After winning the 400m medley at the Indianapolis Grand Prix in 4:12.51, Olympic champion and world record holder Michael Phelps hinted that he may well return to the big opener of his previous Olympic campaigns for London 2012.

Phelps told reporters in Indiana: "It's a race that means a lot to us as a country and for me, somebody who has swum it so many times. If it happens, it would start everything off on an exciting note." Phelps' winning time at the USA Swimming Grand Prix was the 16th best of his career and 12th in a textile suit. 

You have to go back to 2007 to find anything in season as fast, a 4:11.30 at the grand prix a warm-up effort for the early world titles held in Melbourne that year. It was in Australia at world titles that he set what remains the best time ever by a swimmer in textile, 4:06.22. 

The time in Indiana is the best he has ever done so far out from a major meet. "I'm definitely happy," said Phelps. "Who knows [about the Olympics]? . . . I would have to do that well and then be able to come back and swim a bunch of other events well."

Phelps emerged from Bejing saying that he would never swim 400Im again. "Yes, it is different than what I said before," he told reporters with a grin. "I understand that."

He is not the first to change his mind and return to gain through pain. Britain's gold-medal winner at five Olympic Games in rowing, Sir Steve Regdrave emerged from his 4th victory to say that if anyone saw him in a boat again they had permission to shoot him. He turned up for a fifth campaign. Mercifully no-one raised a gun and an historic fifth gold sealed a glorious career.

Meanwhile, Phelps will race for the last time at Indy today at the venue where it all began, in a sense. The 26-year-old reflected on 2000 Olympic trials and told AP: "Indy is where it all started for me as a scrawny, 15-year-old kid that nobody ever thought had a shot." 

The emotions attached to the journey now drawing to a close had Phelps' mum Debbie in tears at the airport as she arrived to watch her son race at the grand prix. "When I got off the plane last night (Thursday), I gave my granddaughter a digital camera and she took hundreds of pictures," Phelps' mum told AP with a nod to the daughter of former swimmer Whitney, who back in early 2000 was a little better known than her brother in the race pool. "Then I looked at the wall in the airport and that's when the tears started rolling."

Whitney Phelps made the world titles team for the US but not the Olympics. In 2000, her bro would make the cut as the surprise of the trials that year in second over 200m butterfly. Coach Bob Bowman recalled the moment when he told reporters in Indy: "What I remember was how excited he was to be in this pool because he had never swum here. 

"I have this framed picture on my desk of he and I after he made the team, and someone asked me one time where it was taken and I was standing right next to it. So I said, `It was right here.' The first time we were here, he was really small. If you look at him now versus what he looked like then, he looks like a baby."

Phelps grew up a while back and is now maturing into a working inspiration. He told children and workers at an Indianapolis Boys and Girls Club this past week to ignore the detractors, such as the teacher who once said he'd never amount to much. Goal-setting and belief were paramount, said the swimmer who came to have a great deal to teach the teacher.