Swimming: Thorpe eager to match Spitz's seven of the best

Australian swimming sensation looking to use Commonwealth Games to repeat American's Olympic gold medal haul

When Lance Armstrong duly rides up the Champs Elysées for his fourth consecutive Tour de France victory tomorrow, and now that Michael Schumacher has won his record-equalling fifth world championship, it will next be the turn of Ian Thorpe to put his size 15s on the block and make his bid for Overseas Sports Personality of the Year.

On Tuesday, Thorpe will win the 400 metres freestyle on the opening day of the swimming events at the Commonwealth Games for the first of a possible seven gold medals. If he succeeds in winning all seven, it will echo the achievement of the greatest swimmer of them all, Mark Spitz, who won seven golds at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

He is all but assured gold in the 100, 200 and 400m freestyle and three relays. But while he plays down the significance of adding a seventh event to his programme, everyone knows that this is a dry run for a bid for immortality at the Athens Olympics in 2004.

With his 17 world records and a record six gold medals from last year's world championships, Thorpe is one of the few Australian sports stars to have broken out of the domestic market to achieve global recognition. Not quite yet in the earnings league of Greg Norman, who grossed $25m (£15.8m) last year, Thorpe's worldwide contracts already top $5m over the next three years and rising. If he were to win seven gold medals in Athens, his earning potential would be stratospheric.

But the 19-year-old will hear none of it. "I'd love to win seven," he said. "I'd love to win 10, but it won't happen. Matt's just too good." The Matt he is talking about is Matt Welsh, his Australian team-mate and world champion on the 100m backstroke. This is the event that will make or break a magnificent seven for Thorpe.

And as everyone knows, there are no successful global sporting icons without loving and committed parents. Swimming parents rarely feature as prominently as those of some other sports, but Australia loves Ian's mum, Margaret. "Thorpey's mum," is very nearly as famous as Thorpey himself. When he was a boy, the two of them were in a television advert for milk. Young Ian goes to the fridge and starts drinking some milk. His mum, catching him, yells: "Don't drink from the carton!" It struck a chord with families around the country, his mum became a bit of a star and the celebrity life had started.

While his parents were busy taking Ian's sister, Christina, to swim carnivals, Ian was dragged along, so he decided to have a go. With an allergy to chlorine he wore a nose clip, belly-flopped into the water and swam with his head up. Unfortunately for the middle-distance swimmers of the world, this lasted about a year before he figured out how to do it and started winning things. And he never stopped.

At 13 he won every event in his age group. At 14 he won an unprecedented 10 age group gold medals, all in state record times and was the youngest man to swim for Australia. A year later he became the youngest ever men's world champion. He won three golds at the Sydney Olympics in 2000 and holds the first seven of the top 10 all time fastest swims in the 400m freestyle and eight of the all time top 10 in the 200m freestyle.

Thorpe is no average teenager. By the age of 18, he had appeared on Friends and The Jay Leno Show, met the Clintons at the White House, attended premieres of film and fashion and taken tea with the Queen. He was visiting the World Trade Centre on September 11 but left half an hour before the planes hit. He currently stars in a prime time television show called Undercover Angels, a camp send up of the 70s hit American show where the girls are called "Thorpey's Angels". He was the star of the catwalks at this year's Australian fashion week and was a personal guest of Georgio Armani to celebrate 25 years of Armani at the Guggenheim. Of them all, he was most impressed with Bill Clinton. "He has so much charisma and he's a really cool guy, very funny. Not at all what you would expect from the President of the United States," he said, and most of Congress would probably agree.

Yet for his father, Ken, a part of him will forever yearn for a different life; one where the celebrity lifestyle of his famous swimming son had never happened. No, Ken wanted the young Ian to become a famous cricketer.

"They had me born at just the right time, too," he said. "October is the start for age group cricket so coming on October 13th, I would have always had an advantage. Dad and I always played cricket in the back yard, but I didn't like it. I used to pretend I was worse than I really was. He was shattered. He's so disappointed in me!"

Britain's performance director Bill Sweetenham ran the Australian age group programme and watched Thorpe come up through the ranks. "It's hard to explain to people his maturity for someone so young. Everything comes naturally to him: his technique, his perfect strokes. He's a swimming genius." Thorpe is the complete package. He has more natural skill than anyone else, has a body that can train harder and for longer than anyone else and a mind that is as brutal in the training pool as it is ambitious in the competition pool.

When these talents converge in one person, they redefine the boundaries of their sport. Coupled with his acceptance of his place among the Gods of sport, these are the attributes he shares with Woods, Schumacher, et al. But when you watch him make history in Manchester, remember too, that he is a 19-year-old boy, who lives with his parents and whose mum still does his washing. And, when she's not watching, drinks his milk from the carton.

Ian Thorpe: The life and times

Name: Ian James Thorpe

Nickname: Flipper, Thorpey, Thorpedo

Age: 19

Date of birth: 13 October, 1982

Family: Father is a gardener, mother is a teacher and his sister, Christina was a swimmer but is now retired.

Born: Sydney

Height: 195cm

Weight: 90kg

Events: 100m, 200m, 400m freestyle, 800m freestyle, 100m backstroke.

Hobbies: Water skiing, surfing, computer games, grunge music, going to the beach, socialising.

Heroes: Kieren Perkins, Michael Jordan, Carl Lewis and Mark Spitz.

How it began: While watching his sister swim he jumped in the pool to relieve the boredom and took to it immediately. Thrashed other contenders in the national and state meets when 14. Became youngest Australian male to qualify for the Australian Swimming Team.

Main victories: 1998 World Championships: 400m freestyle gold, 4x200m relay gold. 1998 Australian Swimming championships: 400m gold and 200m freestyle gold (Commonwealth record). 1998 Commonwealth games: 200m gold, 400m freestyle gold, two relay golds (including world-record breaking 4x200m relay). 1999 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships: 200m gold, 400m freestyle gold (world records), 4x200m relay gold (world record), 4x100m relay gold. 2000 Olympics: 400m freestyle gold, 4x100m freestyle relay gold, 4x200 freestyle relay gold.

Useful facts: Has broken 17 world records, is the current world-record holder for the 200, 400 and 800m freestyle.