He strolls out onto the pool deck and because he's wearing the little knapsack on his back you can fleetingly see the 17-year-old boy living within the man. Yet 17,500 people are roaring at him and he gives them a smile and a wave. Just a smile and a wave. No diffidence and no hubris. Then he goes to work.
It might be no exaggeration to say that Ian Thorpe has saved swimming. Saturday night and we hard-nosed hacks congregated in a big media tent not unlike the one we used in Atlanta four years ago. On that particular Saturday night in Georgia the air was sour with mistrust. The tone-deaf Irish were celebrating. The rest of the world was asking hard questions.
Our own Michelle Smith had changed the nature of swimming. People who loved the sport and knew the sport were close to tears, close to anger. The Chinese and the East Germans they had been able to view as victims of their statehood.
Smith, they suspected, was the first bigtime, privatised, calculating, brass-necked cheat to infest their sport. The mood was horrible. Swimming wasn't a blue skies event anymore.
On Saturday night in Sydney, embarrassingly, journalists were pestering Ian Thorpe for his autograph. Journalists were calling him Thorpey. Every other swimmer who came through the tent answered more questions about Thorpe than anything else.
Here was a champion you could believe in, a phenomenon since he was a kid, a guy who ends the doping arguments by offering to have his blood frozen and made available for any tests which may become available. You looked at the wonder that was Ian Thorpe this Saturday night and you believed in him. The heart jumped a beat. Sport has become so murky and so weak with cynicism that the Olympic Games needed a tonic beginning like this just to survive the fortnight. We all did.
What a night. Four finals. Five world records. The Homebush sky lit by flares of patriotism. Ian Thorpe won his first two gold medals in the space of an hour. 400-freestyle metres swum he confessed with a little tiredness, but yielding a gold and a world record. Then the wonder of wonders, a relay race for the ages.
Dawn Fraser called the 4x100m men's freestyle race the greatest relay she had ever seen. There was no reason to doubt her. The context was perfect: a long-held rivalry between the USA and Australia which heated up to boiling point last week. The venue was right: A madhouse of swim fans. The execution was perfect from Michael Klim's opening-leg demolition of Popov's six-year-old 100m freestyle record to the unforgettable last leg.
The Americans, unbeaten forever in the Olympics and world championships, used to have this event as an exhibition. Until 1988 they broke a world record every time they won gold. On Saturday night, they broke their own world record by 1.5 seconds. Not enough. Gary Hall Jnr touched the wall just after Ian Thorpe did.
Thorpe absorbed it all. His only suggestion of excitement was oblique. "This," he had told himself walking out, "is what the Colosseum was like for the gladiatars". An oddly boyish thought which reminded us that this is just a kid with his career and his life in front of him.
We thought of the old story of Dawn Fraser, the swimming icon of 1956, then a 17-year-old herself. The night before her first race she slept fitfully, woken again and again by a nightmare. So we wanted to know how flustered this 17-year-old was, now carrying a nation on his shoulders as he swam along. Between the cracks of his words it became clear that we were talking a different language. He told the story of his exchange with Michael Klim, when Klim climbed out of the pool after swimming the first leg.
"It was funny" said Thorpe. "I'm not really a 100m swimmer so I wasn't 100 per cent sure of the 100 free world record, but I was pretty sure it was 48.21, but I didn't want to tell Michael he'd broken the record, just in case. So I said, `Michael, you've just done 48.18 seconds'.
"And Michael looked at me, he wasn't realising he'd done it. So I said `Michael' (and he raises his voice as if speaking to a slow child), `YOU SWAM 48.18 sec'."
That's a weak little story until you colour in the background. Ten minutes earlier Thorpe had been on the Olympic podium with his first gold medal around his neck and listening to Advance Australia Fair.
He'd come off. Posed for the snappers, blown kisses to his mother, spoken to Channel Seven, heard his name called for the relays, rushed away, needed four people to get him into his body suit again, dashed out as the relay teams were being introduced.
Suddenly, the race was on, Klim finished his leg. Thorpe who should have been nervous, who should have been flighty, who might have been tired, Thorpe who was swimming perhaps the most pressured swim of his life in 90 seconds does the following:
He registers Klim's precise time on the scoreboard. Recalls the world record time. Decides he's not sure. Decides to tell Klim, but frame the statement in a neutral way so as not to cause embarrassment or unwonted excitement. Tells Klim. Detects that Klim is too excited and can't register the numbers. Tells him again like he's a six-year-old.
Then he steps up and swims the anchorleg of the greatest relay in history.
This is the nature of cool.
By yesterday morning, Australia was beginning to absorb the immensity of it. Already the perfection of the opening ceremony had been topped. We looked across at those FINA blazers, presiding over it all, at Gunnar Werner and the boys who have struggled for decades to restore the purity of their sport. East Germans. Chinese. Michelle. It's been a long war and they've lost many battles been afraid to even fight others.
It will be longer again, but yesterday, beneath untroubled faces, their hands were clapping furiously and, above, the skies were briefly blue. It was worth it for this.
