Mark Spitz reckons that - just as he had by the time he hit the comeback trail in the early 1990s aged 41 - Ian Thorpe, Janet Evans et al have lost their edge and won't be able to find it; but tell that to Torres and Boomer - and Quick up in pool heaven. The key is not repeat but reinvention

Mark Spitz (he of seven golds in 1972) told the world and his wife today that, just as he had by the time he hit the comeback trail in the early 1990s aged 41, Ian Thorpe, Janet Evans and the rest of the comeback trailers have lost their edge and won't be able to find it.

“The world moves on and it is quite difficult," Spitz said at the Laureus World Sports awards conference in London. “I don't think as an athlete you ever forget how to train but what you really lose is how to race against your competitors."

He added: "When I re-entered the sport 17 years later, I was not only yesterday's news, I was trying to find my own way back.So therein lies the handicap. (You) have lost the edge of how to compete against the new stars."

Spitz, who will attend a ceremony today run by a sponsor that completely overlooked the entire sport of swimming, not a Lochte or a Phelps or a Franklin in sight on their lists of the great of 2011, learned his own lessons on the comeback trail on Mare Nostrum Tour back in 1992. 

After being reminded of the passing of time in the water, Spitz gave a press conference in Canet, France, at which he told his audience that it was time to revolutionise the sport of swimming, dump the Olympic programme, cut back on anything that went as far as 200m, organise head to head 50m sprints and do whatever it took to deliver popularity.

Back then, the sport had in its midst the likes of Hungarians Tamas Darnyi and Krisztina Egerszegi, Evans, Kieren Perkins. When Spitz had finished talking and the sun was about to set, he strolled over to Darnyi and said "you are one of the finest athletes this sport has ever seen". The Hungarian smiled, nodded and sat back down to eat. 

I asked Spitz if he realised that Darnyi would not have stood a chance in a none of whom would have stood a chance in the new world Spitz had just advocated. He smiled and shrugged.

He must surely have thought again when a few years on the likes of Thorpe and Hackett arrived just in time for Sydney 2000 and before a 15-year-old called Michael Phelps was about to make his first Olympic team. 

Spitz might also think twice about his latest words if he were to cast his mind back to Barcelona 1992 and the way things panned out for a 24-year-old woman at her third Games and about to retire: Dara Torres, living proof that it is possible to not only race following generations but beat them, living proof that reinvention is the hallmark of the most successful comeback the sport has known.

If Spitz and other comeback trailers down the years care to know a little more about how she did it, they should read on:

There is no warm-up with veteran American coach Bill Boomer, who when asked where he's coming from fires back: "Dara is a cat who lived the life of a dog. Dara is a killer, Dara attacks, Dara is a natural woman and has been treated otherwise in swimming culture for her whole career. The best thing that ever happened to her was she stopped swimming for five to seven years so that her nervous system could return back to its natural state."

The cat he speaks of is Dara Torres,  who at 44 this June/July will attempt to make it to the Olympic Games for a sixth time since her debut at home in Los Angeles in 1984, when relay gold brought yet another talented teenager into view. Still shy of the proverbial nine lives, there is danger yet in the oldest female swimmer ever to make the Olympic podium, a silver over 50m freestyle at Beijing 2008 the last and most impressive chapter in an extraordinary tale of sporting reinvention.

A relay swimmer at her first three Games, Torres also finished seventh in the 100m freestyle final aged 20 and on 56.25sec when the GDR's medals machine was still in full flow, Kristin Otto, winner of six gold medals in Seoul, on 54.93, 0.2sec outside her then world record. Torres retired for the first time, but made a comeback and the 2000 Olympic final in Sydney with a 54.43 effort that delivered bronze, before retiring again. Fast forward to 2008 and Torres was back, aged 40, and on 53.76, the best of her life, on her way to finishing second at the US Olympic trials. Impressive, even taking account of the effects of booster bodysuits since banned. 

In Beijing, Torres skipped the 100m to focus on the 50m and fell just 0.01sec shy of becoming champion, the gold denied her by Germany's Britta Steffen, another who had reason to thank Boomer. On a visit to the Berlin programme, he found that Steffen was scared to stay under water too long after he had asked Norbert Warnatsch's squad to go to the bottom of the pool and touch the floor; she wouldn't, he persuaded her after 20 minutes that she could and there was nothing to fear and everything to gain from spending longer underwater, a message Torres had learned eight years before.

When Torres had indicated that she wanted to make a comeback in time for Sydney 2000, Richard Quick (no longer with us), her coach and the man doing the heavy lifting, picked up his self-advice book labelled "leave no stone unturned" and called Boomer. 

"I told him that when trying to reconstitute a cat who has been treated like a dog you have to back track, to go back to nature and bring her up again through nature," Boomer told me in Sweden recently. "There was to be no conversation with her about freestyle, no way for her to relate to her old self, her ego, history and the many errors that had been built in. We are natural animals and that is what I had to bring out of her." 

Boomer, who wanted to first find Torres' aquatic signature, her centre of balance in water.  He turned instead to butterfly, a stroke that Torres had never raced internationally before. "Stability is the key and one of the first things we had to do with Dara. The mind will not let you do anything unless you are stable enough to be safe." Stability comes from within but many swimmers have what Boomer calls "a soft centre", an emphasis on aerobic stress exercise leading the athlete to use the "outside" of the body, muscle, tension, deliberate placing of limbs in particular positions, to stabilise themselves in water. 

"There is then not enough tone in the centre of body. The intestine is just as important as the biceps in this," Boomer told Scandinavian coaches at the launch of the forward-thinking Swedish Center for Aquatic Research in Lund. "To imagine what that means, try pushing a wet piece of spaghetti down a pool. Much easier to push a stiff piece of Spaghetti down the pool."

"We had to get Dara to turn inside out. To get her to understand what it was I wanted her to do, we put kick boards under her and challenged her competitive spirit," Boomer recalled. "With four to five kick boards under you there is a hefty torque and you're very much aware of balance issues. Eventually, she could balance on 11 kick boards." The aquatic equivalent of the Princess and the Pea fairy tale. 

"On her back she could balance on six kick boards and I would then throw tennis balls at her away from the centre line of her body and get her to catch and throw them back to me with her arms stretched out sideways." 

To explain the kind of balance and strength required for that, Boomer asks his charges to imagine they have a bamboo pole running through the middle of them, a taut but flexible conductor of energy vital to capitalising on momentum during the "space", or dead zone, of a stroke. 

"The real music is in between the notes. Kosuke Kitajima [double Olympic breaststroke champion for Japan in both 2004 and 2008]: why is he winning?" Boomer challenges before delivering the answer: "He is transferring the impulse [propulsion phase of a stroke] into the space better than anyone in the world though posture and positioning. Others might have a bigger impulse [more propulsive strength] but they have a dead space, their hands are in the wrong place, the bamboo line at the core of their body is not in the right place. 

"To reduce drag, you have to coach the transition point, make it seamless. The point is not to coach athleticism: put them in a position to be the best athlete they can be. It is about shape-changing inside the body, about taking who you are and what you're created to go to somewhere you've never been. The biggest challenge for the human is change because you have to give your brain permission to think that way, to overcome."

Boomer had reached an understanding with his own brain and body as a child: an accident during the beet harvest on the family farm when he was eight cost him most of his left hand. "I lost four years of my life, having operations and in between penicillin shots every two hours. At 12 I decided to figure out a way to get back in the game and retrieve my former life. I remember trying to figure out how to work the buttons on my shirt cuffs with two fingers; you have to adapt to the problems that confront you."

Torres was asked to swim butterfly backwards, the idea to get her to tip her body forward, to slow the who process down so that she would be hyper-aware of balance. During the whole reinvention phase, she never swam more than 10m of proper butterfly. "It was purely about trying to get her alignment and balance back," said Boomer.

In early summer 2000, Quick approached Torres in morning workout and asked if she would like to race a 100m butterfly that evening at a local meet. "She said 'that'll be fun' and she broke the American record." That was the trigger for a return to freestyle in time for Torres to qualify for three solo and two relays events at Sydney 2000.

Once at the Games, there was a final touch to be added:  Boomer told Torres to race the 50m without taking a breath. "No way," she said. "You just lost the gold," replied Boomer. "How about just three breaths and you get the bronze?" Torres took three breaths and her medal in the 50m freestyle was one of three bronzes in Sydney alongside success in the 100m freestyle and butterfly finals. She also claimed gold as a member of the US 4x100m medley and freestyle quartets. "By then, Dara was the cat she had always been meant to be," said Boomer.

Take heart yon Thorpe, Evans et al. You're not done yet in a sport full of great stories, personalities and players who Mark Spitz and Co might take the time to talk about as they sip from the cup of those who turned a blind eye to swimming when handing out prizes for prize-winning.