For more than a dozen years now, Australia has held its collective breath whenever Ian Thorpe has swum.
At the end of the race, the usual exhalation was a roar of elation as Thorpe repeatedly conquered the world, winning five Olympic gold medals, 11 world titles, breaking 13 world records.
But everything about this race was different. As Thorpe faded back through the field of his 200 metres freestyle semi-final at the Olympic trials in Adelaide and the realisation dawned that he was unlikely to qualify for his third Olympic team, the nation initially forgot to breathe out at all.
As the people’s champion touched the wall in sixth place with the 12th fastest time, not good enough to reach today’s final, there was only stunned silence from the crowd at first, and then a lingering sigh of disappointment.
The whole nation has ridden on the 29-year-old’s hopes, dreams and victories for half of his life, a weight he has at times found impossible to bear but has for the most part carried with extraordinary grace.
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Even when the old magic deserted him in the pool today, he still summoned that grace once again in an eloquent television interview directly after his crushing disappointment.
“I am terribly disappointed with that,’’ he said. “I had a really good heat swim this morning and I thought I could and I thought I would swim a little quicker, much quicker. The fairytale just turned into a nightmare.’’
Later he would admit that he had “never felt just utterly gutted and kind of left speechless by a performance … So it’s a new thing and I don’t know how I’ll handle it but I’ll have to handle it well so that I can get myself back up.’’
Thorpe initially identified a “little bit of inexperience with racing in the last 18 months’’ as his downfall but his coach Gennadi Touretski has been signalling for the last couple of months that a lack of conditioning is the greater concern.
Thorpe was short of time when he announced his comeback only 14 months ago and has tried to get back to elite level using different training methods from those that took him there in the first place.
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Under Touretski he turned to a more sprint-based programme but the coach concluded months ago that Thorpe’s unique capabilities are primarily brought out through the type of middle-distance training that he has done since he was a budding teenager.
The most obvious sign is that he has lost the killer finish that made him the most effective relay anchorman in history. Today that killed off his chances of making the Australian team in the 200m freestyle. He has faded out of virtually every race he has had in the last five months.
That comes down partly to conditioning, and Touretski has loaded Thorpe up with dry-land fitness work in the last couple of months in a bid to compensate for the kilometres in the water that were a standard part of the younger Thorpe’s regime. But it was too little, too late.
Touretski thinks Thorpe’s physical and emotional fitness for competition are inextricably linked. “In my opinion adding a sprinter’s work to his programme is not enough,’’ he said in Zurich three weeks ago. “I think his nature requires the [harder] work he did before.’’
Thorpe did not have enough time to do that work in a year, coming from a low base of fitness. Whether the training he has done will leave him better prepared to fight for a place in the 4 X 100m freestyle relay over the weekend is debatable and the mountain to climb will be even higher there with world champion James Magnussen sitting on top.
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But Thorpe vowed to “go for broke’’ in his last remaining event. “I have a competition to finish now,’’ he said. “And a competition where I have to perform well. I still want my spot on this team. It got a bit harder this evening, but I’ll find something within myself to give myself the best shot and try not to let this detract from that possibility.’’
The most likely outcome is that Thorpe will miss the London Olympic team. It may always have been the most likely outcome given the time frame, and Thorpe has said as much repeatedly.
However, he has indicated that the London Olympics were not the sole target of his comeback and that he will continue swimming. Without a looming deadline, he will have time to find the champion that he once was.
What we learned today is that even champions like Ian Thorpe cannot take shortcuts to success.
Nicole Jeffery, a writer with The Australian, used to work with Thorpe on his column for newspaper