Australia’s greatest Olympian, Ian Thorpe, is poised to announce his return to international swimming and a full-blown assault on next year’s London Olympics, The (Sydney) Sunday Telegraph reported.

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Thorpe, 28, has been in regular contact with Australian swimming coach Leigh Nugent, declaring he wants to swim at the March 2012 Olympic selection trials in the hope of qualifying for London in July 2012.

All that remains is for Thorpe to give his agent David Flaskas the go-ahead to register his drug-testing paperwork with Swimming Australia. He then would need to wait nine months before he could swim at an official meet.

Incredibly, the five-time Olympic gold medalist’s world-record 400m freestyle swim in Manchester in 2002 is still just 1/100th of a second behind today’s world record, achieved with the controversial and now banned bodysuit at the 2009 world championships in Rome, where almost every world record was taken apart.

Thorpe’s return centers on his appetite for competitive swimming and his desire to race again, a source close to the Thorpe camp said. The source denied the comeback is related to Thorpe’s financial difficulties.

He has been training in private to convince himself he can return to his former heights before making a formal announcement.

Thorpe’s biggest fear is that his return will turn into a media circus, denying him the privacy he has enjoyed since November 2006.