I’m not even disapproving. After all, the first sentence is probably correct. And God help Michael Phelps, I guess, for being in this situation:
When you’ve won 23 gold medals there’s really nothing left to do but race a shark.
The Discovery Channel announced Friday that Olympian Michael Phelps will take on the dangerous animal during the network’s very popular, Shark Week.
The Sports Illustrated’s cheesily-photoshopped picture aside, it’s fairly obvious that they’re not going to put Phelps and a shark in the same pool and make them race each other. It’s also absolutely a gimmick: Phelps has a top speed of about 6 miles an hour, while a shark has a burst speed that’s somewhere between 25 and 35 mph. At a guess, they’re going to have a shark go down a distance without trying to get it to swim fast (a shark’s cruising speed is about 5 mph, apparently); then they’ll have Phelps aim for covering the same distance so that he just beats the shark’s amble through the water. Or just lose; that might make for just as interesting television.
But, hey! You know know two things that you didn’t maybe know before: how fast a shark swims, and how fast Michael Phelps does. So, net gain for the universe, right?