Australian swimmer who specialises in freestyle, but also competes in backstroke and the individual medley. He has won five Olympic gold medals, the most won by any Australian, and with three gold and two silver medals, was the most successful athlete at the 2000 Summer Olympics. At the 2001 World Aquatics Championships, he became the first person to win six gold medals in one World Championship. In total, Thorpe has won eleven World Championship golds, the third-highest number of any swimmer. Thorpe was the first person to have been named Swimming World Swimmer of the Year four times, and was the Australian Swimmer of the Year from 1999 to 2003. His athletic achievements made him one of Australia’s most popular athletes, and he was recognised as the Young Australian of the Year in 2000.
Sometimes called “Torpedo” or “Flipper,” he was known as a poised, confident, modest and calm teenager. Swimming from the time he was eight years old, he kept up practice with about 20 hours a week in the water. He broke ten world freestyle records (some improving his own time) in nine months, from 22 August 1999 to 15 May 2000. Of these, he broke three world records in three days at the Olympics selection meet in Sydney. Winning the 400m freestyle World Championship title in January 1998, he became the youngest male world champion in swimming history.
The 1.96m (6’5″) athlete won a total of five gold, three silver and one bronze medal in the 2000 (Sydney) and 2004 (Athens) Olympics.
His mother, Margaret, was a teacher and his father, Ken, a gardener. Sister Christina was also a swimmer. A big man, Thorpe’s size 17 feet were a bit of an embarrassment, and he suffered from migraines since he was nine or ten, although less frequently in recent years. He defied the pain and nausea of a migraine to break a world record at the world short-course championships in Hong Kong in 1999.
Thorpe had a very difficult four months in early 2000. He had to deal with a broken ankle and was accused by a German swimming coach of being a drug cheat when a drug test was botched in Berlin. In early 2000, there was a swim suit controversy when he featured, in cheeky TV ads for one of his sponsors, one of their black body-length “seal suits,” alongside some real seals on the starting blocks of a swimming pool. Thorpe declared that he would wear a full-length body swim suit in his Olympic swimming races. The bodysuit (which has also been called the “frogsuit,” and “Mr. Condom”) has proven controversial, with some people claiming they add buoyancy and other advantages to swimmers. Full-body suits were cleared for use in the Olympics by the International Amateur Swimming Federation (FINA) in late 1999.
Thorpe quit school at 14, studying at home and reading voraciously. At school he usually scored in the top 5% of every subject except for mathematics.
After years of denial, Thorpe came out as gay in a televised interview by Michael Parkinson in July 2014.
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