How times have changed since 1900, when the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, lifted the original ban on women competing in the Games. That happened only grudgingly. “Would they constitute a proper spectacle? We do not think so,” he once huffed. And since then, while a few British athletes such as Mary Peters, who won pentathlon gold in Munich in 1972, have become national heroines, by and large GB’s female Olympians have struggled to match the profiles of their male counterparts.

But now, more than a century later, it’s our women athletes who carry many of the country’s most realistic podium hopes into the Beijing Games this August. They could, for the first time, overtake the men in the medals table. Since the 1988 Games in Seoul, when the British men won 19.5 medals to the women’s 4.5 (the eventing team featured both male and female riders), the gap has been closing; in Athens four years ago, the women had nearly trebled their tally to 12, compared to the men’s haul of 18.

The men are on the retreat, the pool of talent that for so long provided a new hero every four years – Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, Daley Thompson, Linford Christie, Steve Redgrave – has evaporated, and in athletics, it has been seven years since a British man, Jonathan Edwards, last won an individual gold in a major global championships.

This year, the most compelling British stories from the Olympics promise to come from the women’s team, and athletes such as Christine Ohuruogu, Kelly Sotherton, Goldie Sayers in the javelin, windsurfer Bryony Shaw and track cyclist Rebecca Romero.

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If the British Olympic Association wants to avoid embarrassment as the 2012 hosts, and reach its goal of coming fourth in the medals table (the postwar highest was eighth in Melbourne in 1956), it will have to rely on this new generation of female athletes.“I am keen to win as many medals as possible this summer,” says the BOC’s chief executive Simon Clegg. “Gender really isn’t important, but you can’t escape the fact that we will be taking an exceptionally strong team of women, and they will again play a central role in 2012.”

At a studio in London earlier this year, 11 of these women (sadly our twelfth, heptathlete Jessica Ennis, has been ruled out of Beijing by injury) came together. It was an afternoon refreshingly bereft of ego: most came by train, lugging their equipment. Strops were not thrown when the photographer asked who they were – they sat around nibbling on brownies and discussing plans for Beijing.

“I think it is more important than ever that girls begin to see sportswomen as genuine role models who have achieved something,” says Sayers. “It annoys me that the glut of meaningless celebrities and reality television contestants get so much attention.”

So are Lycra-clad women flooding into gyms across the country? Well, for the moment, no. A study commissioned by Nike for its “Here I Am” campaign revealed that British women between 16 and 30 are the second least sporty in Europe, many citing their fear of becoming muscular – or even of getting “sweaty”. “I hope we can show that you can be girly and sporty,” sighs modern penthathlete Katy Livingston. “Sport makes you healthy and fit, it doesn’t make you look like a bloke,” adds Shaw. “And anyway, who wants to look like a rake-thin supermodel? There is nothing to them.”

The life of a female Olympian is a strange one. You spend four years largely in the shadows – it is estimated only 5 per cent of the media’s sports coverage focuses on women – but the rewards can be enormous. As Kelly Holmes demonstrated, an Olympic gold medal can transform you from an honest battler into a Dame.

“Ultimately, women enjoy the purity of sport, because let’s face it, we would never get in to it for the fame and money,” says rower Katherine Grainger. “But challenging yourself to be the best in the world is worth all the blood, sweat – yes, you get sweaty – and tears. I want more of that in Beijing, and hope we can inspire other women.”

Rebecca Romero, 28

Track cycling, individual pursuit