Is there anything even left to say about Michael Phelps and his performance at the Olympics?

There are few, if any words left to describe what he has been able to accomplish.

Stated simply: Five gold medals, five world records.

He has three more events to go in the Olympics and it seems only a forgone conclusion that he will break Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals.

Phelps will compete in the 200 individual medley, 100 fly and 400 medley relay before the swimming competition ends and the only question left seems to be what the margin of his victories will be.

Watching Phelps excel in the pool in Beijing has been a lot of fun, but even more exciting has been seeing the records fall.

Tuesday night it was the 800 freestyle relay record that went down. The Americans became the first team to ever swim a sub-7 minute 800. That’s pretty intense.

Phelps led off and nearly kept pace with his world record time in the 200 and the team cruised after that. The relay team smashed the previous record by nearly five seconds. Russia finished second and it was five seconds behind the team Phelps, Peter Vanderkaay, Ryan Lochte and Ricky Berens.

Phelps was expected to win nearly every event he entered at Beijing so the wins aren’t so surprising. But the records coming down are really shocking. It’s not tenths of a second that he’s besting the previous records, it’s been seconds. He did it in the 400 IM bettering the record by nearly two seconds and his 200 free was almost a second faster. To set a new record by the margin Phelps has is hard to really understand, but beating a record in swimming by a few seconds is kind of like light-years ahead of the others.

What else is mind-blowing is the fact that Phelps is 23 years old. He has a chance to compete in the 2012 games and add more medals. Just think about that for a second. He already has the most medals in Olympic history and can even have more. That would be a record that would last for a long, long time — unlike the ones he’s bringing down right now.

The Olympics have been awesome thus far and have a chance to get even better.

The U.S. basketball team has an opportunity to “redeem” itself and Minnesota wrestler Jake Deitchler made the games as an 18-year-old in Greco-Roman, to name a few other stories going on. How much fun is it going to be to watch Deitchler wrestle for the Gophers for the next four years?

The women’s gymnastics team lost to China Tuesday night but that was a lot of fun to watch. The Chinese won their first gold medal in gymnastics while the Americans had to think about the mistakes that were made during their performances.

Whether it was the excitement of the commentators or the importance of the event it was a great event to take in.

Come to think of it, some of the value of watching an event like gymnastics you can learn the nuances of the sport from listening to the commentators. Obviously you’re not going to become an expert, but while that event is going on, you will have a handle on it because of the job those commentators do. They don’t even go into the nuts and bolts of the sport, but they give you enough. For instance in gymnastics the scoring is really difficult to understand some of the time, but the commentators were there to explain. Normally this would be frustrating for any die-hard fan of gymnastics but because the sport doesn’t get as much coverage away from the Olympics it’s pretty helpful.

Getting to know an unfamiliar sport by watching it during the Olympics is a neat part of the experience. Watching a little fencing while waiting for something else to start can be a learning opportunity. Who knows you might find yourself watching it again year after year.