Swimming: Six out of seven leaves Thorpe a happy man

Australian carries his nation's flag in closing ceremony after taking another step towards becoming best freestyler in history

Ian Thorpe is too nice a bloke to be greedy. Six gold medals at the Manchester Games were enough and he duly took the last of those at 7.13pm last night as part of Australia's men's 4x100m medley relay team.

The men from Down Under came home in 3min 36.05sec, a new Games record, ahead of England and Canada. The roll-call of the victorious swimmers, in the order that they swam, read thus: Matt Welsh, the world's best backstroker; Jim Piper, a Commonwealth record breaststroker and gold medal 200m individual winner yesterday; Geoff Huegill, who won the 50m butterfly gold last week. And Ian Thorpe, another step on his way to becoming the best freestyler in history. Anchors are meant to sink. He eased home.

"I'm sure that all Australians will agree that Ian is a magnificent ambassador for our nation," Don Stockins, Australia's team manager at the Games, said. Little fear of contradiction, there. Thorpe, he had just announced, had been chosen as the man selected to carry his country's national flag at the Games' closing ceremony, scheduled to start at 8pm last night.

"I am pleased that we can use this occasion to acknowledge his wonderful contribution to the success of these Games," Stockins added. Thorpe also carried the flag at the closing ceremony of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where he added three Olympic gold medals and two silvers to four Commonwealth golds won as an emerging talent in 1998. He has added numerous world titles and records since. Collects them, apparently.

Thorpe had arrived at these Games as its undisputed superstar even before dipping an outsized toe in the pool. He was looking for seven gold medals, a tally no swimmer had managed at a major meet since the American Mark Spitz roasted the opposition at the 1972 Olympics.

In truth, it was always going to take some doing. Thorpe had never before swum the 100m backstroke at competitive level. Barring a major upset, such as the disqualification that saw Welsh out of contention for the 200m individual backstroke last week, then Welsh was expected to prevail. When the final took place on Saturday night he did.

Thorpe took silver. He seemed happy enough with that, having already secured a handful of wins from a handful of finals, comprising a treble in the 100m, 200m and 400m freestyle plus two anchored relays. And he did set a personal best. Of course.

"That's a good result for me," he said afterwards. "I'm more than happy to come second. There's no disappointment. I congratulated Matt. He's world champion, he's an excellent backstroker and a great swimmer." He stopped short of adding he too wanted to be an excellent backstroker. You don't want to frighten people, least of all your team-mates.

The Thorpedo is not just an astonishing athlete but a remarkable person. He has handled the extraordinary pressures of his life superbly, emerging from what some of the Australian media termed an identity crisis to realise that he could handle whatever the world threw at him. He has, for almost five years, been heralded as one of the planet's best sportsman and deals with the attention accordingly.

He is a great talker, rarely hinting at the boredom he must feel in umpteen press conferences. He sees questions coming and copes with ease. Asked to compare the Manchester event in an eight-lane pool in front of a couple of thousand people to the Sydney Games in a 10-lane pool with 20,000 fanatics he paused for less than a second. "Intimate." Then he praised the great Manchester atmosphere.

Ian Thorpe is 19. You can imagine that whatever he does from now onwards his nation will collectively shrug its shoulders with admiration and say: "Yep mate, that's Thorpey."

Welsh, commenting on the physical effort of beating him on Saturday, said: "In the last five metres it felt like a grand piano had been dropped on me." Emotionally, there was also pressure in doing so. "The hardest thing is trying to deprive him of that [sixth] gold medal. But he came to my party." And Manchester has been to Thorpe's. And he has starred in theirs.