Michael Phelps Death Stare

Origin: the ready room in Rio

On August 8, 2016, NBC’s cameras found Michael Phelps waiting to swim the 200-metre butterfly semifinal at the Rio Olympics. Hooded, headphones on, jaw set, he stared dead ahead with an expression somewhere between fury and total absence.

A few feet away, South African rival Chad le Clos was shadowboxing and bouncing on the spot in his eyeline. The camera held both men in the same frame: one dancing, the other — as one write-up put it — looking like a Sith lord under his hood. Phelps went on to win the final.

Why it worked as a reaction image

The still is unusually legible. There is no ambiguity in the expression and nothing that needs explaining. You get contempt, focus and a flat refusal to acknowledge in one frame, from a face most of the world already recognised.

That made it ideal for the internet’s favourite joke of that year: attaching an elite athlete’s competitive intensity to something trivially small. Captions had him seething over an unanswered text, a wrong coffee order, a group chat that would not stop buzzing.

How it spread

Clips and screenshots hit Twitter on August 8-9, 2016 under #PhelpsFace and “Angry Michael Phelps.” A Reddit post titled “Active Swimmer Situation down in Rio” took 2,662 points in three hours on r/BlackPeopleTwitter.

The Photoshops arrived immediately and covered the entire 2016 reference set — Star Wars, Arthur’s Fist, Frank Ocean, Pokemon GO, True Detective, Chick-fil-A. One much-shared version ran the frame through the Prisma art filter until he looked like a hand-painted Disney villain. CNN, USA Today and Rolling Stone all covered it within days, which by 2016 was the standard confirmation that a meme had cleared the internet’s border.

Meaning and usage

Three registers, in rough order of frequency.

• Righteous fury at nothing — the dominant mode, and the funniest one.
• Genuine focus — posted straight, as a “locked in” image before an exam, a deadline or a workout.
• Pointed silence — the reaction to somebody being loud nearby, which is closest to what was actually happening in the photograph.

Where it sits among Olympic memes

Every Games since 2012 has produced at least one reaction image, and the press covered Phelps Face explicitly as the successor to McKayla Is Not Impressed. Slate ran a piece arguing Maroney’s face was still the better meme, on the grounds that anyone can pull her expression at a dinner table, while Phelps needs a hood, headphones and a swimming pool to land the same joke.

That is a fair diagnosis of the difference. The death stare is a great screenshot; the not-impressed face is a face you can make. Both, though, come out of the same narrow genre — a broadcast camera catching an athlete in one unguarded second, and the internet deciding that second is about everybody.