Why did Thorpe have to be Australian?
England's swimmers are looking forward to improving on their last Commonwealth Games performance, the mighty Ian Thorpe notwithstanding.
"Athletes like Ian Thorpe are discussed by every swimming nation in the world," England head coach Ian Turner told journalists on Saturday at the Aquatics Centre where Thorpe and his Australian team mates are expected to rule in the pool.
"Why did he have to be born in Australia to start with?" he added amid laughter.
"Athletes like Ian Thorpe are prevalent in every sport. We have to have strategies obviously...He can be DQ'd (disqualified), like the rest of us, he can miss the wall, he can forget to put his entries in -- but I doubt whether that will happen.
"The guy's only human and we hope that the things that happen to us happen to him as well."
Thorpe is contesting seven events in Manchester when the swimming begins on Tuesday and is generally expected to win six, with fellow Australian Matt Welsh favourite to beat him in the 100 metres backstroke.
The Australians are inevitably favourites to win most of the swimming events but hosts England aim to beat the medal tally they achieved at the last Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998.
"We are expecting a successful Commonwealth Games.
"We won 22 medals in Kuala Lumpur, five of them were gold, and obviously our aim and objective is to make sure we get more than five golds and that we beat our total of 22 medals from the last championships," Turner said.
EXPERIENCED ENGLAND
An experienced England squad includes three defending champions -- Mark Foster (50 metres freestyle), James Hickman (200 butterfly) and Katy Sexton (200 backstroke).
It also contains three 1994 gold medallists -- backstrokers Martin Harris and Adam Ruckwood and freestyler Karen Pickering -- and some promising younger swimmers.
Turner said British swimming was on the way up after the disappointment of the 2000 Sydney Olympics, where the team failed to win a single swimming medal.
He attributed the improvement to Bill Sweetenham, himself an Australian, who took over as national performance director after the Olympics.
"We have a very, very motivated performance director who is determined to be successful in Great Britain and we are all hooked into that and looking forward to the future," Turner said.
Sweetenham, he said, had brought confidence, knowledge, and an understanding of the requirements for getting to the highest level.
"Obviously we're taking on the team which are the current world champions and we're well aware of the size of the task in hand," Turner said.
"The Australians at last year's world championships outmedalled the U.S. That is some opposition but there are umpteen (many) events where England...can be successful."
Turner said England needed to get as close as they could to the medal tally of the Australians and stay in front of the Canadians.
"Obviously this is just one step on the way to Athens (2004 Olympics) and that's our ultimate aim and objective -- to do somewhat better in Athens than we did in Sydney."
