth, but anyone who has seen you in a Speedo knows you don’t eat that rubbish.

The only people responding to this global crisis in a rational manner, apart from 300 million marijuana smokers, are Michael’s third biggest sponsors, Swiss watchmakers Omega. And not just because their country’s banks have tons of Nazi gold and Cosa Nostra cash in their vaults, either. Geneva is controlled by billionaire smack junkies and crack whores who can’t even swim, but, like Michael, they can speak French. Which makes all the difference in the world.

Thanks to his heinous abuse of narcotics, Phelps now has nearly two million fans on Facebook, not all of whom are gay. The messages are overwhelmingly supportive. Like this one, “I think the sandal with Plelps is ridicudiculous , the media is blowwing it out of proportion … people are quick to judge before looking at all of his acomplishemeds in a shor time he gave us the hights honor any olypian has ever had ,there is much bigger curropiton in DC this was only pot for christ sake we all have skeletons in our coloset.”

Okay, so marijuana might not be good for everyone.