Look. Look what swimming has done to Ian Thorpe. Here he is a week before the Olympic Games and some university students are serenading him at a reception. They are singing a little comic ditty of praise to The Thorpedo. He smiles. He waves. He applauds the singing and laughs at the funny bits. We are amused says his royal grin.

The students are all of three or four years older than him. They have those looks on their faces. They'd walk a million miles for one of Thorpie's smiles. Look. Here he is the week before Australia expects him to officially open the Olympic Games with a gold medal on the first day. Bang! The 400 freestyle is up first. Thorpe owns the five fastest swims ever in the 400-metre free. Aussie, Aussie, Aussie? Oi! Oi! Oi!

Look at him. He takes questions at a press conference, answering each one in fluent sportese. Obviously . . . He hopes so . . . That's what he's here for . . . Wouldn't like to say . . . And now, well, you're flicking through with your remote and there he is, swimming with seals, there he is again selling cars and . . . Again! Pushing that bank's services. They think you might switch banks because Thorpie says so. Look at him. Six feet, five inches of teenage gawkiness, with big ears and size 18 shoes. He should be cringing. He should be red-faced. He should be spot-covered. He should be confused and sullen. Instead, he strides towards these Olympics with his skipping-rope grin and his confident lope. A man.

Ian Thorpe is 17. He has been a superstar since he was 14. He's used to this. They took his late childhood away and he gave them the wonder years. No worries. No drama. No fuss. He belongs to Australia. He enjoys his part of the deal, he knows enough to realise that nobody likes a whinger.

The opening four nights of the swimming competition in Sydney are scheduled to be a Thorpathon. Hope doesn't describe it, this surge of longing which has overcome Australia. It is expectation. It is demand. It is the first gutteral roar of patriotism and triumph of the Games.

In a nation half daft about sport, a nation that practically lives in the water. The emergence of a kid who will be perhaps the greatest swimmer of all time is a bigger deal than you can imagine. Thorpe is a messiah with flipper feet. He will be a star of these Games as surely as Marion Jones or Michael Johnson or Cathy Freeman.

Seventeen. Way off the time when a male swimmer hits his peak and already Thorpe holds world records in the 200-metre and 400-metre freestyle events. Naturally, he is the Olympic favourite in both races. He is expected to gobble those events up and then get down to the relays. He will also swim on Australia's 4x200 metres freestyle relay, which holds the world record, and on the medal contending 400 metres relay team. The idea isn't to just win. The idea is to make the Americans cry.

He lives at home with mum and dad. Ken and Margaret are practical people. They raised their boy well. Raised him to be quiet and modest and to speak when spoken to. So it surprises Ken and Margaret when other Australians stop them on the street and ask them for their autographs, but, fair go, if people ask . . . What you see with Ian Thorpe appears to be pretty much what you get. No back doors. No image lain on thick. He has an entourage of people who follow him through life and shield him from this, that and the other, but even they profess the only image they try to project is no image. "He's just a kid," says his manager Dave Flaskas, "that's about it as far as image goes."

He's been swimming since he was four years of age when, bored looking at his elder sister do endless lengths, he plunged in and literally never looked back. Thorpe has a placid demeanour which rivals say conceals a ferocious and angry need to win. You glean some idea of that determination when you hear that he was allergic to chlorine until he was 10-years-old.

Four years ago, he watched the big show from Atlanta and set his mind on getting to the Athens Olympics. Then, of course, his voice broke and his world exploded and he had to change his plans and get a passport. In 1997, he bust his way on to the Australian national team, the youngest male ever to do so. He won silver at the Pan Pacific Games. Boy wonder in speedos.

The following year he won two golds at the World Championships and Australian coach Don Talbot called him the swimmer of the century. Thorpe had to refute that, but last year he went a little crazy and set world records in the 400 metres free and the 200 metres free on successive nights at the Pan Pacific Championships, which were held in one of his favourite pools, the one he competes in today. So Athens, when it rolls around, will have to be his second Olympics. He'll go there as a maturing legend. Just to underline that point, he broke three world records at the Aussie team trials earlier this year.

When he was a kid they just knew he was going to be this great. He had the character, he had the body, and he had the technique. He won his first big race when he was nine and within a couple of years he had been fingered as the next great talent. At one meet when he was 13 he set 10 national records for his age group.

He's a jangling bag of unco-ordinated bones and limbs when he is on land, but somehow in the water he has found the perfect combination of strength and technique. He looks lazy when you watch him swim, almost lolling through the water at times as the chasing pack flail away. Yet he cuts through the pool as if he had a motor strapped on.

Of course, there have been rumours about the motor. Inevitably, in the post de Bruin pool world, success arrives half a length ahead of questions. German swim coach Manfred Thiesmann announced earlier this year that it was widely believed that Thorpe used performance-enhancing drugs. In a German pincer movement, swimmer Chris-Carol Bremer attributing Thorpe's big hands and size-18 feet (US) to the powers of Human Growth Hormone.

Bremer later apologised, claiming he had been misquoted. Thorpe handled the drug slur as easily as he appears to handle everything else. He announced that he was keen to be tested for blood doping and anything else he was alleged to be having. He offered to have blood samples frozen in case a test for HGH become available. With one swift press conference, he put the rumours to bed. The doping accusations weren't the only problem he has dealt with recently. A small battalion of problems have been faced down. He broke his ankle while running last October but somehow missed only two training sessions. He swam with a fibreglass cast on his leg until it healed.

He gets bored also. He abandoned school two years ago to concentrate on the Olympics, but says he misses the classroom and the company of 17-year-olds. He yearns to get a life again. He told an interviewer this week that he is only alone these days when he trains and when he sleeps. In his free time, he is studying French, economics and business theory and he has spoken to Sydney University about the possibility of taking some courses next year. Not that he'll ever need to work. In a country which turns out world class swimmers every year, there is still wonder at how efficiently and quickly Thorpe has exploited his fame. He has a portfolio of endorsement deals that Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods would respect. He bought Ken and Margaret a nice new house last year and was thinking of treating himself to a car when Channel Seven gave him a nice Audi for his birthday. Thorpe, who was a bright kid in school, has spoken wistfully in interviews about wanting to become a surgeon when the fame subsides a little.

That won't happen soon. Nothing in these Olympics has the edge of the swimming competition. The Americans and the Australians have been eyeing each other up for some time now and the race to top the swimming medal table will be intense. Thorpe carries a hungry nation on his back when he goes to the pool today.

"There is no destiny about it," he said at a press conference this week, "and there is no position which is guaranteed when it comes to swimming, or any other sport. Every time you go up there and race, you are competing against other athletes who are just as talented and have just as much ability as you."

The kid looked as if he believed it. Nobody else did.