The race that made a champion of Ian Thorpe happened not at the Olympics, the world championships or the Commonwealth Games, but at the world cup in Berlin in February, 2000, the Australian swimmer revealed on his retirement.

Just days before the Berlin meet, at the Sheffield round of the cup in England, a German coach told Claudia Weidlich, then a sports journalist with a German newspaper and now my wife, that Thorpe's achievements were so astonishing that "a lot of people suspect that he uses doping ... you look along the line of coaches on the poolside and many think the same thing". The story broke the next day in Germany and in The Times of London.

When the fallout hit, the coach denied making any accusation but subsequently repeated the same phrase to Reuters, the international agency, which taped the interview and sent the story to every corner of the globe.

To exacerbate matters, in Berlin, a standoff developed between Thorpe and German anti-doping officials: Thorpe was selected for drug testing but found that the officials did not have the regulation tamper-proof containers and, trust broken, refused to hand over his sample until officials could guarantee its security.

Local police were called and Thorpe did in fact give a sample.

Yesterday in Sydney, he told Nicole Jeffery at The Australian: "It was a high-pressure situation. It was my lead up to the Olympics, and with all of that on me it was a matter of me working out 'how am I going to get through this?' Throw something at me, how am I going to respond to it? And I came up trumps. It was the best swim that I'd done and it's definitely the best performance that I had in the pool. If I pulled out of the meet, it would have affected me, maybe not here but later. Mentally, I think it would have been a problem. I was still utterly miserable when I raced, but it didn't affect me."

The world short-course record he set that day, 1min 41.10sec, still stands. Thorpe rates that performance as his best race.