A kid from Baltimore diagnosed with Attention-Deficit Disorder at the age of seven and convicted of drink driving in his teens as he struggled to cope with his parents' divorce might just be the greatest sportsman of all time.

With seven golds and six world records in the process, Michael Phelps had been making things look so easy that the phenomenal nature of his achievement could have eluded us. Then came Friday night's one hundredth of a second victory over Serbia's Milorad Cavic in the 100m butterfly to give the story an even more dramatic twist. At just 23 Phelps has already won more Olympic gold medals than anyone else in history and at the time of writing remained on course to set a single Olympic record of eight golds. He's a comic book superhero come to life.

2 Phelps' new gold dream was almost derailed at the very start. Going into the last leg of the 4x100m freestyle relay, France had a half-second lead on the United States. With World 100m champion Alain Bernard swimming that final leg, the odds in running on the USA must have been massive. Even 25 metres from home France looked certain winners before Jason Lezak, looking as though he'd been fitted with a propeller, closed the gap and got home by eight hundredths of a second. Lezak had swum the fastest relay leg of all-time.

3 Kenneth Egan is one of the finest amateur boxers ever to come from this country but he had to go down to the wire before finally clinching a much coveted place in the Olympics. Last week the Neilstown light heavyweight made up for lost time as he defeated Julius Jackson of the Virgin Islands and Bahram Muzaffer of Turkey on a combined score of 32-4 in the first two rounds. Washington Silva of Brazil awaits on Tuesday when a win will guarantee Egan a medal. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility that this day week we'll be getting up to watch Egan take on Tajikistan's Djakhon Kurbanov in the Olympic final.

4 The course for the cycling road races provided some of the prettiest pictures of the week, taking the riders out in the vicinity of the Great Wall and through the mountains which made this the most gruelling of all Olympic courses. After three and a half hours, the women's race came down to one of the most painful looking sprint finishes you're ever likely to see. The first three crossed the line together and winning by not much more than the width of a wheel was Welsh woman Nicole Cooke. Few golds will be harder won.

5 Looking completely at odds with himself in the heats and semi-final of the kayak slalom, Eoin Rheinisch somehow managed to scrape through, fifteenth of 15 qualifiers for the semis, tenth of 10 for the final. But then Rheinisch displayed that rarest of attributes, the ability to produce his best when it really mattered. Going off first he set a time which had him in bronze medal position with just one competitor left. That was when Benjamin Boukpeti of Togo decided to write his own fairytale, pipping the Dubliner for the medal right at the death for his country's first ever Olympic medal and snapping his paddle in half out of sheer joy at the end.

6 If Michael Phelps is Superman, then Wei Yang is the Lord of the Rings. Yang's almost perfect performance on that most difficult piece of apparatus ensured his gold medal in the gymnastics, his power and strength such that you could hardly believe the Chinese star is only five foot three. Almost as remarkable was the silver medal for Japan's Kohei Uchimura, whose embarrassing fall from the pommel horse earned him the worst score of all the competitors and plunged him way down the rankings only for spectacular displays over the vaulting horse and parallel bars to claw back a near miraculous second place for the Nagasaki teenager.

7Not only had Alain Bernard been humiliated by Jason Lezak, he'd also lost his world record to Australia's Eamon Sullivan whose first leg in the relay final was the fastest 100m ever swum. And when he turned for home in second place in the 100m final, Bernard, a famously quick starter, looked set for further heartbreak. Instead the man known as 'The Horse' for possessing shoulders which wouldn't be out of place on The Incredible Hulk did to Sullivan what Lezak had done to him, swimming the Australian down in the closing stages and gaining redemption. That Lezak was a well beaten third only underlined the remarkable nature of the American's relay performance.

8 The prowess of little Slovakia at canoeing is a permanent wonder. And no one is more wonderful than Michal Martikan, 17-year-old gold medallist in 1996 in the Canoe Slalom, silver medallist in Sydney and Athens and multiple world champion. Last to go down the course in Shunyi, Martikan had to surpass a dream run by Britain's David Florence to win. Four years ago the Slovak thought he had won gold only to be denied when a video review showed him brushing against a gate. This time there was no mistake as Martikan made the white water look like a flat calm lake en route to gold.

9 The days when the Olympics and amateurism went hand in hand are long gone. But German three-day eventer Hinrich Romeike is a throwback to more innocent times. A 45-year-old dentist from Hamburg who only gets to practice when the day's work is done, Romeike, who'd given the outstanding performance over a tough cross-country course, unexpectedly found himself leading the competition going into the showjumping phase. As he set out for his final round on Marius, he knew that one fence down would leave him with a bronze and two knock him out of the medals altogether. The cool nerve and steady hands engendered by years of root canal work saw Romeike go clear to win gold and leave the professionals red-faced.

10 Once banned from the national team for "excessive commercialism" (she advertised McDonalds) and possessed of supermodel looks and a millionaire playboy companion, diver Guo Jingjing is as far from the stereotypical regimented Chinese athlete as you can get. Despite, or perhaps because of, this she is China's most popular sportswoman. The arcana of synchronised springboard diving may be a mystery to most of us but, in winning gold, Guo and partner Wu Minxia showed sufficient balletic elegance, gymnastic flair and star quality to make the comprehension gap irrelevant. She's lovin' it.

11 An Olympic Games is probably the only time anyone outside the cognoscenti is likely to watch women's weightlifting but the sport is a surprisingly addictive spectacle. The wow factor looms large when you watch someone like Prapawadee Jaroenrattanatarakoon in action. Five foot two tall and weighing in at around eight and a half stone, the 24-year-old Thai woman hoisted 19 stone 11 pounds over her head to win the gold medal in the featherweight division.

12 Cynics who like to know the Olympics for its supposed appeal to nationalism and the baser side of human nature should have been given pause last week as the Russian government showed what actual war is like. When air pistol silver medallist Natalia Poderina of Russia and Nina Salukvadze of Georgia embraced on the podium as a gesture of peace it was a reminder that, by and large, athletes behave better than politicians and inhabit a more noble sphere of existence. For the more primitive joy of seeing Russia suffer bad karma for ill treating its neighbours, there were victories for Lithuania in the basketball and Georgia in the beach volleyball which will no doubt give those countries that lovely Stuttgart '88 feeling.

- EAMONN SWEENEY