I used to freak rivals out: Swim legend Thorpe explains how he could just turn it on

That lumberjack-sized fellow at the Sports Hub, polite, articulate, you remember him, don’t you? The swimmer they called “genetics gone crazy”. The one whose feet became a national obsession. The kid who lit up the world in 2000.

Now, 23 years later Ian Thorpe is here and he’s giving The Straits Times a peek at his shining Olympic summer. The pressure he wore. The hope he carried. And the world we never saw.