Michael Klim is the latest swimmer to come out of retirement and target the London 2012 Olympic Games. The news was broken by Michael Cowley at the Sydney Morning Herald and delivered to the wider world by agency reports noting the swimmer's Facebook page as the source. Klim's confirmation came in a radio interview Down Under today in which he said: "If I get to the (Olympic) trials it'll be fantastic, if I get to London it'll be amazing."

In the wake of comebacks by Geoff Huegill, Libby Trickett and Ian Thorpe, Klim is the latest Australian swimmer to make a comeback that challenges coaches and next-generation swimmers Down Under to fight that little bit more for a place on the national team.

Klim retired after the 2007 world titles in Melbourne at a time when shoulder pain had hindered his career. That was nine years after he was one of the stars of the 1998 world championships in Perth. Klim's Olympic peak was Sydney 2000, where he set the 100m freestyle world record leading off the Australian 4x100m free relay to an historic victory over the US alongside Thorpe, Ashley Callus and Chris Fydler. He also took silver in the 100m butterfly behind Lars Froelander, a Swedish international still racing to this day, and ahead of Huegill's bronze.

Comment: Klim's plans will fuel the debate about comebacks: on the one hand his ambition confirms that at 33 these days swimmers are perfectly capable of reviving their swimming careers; on the other it suggests that swimmers are not finding something as worthwhile in their life as their swimming days that may help them to move on, while comebacks also run the risk of upsetting development plans as some among those who might have made the grade for London 2012 as a first Olympic experience may now be denied. That's competition.

The questions for Swimming Australia run along these lines - would it have been possible for a star of the 1988 Olympic Games to comeback for Sydney 2000 and keep the next-next-next generation off the team? The answer is "highly unlikely". In the years between, Australia went through an aquatic revolution and the likes of Perkins, Hackett, Thorpe and O'Neill put the Dolphins back in the realm of team superpower status for the first time since Karen Moras, Shane Gould, Mike Wenden and Brad Cooper were gracing the race lane. 

The same question today produces the answer 'yes'. Part of the why is that standards being achieved by the latest generation of swimmers do not match the standards of those left behind in a number of cases, leaving room for those who wish to make a comeback not only to say 'I can do my best' but 'my best could well be better than any among the latest crop of national-team prospects'.