Rowing gives Gillian a basket of dreams

Gillian Lindsay from Paisley was Scotland's only world champion in an Olympic sport last year when she won the double sculls gold medal with England's Miriam Batten at Cologne to follow up a silver of the previous year. Yet nine years before that, at the age of 15, she was representing Scotland at the hoops game in the Four Countries Schoolgirls' championships and, endowed as she is with an athletic six-foot frame, she would probably have gone on to senior honours had not the lure of a more demanding physical challenge taken over.

It is a challenge which has seen her give up her job and leave home to live in London and involves her in a Spartan regime of rising at 6.30am for the first of three daily workouts. But it has already reaped a golden harvest and there could be more to come.

Last week Gillian was in Nottingham for British trials as a prelude to a busy season. Despite their achievements there is no automatic entry for Sydney and this year will be a hard grind of Olympic qualifying events from which the top eight will progress to Australia next year.

The man who introduced Gillian to rowing was Richard Walsh, her PE teacher at St Andrew's Academy, Paisley, who first got her into basketball then persuaded her to try rowing on the Clyde: ''I really didn't know what I was letting myself into. I thought I was going down for a little outing in a rowing boat.''

Now she is on the Thames each day at 7.30am for one-and-a-half hours, working with Steve Redgrave's former coach Mike Spracklen - ''if you're late you just get left behind'' - and along with her international training partners from the Marlow club she will row up to 18km before breakfast.

''You work up quite an appetite,'' laughs Gillian, who does not always enjoy jolly boating weather. ''I'm pleased the summer's coming as we train in wind, rain and snow; in fact the only time we don't is if there is thick fog.''

After breakfast at 11am the squad are back out on the river for technique work before breaking for lunch and, usually, a sleep, sometimes as much as three or four hours. Then it's back for weights or fitness training in the evening.

In winter they have Wednesday afternoons and every Sunday off, but, just in case anyone is tempted to do anything wild on Saturday nights, there is a single skulls time trial every Monday morning when the stopwatch tells no lies.

Gillian insists that she does not feel she is denying or sacrificing herself: ''We do have dinner parties and go out,'' she says.

She also leaves you in no doubt that, if it were necessary to succeed, she would cut down even further on her socialising. ''I've always wanted to be the best in the world at something,'' she says.

Good looking and statuesque enough to be a model, Gillian also has no fear of becoming too muscley. ''Because the volume of work we do is so great we're never really going to get bulky, but I've certainly changed shape: I want to be one up on my opponents, not psyched out because I'm at a physical disadvantage,'' she explains.

But there is no fear that she will take any short-cuts to success as some others have done: ''Testing is never an issue as I've got nothing to hide - the drugs scene scares me to death.''

Gillian is being backed in her Olympic bid by the UK Lottery Sports Fund - ''I wouldn't have been able to do this without it'' - but is also warm in her praise of her sponsors Walter Scott & Partners who have been ''brilliant - backing or guaranteeing my mortgage.''

Although squad members compete against each other at singles, Gillian has no plans to launch a singles bid: ''It's too much of a risk at this stage - it's completely different mentally. But it depends how we do in Sydney. I still feel I have another Olympics after that.''