Sullivan injury free, 'but can improve'

Eamon Sullivan is over his recent injury scare, but has still warned he may not live up to his title of the world's fastest swimmer in the coming weeks.

In the midst of the endurance portion of his preparation for the Beijing Olympics, the 50m freestyle world record holder will travel to Europe in the coming weeks to compete in three meets designed to hone his bid for gold in China.

And while the Perth-based flyer says he is happy with the way training is going, he is not expecting anything special to come out of the events.

"We are in a pretty tough phase at the moment, an endurance phase, which is not as fast and I certainly do not feel like the fastest man alive at the moment," Sullivan said.

"The times are pretty consistent with what I have done in the past, if not a little bit faster, so things are looking good.

"(But in Europe) nothing special, I don't think. This year we are focusing on doing hard racing, and trying to keep my training quite vigorous while I am over there whilst still being able to perform.

"Finding an equilibrium between those two is going to be interesting."

Sullivan's preparations were dealt a small blow last month when he was forced to pull out of the shortcourse grand prix meeting in Canberra after a back injury flared during the Olympic team's orientation camp.

Speaking at the University of Western Australia, Sullivan said the small mishap had been just that.

"I ended up having a couple of days out of the water and that was it. The injection had settled down really well," Sullivan said

"I was back in the following Monday, and I have had two solid weeks since then and no sign of the injury flaring up again - knock on wood everything is going to be fine.

"Sometimes you have to have to take a step back to take two steps forward. And we are pretty good now at trying to find when those times are."

And despite three Frenchman - Amaury Leveaux, Alain Bernard and Frederick Bousquet - all threatening his 50m crown since the Australian broke Alexander Popov's record in February, Sullivan said his concentration had been on honing time off his 100m time.

"We have found some areas to improve and we are doing everything we can in training to try and improve on them. The next couple of months we should start to see some improvements, and if I can carry that into my racing I will be very happy," Sullivan said.

"My turns we have done some analysis on with other swimmers and my turns are 0.2 or 0.3 secs slower ... and obviously that is very important part of the 100m.

"If I can take 0.2 off that I will be in some good shape and hopefully that does not take away from other parts of my swimming."