When the microphone hissed, Dara Torres leant over, flicked a switch, smiled at the USA Team media officer and murmured a comforting “there you go, all done” as if she were helping her two-year-old daughter Tessa to tie a shoelace. Swimming’s “supermom” is 41. Her age, coupled with the fact that she is racing faster than ever, grants her a place on the top table of a press conference divided into immortals and mere medal hopes. Alongside Torres is a man who jokingly calls her “mom”: Michael Phelps had yet to be born when Torres picked up her first Olympic gold medal back in 1984.

In Sydney, she became the oldest winner of a solo Olympic medal in the pool at 33. In fact, she caused a sensation by winning three solo bronzes and two relay gold medals eight years after racing at her third Olympics. She missed Atlanta in 1996, and after Sydney retired “for good”. Now, she has reinvented herself once more - as the amino-acid queen and champion of the “female, forty and fierce” club, as one US hack put it.

Torres tore a strip off rivals half her age at the US Olympic trials last month, winning the 50m and 100m freestyle finals in times she had never seen before and booked a berth on the 4x100m freestyle relay. She could also race in the medley relay. Both US quartets are almost certain to win a medal, if not gold, in Beijing.

Speculation about how Torres gets better with age ran rife, but she was ready to respond. Beyond submitting to every test thrown at her, she had volunteered to have urine and blood frozen under a United States Anti-Doping Agency pilot programme. With a sigh, she repeated the line in Beijing, adding: “I’ve repeated this a thousand times and I have done everything I possibly can [to submit to any test possible]". It was “unfortunate”, she said that the testing regime had not kept up with cheats.

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“It’s too bad that some athletes have no conscience," she said. "I have a conscience.”

So how do we explain the uncharted waters she has swum into? Down at the temple of aquatic sports known as Beijing’s Watercube, Torres stripped off her shorts and t-shirt to reveal a body fit to worship, with limbs that make her 6ft stature look all the taller and muscle definition of the thoroughbred variety. At 14, Torres set a world-best time in the 50m freestyle before the event gained world-record status two years later. She was always a sprinter but the miles mattered back then. More than 60km of slog and plough a week. Now, she trains once a day, covers 25km a week, at least in water: the rest of the day Torres treats her body the way Ferrari fine-tunes its engines.

Torres, who grew up the fifth of six children in a wealthy home in Beverly Hills (there were ten bathrooms and her mother was model Marylu Kauder), spends $100,000 a year - money earned in part from modelling contracts won during her retirement - on an entourage of nine experts: a head coach, a sprint coach, a strength coach (Andy O’Brien, of the Florida Panthers hockey team), two stretchers, two masseuses, a chiropractor and a nanny. A price worth paying for a place in history as the oldest female swimmer to ever to race at the Olympic Games. That will not satisfy the supremely competitive Torres. Medals are what she wants.

To get them, she turned to Michael Lohberg, a Florida-based German coach who recommended further help from the German doctor who in 2005 used an isotonic, amino-acid-rehydration drink of his own invention to become the oldest world swimming champion. At 35, Mark Warnecke won the 50m breaststroke crown in Montreal. He then revealed that he had shed 20kg in the months leading up to the championships by taking a potion designed specifically with the older athlete in mind. Having set aside his medical career to pursue a lucrative business in supplements for athletes, Warnecke was conscious that older athletes who improved while taking his products, prescribe for “faster regeneration and recharging of the muscles”, might be regarded with suspicion. He sent his “AMSport Competition” preparation to the Cologne anti-doping control laboratory for testing. The result: no trace of “anabolic substances or stimulants”.

Twice married and divorced, Torres, now with David Hoffman, a reproductive endocrinologist and Tessa’s father, is what she wants to be: a role model of health and fitness. “I can’t wait to get out there, stand up and compete - and to stand up for forty-somethings and show that age is no issue." She will do more than that if on Sunday if she becomes the oldest Olympic swimming champion ever, as a member of the USA 4x100m freestyle squad.