Phelps and his 700,000 friends

By Sam Sessa | Sun reporter

August 19, 2008

Yes, Michael Phelps has been called a rock star. But online - at least on Facebook - the Rodgers Forge swimmer is actually much bigger than that.

So many comments poured in yesterday, part of his fan profile site temporarily crashed, Facebook officials said.

By noon yesterday, the Olympic swimmer had more than 700,000 fans, from high schoolers to parents. That's second only to presidential candidate Barack Obama (1,344,000), and more than Coldplay (501,000) and Michael Jordan (108,000) combined.

His fans have posted more than 30,000 comments on his wall, including marriage proposals, generic compliments ("he's sooo amazinggg!!!") and jealous insults ("you suck"). Here are our top five posts that stuck out from all the rest:

•"I think you deserve a word named after you. Like if your day is going well, or you do something awesome, you say 'Hey thats Phelps.' Anyway keep it up man. Your a great inspiration." - Richard Shuping

•"Michael Phelps, you're so good Morgan Freeman narrates your life" - Anthony Pancochar

•"Totally regretting the fact that I gave up on swimming lessons when I was 10." - Lauren Sciacca

•"A bunch of us ... have taken the challenge to eat like you and work out for 5 hours (broken up throughout the day, of course) for a week to see if we could keep up. Doubt it could happen and it'll most likely go to our thighs." - Tomasi Akimeta

•"Fantastic. We are all proud of you, and are talking about you. But can you beat Captain Kirk?" - Bones Rodriguez

sam.sessa@baltsun.com

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Phelps and his 700,000 friends

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