Vicomte de Valmont: “Why do we only feel compelled to chase the ones who run away?” Marquise de Merteuil: “Immaturity?” - Dangerous Liaisons

The chase: photographers, journalists, cameramen . . . “Hey, Rebecca! Smile, Rebecca!” The awards and the acclaim for her fabulous achievement; world champion rower; Olympic champion cyclist; the first Briton to win a medal in two Olympic disciplines . . . “Hey, Rebecca! Rebecca, smile!”

The speeches, the red carpets and the bright lights of show business: Friday Night with Jonathan Ross; Thursday afternoon with the Queen; Inside Sport; A Question Of Sport, a question . . .

Is Rebecca Romero the most interesting sportswoman in Britain?

It is November. She’s in a car on the way to Manchester for an interview with the BBC. Three months have passed since Beijing but she is still without a sponsor, and when her agent calls with the request from Inside Sport, she is pleased. The interview will do wonders for her profile.

The first surprise is the location. Why have they invited her to a derelict warehouse? And where’s Gabby Logan? Why do they want her to sit in front of a small black speaker in an empty hall?

The interview starts. “Hello, Rebecca,” a woman announces from the speaker.

“Hello,” she replies. “Let me take you back to August 17. How did it feel when you knew you were an Olympic champion?”

“I was ecstatic.” She doesn’t look ecstatic; she looks nervous, wary. The tone of the question has unsettled her. There is something not quite right here. The probing continues and she is soon feeling uncomfortable.

“Let’s talk about friendship. Do you have many friends outside sport?”

“She sounds like a bloody psychologist!”

“Do you feel fulfilled as a person?”

“It's a set-up. I'm being analysed!'”

“Would you describe yourself as happy ?” “This is not how they treated Kelly Holmes!”

By the end, furious, she calls her agent to complain. “It wasn’t an interview, it was an interrogation,” she fumes. “They think I’m some kind of freak!”

A freak? No, but very different. Matthew Pinsent described her as “infamous on the rowing team for never smiling or enjoying training”. Her cycling coach, Dan Hunt, has portrayed her as “the most driven athlete I have ever met”. There is something about Romero that intrigues.

WE MEET at the English Institute of Sport in Manchester. She is still feeling sore at the BBC.

“The line of questioning was unbelievable,” she says. “I was an Olympic champion and I felt like I was being interrogated. There was no opportunity to project myself in any light other than what they were setting up. It was really harsh.”

“What if I was to suggest that you look like a woman burdened by a dark secret?”

“What!” she gasps. “In what way?” “A friend, who watched you recently at an awards ceremony, thought you looked like a woman burdened by a dark secret.”

“I haven’t got any dark secrets. God! Maybe it’s the fact that I’m . . . I dunno, uncomfortable talking about myself.”

“You don’t seem it.” “Yeah, well, I don’t know . . . I’m probably quite introverted. But I’d like to have it explained to me, what it is that I do or say.”

“I think he meant it as a compliment,” I tell her. “You’re different, interesting. I was really looking forward to meeting you.”

She shrugs, unimpressed. “That pisses you off?” I suggest. “What?” “This infatuation with your dark side?” “What dark side?” she spits. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know,” I stutter. “Maybe it’s how you project yourself.”

“Yes, but . . . the public only get to see one aspect of me and that’s in an environment of intense pressure. I am talking to you about my whole sporting life - not what I’m like when I’m down the pub with my mates. It’s not the whole rounded me.”

TO FIND the whole, rounded Romero requires a touch more effort than a visit to the pub. Check the biography on her website and her life began at age 17 in a rowing boat on the Thames. She presumably had parents and some kind of a childhood . . .

“Your mum was Beverly?” I suggest. “Yes.” “And your dad? I haven’t found his name anywhere. Obviously he’s the Romero but what’s his first name?”

“Why?” she asks. She glances at me anxiously until the folly registers. “His Spanish name is Hey-sus,” she says.

“As in Jesus?” “Yes.” “He’s from Majorca?” “Yes.” “Your mother had you quite young?” “Yes.” “She was 20?” “Yes.” “So they obviously married young?” “Yes.” “You were born in Carshalton, Surrey, in January 1980 and grew up in Wallington?”

“Yes.” “Your parents divorced when you were six?”

“Yes.” “Michael Phelps and Bradley Wiggins and a lot of successful sportsmen are marked in different ways by their parents’ divorce. What impact did it have on you?”

“It didn’t have a negative impact because they dealt with it well with regards to myself and my sister. We weren’t affected because we still had contact with my father, so it was just something that happened.”

“It was amicable? Or as amicable as divorces can be?”

“Yeah. Most children wish that their parents get back together but I didn’t because I knew that was the way it was and the right thing.”

“That’s odd,” I observe. “I don’t know,” she says. “I was intelligent and emotionally developed at a young age to understand that it was better if they weren’t together. I didn’t want them to be unhappy for the sake of a complete family. It was almost like I didn’t know any different so . . . does it matter?”

“What did your dad work at?” “I don’t know, different things.” “Did your mum work?” “Yeah, when I was younger she went to university as a mature student.”

“Was that after they divorced?” “Yeah, and then . . . your question about the family situation and how that affects you as an athlete . . . one thing I did learn was independence. Maybe I grew up quicker but I don’t think that’s a defining factor.”

“You ascribe your drive to your mother?” “Yeah, she has been pretty inspiring in everything that she has gone through; bringing up two kids as a single parent; making a decision to better herself when she hadn’t been good at school. We were the centre of her life but she still managed to study, to train herself up and get a job. We lived in a flat and myself and my sister were like, ‘When can we have our own bed-room? When can we have a house with stairs?’ I learnt to appreciate what it takes to work for things. You have to take small steps but you can turn your life around.”

THE month is September 1997. Rebecca has just moved with her mother and sister, Rachel, to a home in Twickenham, west London, with a bedroom and stairs. Her first term at St Mary’s in Strawberry Hill is about to begin and she is flicking through the Yellow Pages. She’s studying sport science and English and needs to find a sport.

How can one of Britain’s most gifted athletes spend her first 17 years flying under the radar? Well, like a lot about Romero, that’s not easily explained.

“I was a good swimmer when I was young,” she says, “and I flitted about at hockey and tennis and netball but I never had anyone telling me that I had any ability, so I just believed I hadn’t.”

After narrowing her search to canoeing or rowing, she takes a trip to Kingston Rowing Club and spends a couple of weeks thrashing herself on a rowing machine. For a sport that looks so graceful on TV there’s a lot of snot and sweat but at 6ft tall and hard as Steve Redgrave, she is made for it. The Kingston coach, Ian South, tells her she will row for Great Britain. “I laughed,” she says. “I thought he was crazy.”

Eight months later she is second in a pair at the junior world championships but is disqualified for straying out of lane. The disappointment is crushing but the flame of her ambition has been lit. And for the next five years it absolutely rages . . .

She’s setting the alarm for five each morning and cycling four miles to the boathouse so she can be on the river by six. She’s rowing for two hours and cycling four miles to lectures. She’s working afternoons in McDonald’s or WH Smith or Pearson’s bike shop. She’s cycling back to the boathouse for gym work and staying up all night to study. She’s dating Nick, earning a 2:1 degree and rowing brilliantly.

It was, she admits, a kind of madness. “I liked the physical exercise,” she says, “and being out on the river. My sister would ask, ‘Why do you do it?’ But I was just happy to be at university; happy to go training; happy to have a part-time job.”

Her raison d’etre was the 2004 Athens Olympics. Rowing at stroke in a quadruple scull with Debbie Flood, Frances Houghton and Alison Mowbray, they just came up short, finishing second to Germany.

A year later, at the world championships in Japan, the result was reversed. With three years to Beijing, Romero was finally the best in the world. And then she did something that nobody expected . . .

The British quad has tended to win races in the final third, using the power of Houghton and Flood to pull them through. That is how they beat Germany by inches in a World Cup race in Lausanne last year. Yesterday coach Paul Thompson decided to vary the tactics. But after 500m, his crew found themselves in fifth place, more than a second behind Germany, and had to revert to their usual approach. - the Financial Times report of the 2004 Olympic women’s quadruple sculls final

“TELL ME about Athens.”

“It was my first Olympic Games and you shouldn’t really turn your nose down to a silver medal, and I don’t, it was a huge achievement, but for me . . . I felt we had the capability of winning and we didn’t because a mistake was made. If we had had a perfect race and got beaten, then I would have been perfectly accepting of it, but . . .”

“What was the mistake?” “It was the last-minute change to how we were going about our race . . . a day or two before the race a change was made to our racing strategy.”

“Was that a management decision or was it the four of you sitting around a table, ‘This is how we are going to do this, girls’?”

“Well, this isn’t something I’ve ever said or discussed. It’s not something that should go out in articles and stuff.”

“Why not?” A long pause ensues. “Emmm . . . A lot of emphasis is always placed on my dissatisfaction from rowing but it was just something that made me think about the environment I needed to be in and what I actually wanted to do, so I left it behind. The [rowing] team structure and team environment is successful, I have always said that, but my balanced opinion is never put across.”

“I’m trying to figure out why you quit rowing,” I explain. “Was this strategic change in Athens imposed on you? That’s a straight yes or no.”

“In my opinion it was imposed on us.” “Did your teammates feel as strongly about it afterwards as you did?”

“I have no idea.” “You didn’t talk to them about it?” “No.” “How did you feel when you stood on the podium with a silver medal?”

“I felt disappointed and gutted. It was a failure, yet I learnt so much. It fuelled me to get to the position I am in now.”

“You didn’t quit straight away,” I point out. “You won the world championships a year later in Japan. So surely the logic was, ‘Okay, we messed up in Athens but we did it in Japan and can do it in Beijing’. It would have made more sense to quit after Athens.”

“I knew then [after Japan] that the focus was going to be on the quad scull being the top boat going to Beijing.”

“That’s a good thing, surely?” “Yes and no.” “Why no?” “Because you are only 25% of that boat; you are reliant on others. But that was irrel-evant . . . I just wasn’t enjoying it. One of the big questions in my head was, ‘If you were guaranteed a gold medal in Beijing, would that make you carry on?’ And the answer was no. You can’t be successful if you are constantly stressed out and unhappy. Would winning gold have made it all better? It wouldn’t. It would have been four years of wasted life.”

“What was stressing you out?” “The biggest aspect was that I didn’t have autonomy; I wasn’t able to train as an individual to my needs; I was one athlete in a group of many doing the same thing.”

“I get the impression they [rowing] weren’t pleased when you left.”

“No, I wouldn’t say that, but then what I do after is none of their business. I left rowing, it doesn’t mean I can’t do something within the same field, so what’s the problem?”

“I’m not arguing with you.” “It just emphasised the fact that you feel like you are owned by them.”

“Why cycling?” “It was an accessible sport and with my inquisitive nature I wanted to see what it was about. It was the opportunity to start something new.”

“Did you enjoy it or was it just a challenge to make Beijing?”

“Yeah, initially, but also I did enjoy the training. Just being able to get out on the road is an enjoyable thing. After the first year I went to the world championships and came second and I knew then I could get pretty close [in Beijing] so I decided to throw everything at it.”

Everything was 100%, every day for 2½ years. Everything was moving from London to Manchester. Everything was ending her relationship with Nick. Everything was missing her friends. Everything was the scream, the last breath in her lungs as she crossed the line in Beijing. There was nothing left. She had given it all.

They presented her with the gold medal. She stood on the podium listening to God Save The Queen. Wonder woman. The tough of the track. And the truth? The complete, unvarnished, unspeakable truth? She wasn’t sure if it was worth it.

“It wasn’t that powerful experience you expect of becoming an Olympic champion. I had raced [in the individual pursuit final] against another British girl [Wendy Houvenaghel] with the same coach and it felt . . . almost sedated. There wasn’t the same response as if I had beaten a foreigner; it was dampened down and not the way I imagined.”

The interview is drawing to a close. I show her a picture I’ve found on a blog. She is smiling and radiant and gorgeous.

“Who’s this girl?” I ask. “That’s me when I’m not being an athlete,” she replies.

“Not much darkness there?” “No.” She smiles. “What do you do apart from sport that makes you happy?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “That’s one of the things I need to find out. I need a break. I want to spend more time with other people and get involved with their lives rather than everyone being involved in my life.”

“What about London and 2012?” “I don’t know,” she says. “I’ve got a gold medal. I’ve proved [all that] to myself. I’d like to carry on being an athlete but to train in a way that enables me to explore other things in life.”

She’s thinking about dancing lessons. About playing the violin. About golf and skiing and exploring the countryside and things that make her happy. She’s thinking. And for the moment, that’s enough.