Posted on 04/08/2014 4:53:21 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Australian swimming great Ian Thorpe is in intensive care in a Sydney hospital receiving treatment for an infection that could result in him losing the use of his left arm, Australian media reported on Tuesday.
The five-times Olympic champion reportedly contracted the bug after surgery at a hospital in Switzerland, where he now lives.
In February, Thorpe's manager James Erskine said the 31-year-old was suffering from depression after being found disorientated and behaving oddly near a vehicle in Australia after taking a mixture of anti-depressants and painkillers for a shoulder injury.
Thorpe, who made his Games debut in Sydney in 2000, retired in 2006 due to a lack of motivation and made an ill-fated comeback in 2011 when he failed to make the Australian team for the London 2012 Olympics.
Wow. Hope for the best. Terrible situation. You wonder how one can be so mentally tough to compete at that level of a sport and then come crashing down.
This is sad. I met Ian Thorpe once when he was in Long Beach for a competition. He was swimming in the lane next to me at the LB Natatorium. He seemed to be a really nice guy.
Achieve your life’s goal, don’t have a greater goal to replace it.
Smoking a lot of pot tends to do things like that to you...
Switzerland seems to be a popular place for Australian athletes to avoid taxes.
1988, I was playing on the U21 USA east rugby side. We played u21 Canada. The pitch was known to be landing spot of water fowl, mostly geese.
A guy on the Canadian club had a pretty good scrape/cut on his thigh. The Canadian club left town about 3 hours after the match when the after match meal ended. The guy did not clean abrasion /cut until the get back to Torronto (from Albany, NY). The guys leg was amputated by Friday due to infection. What a eye oppener; unimaginable.
Poor guy.
BTW, idiot “journalists”, there is no such word as “disorientated”.
That jumped off the page at me, too, but it's amazing how many people use that term these days. Drives me nuts!
Thorpe is a doper or are you thinking of American Michael Phelps?
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