`Thorpe’s foot has twice the surface area of average feet’

Just about the only thing he has yet to win is an Olympic title and you do not have to be Australian to bet that, come September, that will be rectified in his native Sydney where Thorpe promises to be the star performer in an outstanding Australian men’s team.

Thorpe says the expectations of a nation are a help, not aburden. “It’s only pressure if you want to let it be pressure. I look at it more as support than anything else,” he said on Tuesday at his first competition in Britain and the first of three World Cup meetings he is contesting in Europe.

“Any expectations that anyone else has are nowhere near the expectations I have of myself.

“I’m more than happy, quite surprised how well I’m swimming and how everything’s going. I broke my ankle late last year and coming back from that everything has seemed to go my way…That can change and I’m just making sure I do the right things in training, making sure I get great race rehearsals, and try and bring it all together.”

After Sheffield, Berlin and Imperia in Italy, Thorpe has his sights focused on the Australian Olympic Trials in Sydney in May.

Winner of an extraordinary 10 National age-group titles in 1997, Thorpe’s talent is prodigiously comprehensive. The 200 and 400 freestyle are his forte but he has a turn of speed in the 100 freestyle and has given the long-distance men something to fret about by entering and winning the 1,500 at last month’s New South Open Championships and becoming the first man to win the 100, 200, 400 and 1,500 at the event.

Apart from the 200 and 400, the big and burly teenager wants to swim the 100 and is concentrating his World Cup efforts on sharpening his sprint time — an ambition thwarted when his goggles came adrift on Tuesday, though he still won.

“It all depends on how well I swim the 100 freestyle. I want to swim the 100 freestyle at the Olympics as an individual event and more so as a member of relay teams which come with that event,” he said.

“If I’m not fortunate enough or I’m not in a position where I’ll be swimming that race as first or second fastest Australian I’m going to look at swimming the 1,500 simply because there isn’t anything else for me at the end of the programme.”

Thorpe progressed from being the youngest male ever to swim for Australia, at the 1997 Pan Pacs when he was two months short of his 15th birthday, to becoming the youngest men’s World champion in history five months later in Perth, overhauling team-mate Grant Hackett to win the 400 metres freestyle with the awesome finishing burst which is his devastating trademark.

Four gold medals followed at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in September 1998, three more plus a World record at the World Short-Course Championships in Hong Kong in April last year and then, in perhaps the most extraordinary four days of his swimming life, four more titles and four long-course World records at the Pan-Pacific Championships in Sydney last August.

Thorpe carved almost two seconds from the five-year-old 400 freestyle record of fellow Australian Kieren Perkins, reducing the mark to three minutes 41.83 seconds in what coach Doug Frost rated the greatest swim in history, twice lowered the 200 freestyle World mark, bringing it down to 1:46.00 in the final, and finally shared an Australian World record in the 4×200 metres freestyle relay.

“I go to bed at night and say my prayers and thank God that we have got him,” National head coach Don Talbot said at the time. “He could be the greatest swimmer we’ve ever had and maybe the greatest swimmer the World has ever seen.”

Thorpe could grace three Olympics before he is 26. “I’d like to swim until 2008. I’m only going to swim while I still enjoy it and as soon as I stop enjoying it I’m going to stop doing it,” he said.

Meanwhile, he is reluctant to consider his place in the pantheon of great Australian freestylers: “It’s a big question mark…It’s something I haven’t looked at and I don’t think I should look at till I’ve finished swimming and I hang up my costumes and look back on it — and hopefully I’ll be smiling at that stage.”

His boy-wonder exploits have earned him a string of awards, from World and Australian Swimmer Of The Year to Male Athlete and Young Australian Of The Year.

Coach Frost says he is amazed at how well his protege handles himself. “He doesn’t feel uncomfortable in anybody’s presence, right from the Prime Minister,” Frost said.

As for the flipper feet — Thorpe’s age matches his 17 shoe size, they must be a help, according to one sports scientist.

“If you compare an average foot with Ian Thorpe’s, he may have twice the surface area. You can see that it is an advantage,” University of Queensland biomechanist Robert Neal was quoted recently as saying in Brisbane. An edge of only 0.05 seconds each length would turn into half a second over 400 metres, a substantial difference at the elite level, he said.

Thorpe himself prefers to look for other reasons for his success. “It’s the training and everything else that goes into it that’s more important, I think,” he said.

“There’s no secret. The harder you train the luckier you get.”