Thorpe Delves Into His Olympic Dreams & Duress 25 Years On From Sydney 2000
“I appreciate when people say ‘you don’t know what you did for the nation’. It’s overwhelming when I hear that, or how much joy I brought to someone’s life. To have that impact on the national psyche is an enormous accomplishment but it wasn’t just me, it was all of us in the Olympic team."
He was just 10 years old when Sydney won the vote to host the 2000 Olympicsin 1993. Seven years on, this day 25 years ago, and two years after he became the youngest male World swimming champion in history at 15, Ian Thorpe claimed two home-Games gold medals to seal his sporting immortality regardless of whatever was to follow.
Craig Lord
Back in 1993, Thorpe was fast asleep when the announcement about Sydney 2000 was being greeted by Aussie adults late in the evening Down Under. His mum and sister were so excited that they woke the family's baby up to tell him.
He drifted back into slumber and an unconscious dream, perhaps, of what it all might mean one day. When he spoke to my News Corp colleague Julian Linden as part of national coverage and celebration of Sydney's quarter-century Olympic anniversary, Thorpe recalled:
“For a long time, I thought I’d be too young for the Sydney Olympics but then in 1998 when I was 15, I became world champion. Even then I wasn’t sure if that was just a fluke. But the following year I broke four world records in four days so a year out from Sydney, it became obvious that this was the Olympic Games for me.
“I still didn’t know whether or not I’d be ready for it. No athlete will know that until they’re there on the day. I also didn’t know if I’d be able to deal with the amount of pressure that I’d be under.
Even now, 25 years later, when I look back at some of the accomplishments, I don’t know how I did it. I do know it was a lot of hard work, and I had the capability to be able to do that. But sometimes in life you don’t know if you’re supposed to dream that big.
“I was someone as a child who was able to accomplish their dream but a dream’s a loftier aspiration than what a goal would be. A goal is something that you can work towards and I was able to accomplish many of those. But a dream’s the kind of thing that you don’t really wanna share with so many people because you might be a little bit embarrassed to say it out loud.”
