Alan Thompson, Swimming Australia head coach, believes that Ian Thorpe could still compete at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 even if he misses the 2007 world championships in Melbourne.

Thorpe will make an announcement to the Australian media and his nation live on Channel Nine at high noon in Sydney. Feverish speculation suggests that he may announce his retirement or simply say that he will bypass the Melbourne 2007 world championships.

The Olympic 200 and 400m freestyle champion has not raced top flight since taking those two crowns in Athens in 2004. He missed the Commonwealth Games and then the Pan Pacific Championships through a mixture of illness (glandular fever) and injury (fractured hand). Trawl through history and it is pratically impossible to find a champion of Thorpe's ilk who has missed so much training and international competition but managed to return to the top four years after his or her last great effort.

The questions are: can he ever really get back to best and, more importantly, does he want to? Asked if he thought Thorpe could miss yet another big event but still race in Beijing, Thompson said: "I have no doubt that's a possibility. In normal circumstances you would certainly see this [the Worlds] as a major stepping stone on the way to the Olympic Games but for somebody of the ability of Ian I'm sure that he would be more than capable of making it through to the Olympic Games without this meet."

Thorpe, Thompson said, was "just trying to work out where he's going with his career at the moment ... he's had a lot of distractions in his preparations over the last few months and I think he's just trying to work out where he is and what's going on".

Thompson also confirmed that Thorpe had skipped a scheduled training session with him last week. "I went out to see him that morning and he wasn't there. I was a little disappointed he wasn't there but I don't think it's overly critical to the whole scheme of things, but I think after the reports over the weekend that there may be a little more to it than meets the eye."

Lawrie Lawrence, former coach to Duncan Armstrong among many other Aussie champions, joined the debate when he told reporters: "He's got nothing to prove. I'd love to see him keep swimming but he's the sort of person who if he's not totally switched on to what he's doing ... he doesn't want to put a half-hearted attempt in - that's his character. And if he feels that's it's going to be a half-hearted attempt I am sure he won't go on."

The sharp end of the cut came from the man who has arguably been least afraid to speak his mind over many a long year in Aussie swimming, Don Talbot. The former head coach told Nicole Jeffery of The Australian that he believed Thorpe's decision to go on and have a crack at greatness in Beijing or to quit now was "tearing him up".

Talbot said he suspected that Thorpe had begun to swim for other people rather than himself, causing him mental anguish and resulting physical problems. The coach described Thorpe as "trying to sit on the fence and the edge is sharp".

The swimmer's Sydney coach Tracey Menzies hinted that Thorpe was less committed to the task than he needed to be. "I think there is a level of commitment that needs to be there, and I just think that to take the steps you need to take, there has to be that commitment factor."

Doug Frost, the coach who took Thorpe from minnow to mighty whale, said something similar some time ago, while many leading lights have privately talked for quite some time of how Thorpe was failing to face up to the workloads needed to keep him at the dizzy height he had become accustomed to.

Talbot told The Australian: "I, personally, think he should make up his mind what he wants to do independently of all the people around him because a lot of people have vested interests in him. He has to be selfish. Then the stress will come off him and his health will come back. I think getting sick is the result of the stress.

"e;He's a hero here but he has to bite the bullet and say, 'yes' or 'no, I'm not going to do it', rather than waffling. That makes people uncertain, and their opinion of that person is lowered, and I wouldn't like to see that because he's been a great athlete for Australia."

Even so, Talbot agreed with Thompson that missing Melbourne would not necessarily mean the end of Thorpe. Australia's Olympic trials are 16 months away. "There's enough time because I think he's been doing enough swimming," Talbot told Jeffery. "The road back isn't easy but, if he doesn't get in the water now, you can forget it. I'd rather see him stay in but he might have got to the point where he can't turn himself around and commit himself."

It would be a great shame to see Thorpe go but the bigger sorrow would be to see him swim on and fall short of the magnificent performances that have thrilled the swimming world and the wider one beyond that since a 15-year-old became the youngest male world champion ever back in 1998.

All that said, it could just be that he of the size-17 feet has wrong-footed everyone and has something quite different to tell us from his Sydney platform in the next 24 hours.