Beijing Olympic Games

Those responsible for the key factor that will govern whether the London games truly captures the public imagination – the number of British athletes who end up with medals draped around their neck – are already planning for a world beyond 2012.

Concerned that public and lottery funds will take a hit as political focus shifts elsewhere and the public spending squeeze hits home, they are adamant that one less visible lasting legacy must be a "new deal" for British sport that contains sizeable investment from commercial sponsors.

Tessa Jowell has claimed to want another legacy for the Olympics, that of making the UK "a world-leading sporting nation". Among those tasked with achieving that aim, there is bold talk of creating a system that will deliver a seismic shift in the way sport is supported and the attitude we have to it.

The chief executive of UK Sport, John Steele, said: "The step change occurred the day we won the bid in 2005. An evolution started. It has been a catalyst to bring together everyone in the landscape. I have never seen such willingness to work together towards a common goal."

There is general agreement that the once dysfunctional collection of sports administration bodies have succeeded in replacing infighting with a more cohesive approach in the past 18 months.

"The systems and processes will be there. When a 12-year-old watches their hero in 2012, there will be a clear pathway to how they can do the same in 10 years time. There is now a far more structured approach to talent," Steele promised.

Thanks to the "Beijing bounce", where Team GB achieved fourth in the medal table four years ahead of schedule, support for investment in elite sport remains high, despite the increasing pressures on the public purse.

At UK Sport, the agency charged with investing £550m of lottery money into elite sport during the Beijing and London cycles, there was a period of discord as the cuts required by a £50m shortfall in commercial funding were worked through. Some governing bodies continue to believe that the "no compromise" funding system will create a world of haves and have-nots where those that cannot compete never will. But Steele is unapologetic about the rigorous system for applying funding to those sports that are most likely to win medals. Based on the cycling model, the aim is to be ruthless about the search for perfection.

"For too long in this country we invested in weakness and lack of achievement. Excellence creates excellence," he said.

The sports minister, Gerry Sutcliffe, said the Olympics had helped raise the profile of sport within government and secure the extra funding that he hopes will help deliver medal success in 2012.

But public and lottery funding will almost certainly take a hit after 2012 as political focus moves elsewhere. To that end, politicians and administrators are keen to talk up the idea of establishing a new funding mechanism for sport that will also have a sizeable commercial element.

They hope some of the £500m that has already been captured in sponsorship revenue can be transferred to sport after the games have left Britain.

"We now need to see the funding not only as a way to succeed in 2012 but a springboard to how we run our businesses post-2012. There is an emphasis on sport to build bridges with those sponsors over the next three years," said Steele.

But there are concerns among some of the sports about the physical legacy the Olympics will leave, with the drive for a "compact" games devoid of white elephants meaning that some will be left with gleaming new facilities while others will get nothing.

The success or otherwise of the elite sport system in genuinely constructing a new template will be the easiest to judge, given that it can be measured in precious metal in 2012, 2016, 2020 and beyond.

For those who still believe that what happens on the track, in the pool and on the water is the most important thing, then the good news is that it also looks like the part of the legacy promise that remains most deliverable.

It gets more investment than athletics but swimming just doesn't have as strong a hold on the public imagination as track-and-field

The world swimming championships start today, the question is: is anybody watching? Over the next four years UK Sport will invest £25,606,000 in British swimming, a full £1.5m more than the athletics program will receive. And yet, writing this from the Foro Italico swimming complex in Rome, it's hard to hide the feeling that swimming just doesn't have as strong a hold on the public imagination as track-and-field.

I spent ten minutes talking to a PR from Speedo today - they're having a busy Games, what with the swimsuit brouhaha - we sat and shot the breeze underneath the scorching sun. "I used to swim for Britain," he said after we'd meandered through some small talk. Not wanting to embarrass us both by asking who he was, I looked closer at his face and cycled through my memory banks, but I couldn't place him.

Afterwards I took a second look at his business card. Turns out he was James Hickman, three-time Olympian, five-time short-course world champion. You may remember him best, as I do, coming home seventh in the 200m butterfly at the disappointing Atlanta Olympics. Hickman was one of the most successful swimmers Britain has had in the last 15 years, but the sorry fact is that until I looked twice I couldn't tell him apart from any other of the legions of strangers wandering around the stadium.

The only swimmers who made a serious impression on the British public consciousness in that era were either a) retired and bald or b) retired and infamous for not wearing a bra on TV. Even now, after six British medals in the Beijing water cube, the most recognisable face to be seen at this competition, after those of Michael Phelps and Rebecca Adlington, is probably that of Benito Mussolini. Il Duce's visage, bizarrely, is plastered all across the various friezes that decorate the Ponte Duca D'Aosta which spans the river Tiber on the approach to the stadium, transposed over-and-again onto the bodies of Italian soldiers pictures performing heroic deeds.

Swimming is a sport struggling to make the transition from a minority to a mainstream spectator event. At the moment, like so many other sports, it appears on the back pages and at the top of the news bulletins for seven days every four years or so. £25m is a lot of money to spend on a week's worth of headlines, even if they are at the Olympics. Dara Torres, captain of the US women's team, spoke recently about the minor nervous breakdown she had suffered at her first big swimming meet. "I just wasn't used to walking out into a stadium full of 17,000 people," she reflected. "Normally we compete in front of about 200 fans, including the other swimmers and our families."

Hickman for one thinks that a shift is already happening. For the first time in his experience, he noted, the BBC have sent a news team as well as a sports team to the swimming world championships. He was, it seemed, already beginning to rue the fact that he may have retired a touch too early to catch the boom years.

But is swimming really making much of an impression back home? I'd be interested to hear how much attention the average sports fan on the Guardian's web pages will be paying over the next eight days. Phelps did the event few favours by treating this tournament as his warm-up comeback from a six-month break spent living out Animal House. One of the big reasons he wanted to come to Rome, he half-jokingly revealed, was that his mum was very keen to go shopping here.

Adlington, of course, may make a real difference to the sport's popularity in Great Britain. She is the closest thing swimming has to a superstar in the UK. But even with those two gold medals, I wonder if she has made a big an impression as, say, Fatima Whitbread did in this city some 22 years ago when won world championship gold in the javelin, or as much as Sally Gunnell did after winning the 400m hurdles at Barcelona '92.

Perhaps it is just that swimming is not all that good as a spectator sport, that its nuances and depths are harder to fathom and its intricacies less accessible. Perhaps watching people churn through the pool is just less compulsive viewing than seeing them sprint down a track, where all the work of and technique of these incredible athletes is visable, rather than hidden beneath the surface. Perhaps the personalities simply get lost beneath all the lycra, swim-caps and splashing water.

One thing which will certainly spur interest on is the burgeoning competition between Adlington and Joanne Jackson, who took bronze in the 400m freestyle in Beijing. Jackson has been out-performed her old friend and training partner since the Olympics ended. The races between the two catch fire in Rome this week, British sport could be about too enjoy one of those great rivalries which can come to define a sport during a certain era, though the public would be hooked far sooner if there was even a hint of any enmity between the two.

The contest between those two, currently ranked second and third in the 400m and the 800m, with Jackson ahead in the shorter event but behind Adlington in the longer, may do more for swimming in the UK than any number of bronze medals at these championships. If swimming is serious about trying become a major player in the British sport market, and there are 25 million reasons to think it is, it could do with Jackson beating Adlington to gold by a fingertip's width in the 400m freestyle later today.

Many of Britain's top medal winners thought they would return from Beijing to lucrative sponsorship deals. But within a year, most had to go back to work. Tracy McVeigh reports

They won glory and were promised that riches, too, would follow. Just 12 months ago British athletes produced the country's best performance in 100 years at an Olympic Games, leaving Beijing with a total of 47 medals.

The lives of the 27 Olympic heroes of 2008 would change for ever, or so it was widely predicted. Steve Martin, chief executive of sponsorship at advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi, said they all had a golden opportunity to be millionaires. "People don't understand how much these guys could actually make," he said in August last year. The potential was huge, he said, because of their high profile in a country that was "going to be obsessed with the Olympics for four years".

But the Observer has discovered that far from the goldrush to fame and fortune, last year's British Olympic medal winners came home, in the majority of cases, to an anti-climax.

The reality is that just a year after their glorious moments on the winners' podium, no one is rich, most are still struggling against anonymity and a lack of sponsorship and funding, and 23 of them are back in the daily grind of training, preparing to try and do it all over again at the London Olympics in 2012.

For athletes who dedicate much of their lives to punishing daily training routines towards just one goal, it is hard to move on into any other future especially when the public is so quickly prepared to forget its one-time Olympic heroes. In the opinion of at least two of them, Tim Brabants and Chris Boardman, it seems the British public only has the capacity to remember one or two Olympic celebrities in any given year. For 2008, they claim, it was Chris Hoy and Rebecca Adlington. For the rest, they are all left to fight over the very few sponsorship deals, speaking or media punditry gigs that might be available to sportsmen or women who are not footballers.

Cyclist Paul Manning was the first of the gold medalists from Beijing to retire. He is now an assistant construction manager helping to build London's velodrome for 2012, and he admits he was daunted at the prospect of entering a job market after years of cycling training that left him with a fairly empty CV. A paper round and an Olympic gold impress no one, he said.

Canoeist Brabants went back to eight-hour shifts as a doctor in a Nottingham accident and emergency department. Brabants - who tells Observer Sport Monthly that he only ever gets an invite to anything when it has already been turned down by fellow Nottingham Olympian Adlington - certainly has not been scooped up by some great sponsorship or advertising deal despite his two medals and, indeed, says his life was in part set back by his sporting success.

"Its difficult to progress when you're only working part-time," he says of his stalled medical career.

Another Olympian complained: "People say that I must be making loads of money, but how? Everybody wants you for free."

One success story all the athletes point to and envy is Hoy, who won three individual golds in cycling events at Beijing - the first Briton to win three golds at one Games since 1908. He went on to scoop Sports Personality of the Year, Jaguar ambassador and face of Kellogg's, he had a passenger plane named after him and even caught a knighthood in the New Year honours among the MBEs given out to other Olympians.

After Beijing, Hoy had said that a gold wouldn't change his life.

"I have eaten my words there a bit," he says now.

But even he, the exception to the rule, says that despite his rise in earnings he still is nowhere near attaining the wealth of most comparable professional sportsmen. "Olympic athletes are very much amateur athletes. When you finish you're going to have to start at the bottom rung of a different career somewhere else."

Track cyclist Victoria Pendleton says she is frustrated by the system and its inequalities that saw her teammates find a fame that slipped past her grasp; even a photoshoot for men's mag FHM was unpaid she says.

"I've pretty much done everything I can and I'm still an unknown," she says. "You come away with two gold medals and you think your life is made," she said. "But I'm not sure anything is different at all."

It seems that the lesson for Martin is that it was only Saatchi & Saatchi itself - the New York office of which won an estimated $62m advertising contract to promote the games ahead of Beijing - that actually profited out of its Olympic work.

How do you follow the greatest day of your life? One year on, Emma John catches up with six Olympic gold medallists and finds that if you think losing's hard, you should try winning

Twelve months ago, we were a nation transfixed. We knew that the Beijing Olympics would be the greatest show on earth: we had never guessed that Britain would play such a starring role. From the moment that Nicole Cooke crossed the line in the women's road race, to James DeGale's middleweight scrap on the penultimate day of the Games, we got up early, joined Hazel Irvine on the couch, and watched, open-mouthed, as a procession of British talent took the podium. When Boris Johnson accepted the handover flag, Britain had finished the 29th Olympiad fourth in the medal tally with 19 gold medals, and 47 medals in total - our best performance in exactly 100 years.

A year on, a few have stayed with us - the one who was knighted, the one who wore Jimmy Choos, and the one we mistook for a villain, at least until she won the 400m. For the rest, if we're honest, we would struggle to match the name to the sport, if we remembered the names at all. If we do think of our Olympic champions, we might imagine them basking in their achievements, their perfect physiques wrapped in a contented glow. We tend to forget that for those who have spent their lives chasing a single, all-but-impossible, goal, achieving it leaves a void. As Victoria Pendleton, the track cyclist who took the women's sprint title, puts it: "You don't plan for the next day."

Most have chosen to attempt it all over again. The opportunity to perform at a home Games comes only to a lucky few, and of the 27 British gold medallists, only two have opted not to defend their titles at London 2012, with another two undecided. The rest have already returned to their gyms, to their diets, to their sleep schedules; to the start of the long, monotonous climb towards a peak performance three years away.

For gold medallists, anticlimax isn't just a danger, it's an unavoidable reality. The American sprinter Wilma Rudolph, after finishing the 1960 Olympics with victories in the 100m, 200m and 100m relay, said: "There has to be more to this life than that." After the 2004 Games, where he won the individual pursuit, cyclist Bradley Wiggins found himself locked in a year-long spiral of drink and depression, a combination of unlimited partying opportunities with a sudden loss of purpose. Another Athens champion, the Australian diver Chantelle Newbery, was admitted to hospital with depression. Harold Abrahams seemed grief-stricken after his 100m gold in 1924 - when a friend asked him why, he replied: "Maybe you should try winning some time."

For athletes who have known no other life but full-time training, it can be hard to picture a future beyond the locker room. Many will have forgone university or other higher education. Only a lucky few will find roles in coaching or commentating; the others must start new careers from scratch. Cyclist Paul Manning, who won gold in the team pursuit, was the first champion to announce their retirement after Beijing. He has since landed a job as assistant construction manager with the firm that is building the London 2012 velodrome, but he admitted that, even with a degree in geology, it was intimidating to enter a tough job market with a CV that boasted shelf-stacking and a paper round.

So what do you do after the Downing Street drinks have run out, and the open-top bus has dropped you back home?

Backstage at Belfast's Odyssey Arena, in a small, spare dressing room, James DeGale is punching the air. Not in euphoria, although he is euphoric. The boxer has just beaten the Czech fighter Jindrich Kubin in two minutes 22 seconds, and he is replaying some of the highlights for his trainer, Jim McDonnell, and his dad, Leroy.

"In the corner, I had him with a body blow, then boom! Boom!" He dances around the space. "He didn't hurt me one bit. I feel fantastic. I could go again tomorrow, Jim, easy." The 48-year-old McDonnell, a former European champion, tells him to enjoy the feeling. "The number of times you'll come into a dressing room, you've done 12 rounds, and you can't even breathe..."

This is DeGale's second professional fight, and his second win. The 23-year-old turned pro in December, four months after reaching the peak of his amateur career with his middleweight gold in Beijing. The thought of becoming the first Olympic boxing champion to retain his title in his home city was tempting for a time - he was, he says, still in "the Olympic bubble". But he has wanted to be a professional fighter since, aged 13, he first saw a video of Naseem Hamed. When Frank Warren, the man who made Naz, offered him terms worth "not far off" £2m, the bubble burst.

It did, however, mean an end to the non-stop party life DeGale had enjoyed since Beijing (as his father Leroy says, endearingly, "It's not fair to depict him as a playboy; he was only a playboy for four months"). Having well and truly celebrated his arrival at the top of his sport, he began again as a novice. There was a new training regime - longer runs, tougher sparring rounds - and DeGale learned the hard way that an Olympic gold buys you little goodwill in the professional realm. His debut in February - a points victory against Georgian Vepkhia Tchilaia - was marred by boos from sections of the crowd, and poor reviews in the press; and it upset the one-time golden boy to find himself, so suddenly, an antihero.

"I sparred with someone a week ago," says DeGale, "and today they've wrote on the internet: 'I can't believe all these Olympians are getting so much attention - James DeGale is nothing special.'" He adds that he has found respect from most fighters, including his idol Joe Calzaghe. The former world champion had previously speculated that DeGale's post-Beijing fortune would diminish his hunger for success. But DeGale has set his goals high, a British title by the end of 2010 and a world title by 2012, and today, with the adrenaline of his TKO, he seems ecstatic about his progress. "I can fight, I can box, I can move my feet when I need to. If you compare from my first fight to now, it's pathetic, innit?"

Boxing is one of the few Olympic sports that offers its champions a path to a greater prize. For the rest, be they athletes or archers, the question is: what next? There is no way to better a gold medal: the only challenge left is to win more. And that means repeating themselves, submitting to the same sacrifices, the same routines, and the same cycle of "lesser" tournaments - competitions that were once major events in their careers. There's also the knowledge that, when the Games arrive, nothing less than victory will do. "If I'd gone to London 2012 and won a bronze or a silver," says DeGale, "it would have been a failure."

Rower Andrew Triggs Hodge, the blond-maned stroke in the victorious men's four, admits that before Beijing he had a very particular motivation. "I was always labelled the dumb kid at school," says Triggs Hodge. "I didn't achieve anything. When I discovered rowing, something I was good at, it was like a 'fuck you' to everybody who didn't believe in me."

In 2004, his boat came dead last in the men's eight: more than 1,000 days of training, including 4am starts and ergos that took him to the edge of unconsciousness, had counted for nothing. Victory in Beijing was the settling of an imagined score. "Then there was nothing left," he admits. "I wondered, 'Has the carrot gone?'"

Of his team-mates, Steve Williams has taken an indefinite break from rowing to ask himself the same question and Tom James only recently announced his return. Triggs Hodge lasted just six weeks away from the water before he cracked. "I tried to distract myself, but it was intrinsic, I just wanted to do it. I didn't want to prove anybody wrong - I've put those ghosts to bed. The only way I can describe it, now, is pure will." It seems to be working: competing in the pairs with Peter Reed, the other member of the Beijing four, Triggs Hodge has taken gold and two silvers in this summer's world cup regattas.

Even while returning to the stringent schedules of Britain's Olympic coach Jürgen Gröbler, Triggs Hodge has taken on the elected (and unpaid) post of captain of the Hampton-based Molesey Boat Club; he regularly works 10- to 12-hour days there, working on club strategy and management, doing admin, encouraging the juniors. Like many of the gold medal fraternity, he seems disinclined to enjoy his laurels. He rarely reminds himself that he is an Olympic champion: "And whenever I do think about it, my first reaction is - don't forget how hard it was."

There's a restlessness that is common to gold medallists, who seem keen to fill their time with new projects, goals, and ambitions. No one epitomises this better than Tim Brabants, who won kayaking gold in the K1-1,000m and bronze in the K1-500m. "Once the weight has lifted you feel like" - he sighs - 'Now what?'" In Brabants's case, the answer is a diary that would make super-ambassador Dame Kelly Holmes blanch. The canoeist has returned to his pre-Games career as a doctor at one of the busiest accident and emergency departments in the country, in the Queens Medical Centre in Nottingham, where he balances locum shifts with exam study and regular volunteering as course doctor at sports venues such as Donington Park. He has taken up triathlon and rowing, and in July raced in a four-man crew from Sark to Jersey. He has also taken on advisory roles with the London 2012 Organising Committee and the World Anti-Doping Agency, not to mention sponsors commitments and presentations, and has, on occasion, headed straight from an eight-hour night shift to talk at a school assembly. "I really like the way that my lifestyle is unconventional," he smiles. "I like variety, and I can fit a lot into my time."

On the first day of the Chelsea Flower Show in May, the celebrities are as much the exhibits as the gardens. A cluster of journalists has settled on a particular stall where Robert Winston and Stephen Fry are chattering amiably into dictaphones, and Victoria Pendleton is posing with a rose that has been bred especially for her. Wearing a tomato-coloured shift dress that she made herself, and a Burberry mac which is, she says, the single most expensive thing she has ever bought, she holds a gold medal in one hand and the yellowy-tangerine bloom (the closest to gold the growers could manage) in the other.

Pendleton seems to be enjoying herself and angles her demure smile this way and that to the great credit of the Royal Horticultural Society. She admits that she loves an excuse to glam up - this year has already brought several awards ceremonies, and a sashay down Stella McCartney's catwalk at London Fashion Week. New frocks are needed for Ascot, Wimbledon and Buckingham Palace, where she is to receive an MBE.

Like every British Olympic champion, Pendleton received a welter of invitations in the immediate aftermath of the Games. Theoretically at least, it is possible for a gold medallist to live like a 19th-century dAndrew, eating out at other people's expense for lunch and dinner every day, and scarcely needing to go home in between. "I remember having a chat with Rebecca [Romero] at one event and we were both saying this is a completely different world," says Sarah Webb, who won her second Yngling gold in Beijing. "It was much, much bigger than Athens. By mid-November, I'd been out every lunch or dinner for weeks doing something and I thought, 'I need to rein it in a bit because this isn't normal. It would be nice to sit in and watch TV.'"

Pendleton now chooses to attend only the bare minimum of events; she says - and you suspect that she's joking - that she only went to the British Olympic Association's Gold Ball because they promised the athletes makeovers beforehand. "Sometimes you meet some fantastic people and you see celebrities and it's fun," she says. "But sometimes it is just hard work and you are looking around thinking, 'Is it OK to leave now?'

"Yeah, you get invited to a nice dinner, but there are a million and one questions, you don't kick back and enjoy yourself, you are working all the time, putting on your best face. There are only so many times you can repeat yourself before you feel like you're reading off a script. Is it heavy? Yes, it is heavy. Is it really gold? No, it's silver and gold plated. How did it feel? It was a dream come true that I can't possibly put into words..."

The eddy of social engagements also contributes to another, more potent, illusion. If every time you see an Olympic champion they are wearing Amanda Wakeley or Paul Smith, clasping a glass of champagne or a royal gong, it is easy to believe they are on their way to becoming extremely wealthy. Even as the team landed at Heathrow last August - and were escorted from the first-class cabin to the VIP arrivals entrance - the chief executive of sponsorship at M&C Saatchi was claiming that they could soon be millionaires. "People don't understand how much these guys could actually make," Steve Martin said. "The potential is simply huge now."

But most of the champions - with the exception of DeGale, who is giving the shops on Bond Street plenty of business - say that their financial situations have not changed at all. The suggestion that they are on their way to their first million is met with derision. Pendleton's Burberry mac is one of only two treats she allowed herself; the other is a pair of Christian Louboutin heels. When Zac Purchase was asked if his earnings had been boosted by his rowing gold, he replied: "I got a pair of gold, limited-edition wellies... Does that count?"

Lottery funding notwithstanding, Brabants has always known he would need a second career. Canoeing offers no financial incentives, and while being recognised at the hospital might be a bizarre perk - a patient having a heart attack recently stopped him to say "You're that Olympic doctor, aren't you?" - the gold medal has had little other impact. "People do say that I must be making loads of money, but how?" he asks. "I've said yes to as much as I can, I have been to schools, universities, and businesses, taking every opportunity that has come my way, but I am no richer. Everybody wants you for free."

Some of the top performers have picked up a few more personal sponsorships, or improved terms from the ones they already have. But in a tough financial climate where sponsors are increasingly demanding, and athletes training for London 2012 loth to compromise their training schedules, opportunities are necessarily limited. Some feel that their achievements are already forgotten, or considered last year's news.

The same is true on the speaking circuit. Fees for corporate engagements can be anything from £1,000 to £25,000 a time, but after Beijing companies wanting a speaker for their business leadership seminar can choose between 27 different Olympic title holders rather than the usual one or two. Most Olympic champions training for 2012 are still reliant on their lottery funding, which doesn't reward a gold medal - it stays at a maximum of £25,000 a year for anyone with "podium potential", whether that's gold or bronze. Moreover, lottery funding is means-tested - so a gold medallist's rewards from outside earnings and sponsorship can end up diminishing it.

Back at the Flower Show, Pendleton wanders around the stalls. One man asks if she's an exhibitor; she explains, patiently, that she is a guest, and shows him the buttonhole that was named after her and - when he doesn't recognise the name - her gold medal. At another stall, a woman makes flippant references to Olympic athletes, before her husband quietly points out that she is talking to one. "I'm sure loads of people have asked you this but what does it feel like when you win?" he asks. Pendleton smiles and takes a breath. "Oh, it's a dream come true..."

That's actually a bit of a myth. Pendleton admits later that like most Olympic champions she has spoken to, she found the sensation rather underwhelming: not one of triumph or elation but of relief. "There's not really any time to go 'Oh my God!'" she says. "On the podium I was thinking, 'I should be crying, why am I not crying?' So I looked down at my medal and I just smirked - then I thought, 'Don't smirk during the national anthem, that's probably treason.' From the moment you win, everything is very clinically done: dope control, podium, media, home."

In some ways, the British team have become victims of their own success. "The first time I rode for Great Britain in '96," says Chris Hoy, "there was one gold medal for the men's coxless pairs, so if you won a bronze or a silver then you were pretty hot stuff. Now not only do you have to win a gold but you have to do it in a way that becomes memorable." Among the returning champions, a hierarchy quickly became apparent, with those who won multiple individual golds scooping the best sponsorships and the acclaim, and those who won their medals as part of a team discipline all but forgotten (consider the last time you heard a story about cyclists Jason Kenny or Ed Clancy).

Thanks to his three individual golds, Hoy is at the centre of the bunfight, and nearest the buffet. The Sports Personality of the Year, Jaguar ambassador and face of Kellogg's has also had a jumbo jet named after him and received a knighthood in the New Year Honours, and when we meet he is on yet another promotional day, this time for Skyride, a series of mass-participation cycling events taking place in cities across the UK in August. After Athens, Hoy said that a gold changed nothing about his life. Reminded of that, he laughs. "Yeah, yeah. I've eaten my words there a bit. The one thing I've had to change is that I've had to learn to say no to things. I used to be able to say yes to almost everything." And while he admits he's earning well, he says it still doesn't put him among the ranks of most professional sportsmen. "Olympic athletes are very much amateur athletes. When you finish you're going to have to start at the bottom rung of a different career somewhere else. Any money you get now is to offset that future loss."

You wonder if he's embarrassed by his lion's share of the attention. Is it awkward, for instance, that he has a knighthood while everyone else, including those he trains with, had to settle for MBEs? Hoy says he doesn't think that other athletes mind, and that it has happened before, to Kelly Holmes and to Steve Redgrave. But he admits he does find the hype rather bemusing. "Just because I won three gold medals doesn't necessarily make me a better athlete than someone who can only compete in one event."

One explanation for the phenomenon is that the public only have room in their collective consciousness for one male and one female icon from each Games. This year the lucky two have been Hoy and Rebecca Adlington. That has certainly been noticed by Brabants, Adlington's Nottingham neighbour. Whenever he gets an invitation to a local event, he says candidly, it is because Adlington has turned it down.

Pendleton has often voiced her frustrations with the inequality of the situation: "When you see one of your team-mates gain so much fame and recognition you think, 'Why can't I have that too?'" A few weeks after the Flower Show, she appears on the cover of FHM. It's a break from the usual goody-two-shoes image of the Olympic athlete - the public generally associates gold medallists with fibre-rich cereals, cholesterol-free margarine and house insurance. Pendleton says that some people thought it "unnecessary", and others were surprised she hadn't been paid for the shoot. "But I said: 'When will I get asked to go on the front of a magazine?'" She laughs. "Plus I thought, 'They are going to make you look hot.'"

"Vicky's one of the few athletes that does really thrive on that," Hoy says. "She loves the media spotlight and I think she measures her success by how much attention she gets, which is crazy because she's the best in the world at what she does. That's one of the things I always try to say to her, enjoy your success. If you could say to her four years ago that this is what you're going to achieve she'd be over the moon, but she measures her performance against her public recognition."

In June, OSM meets Pendleton again. She recently promoted a project for Sky with Elle Macpherson; apparently Macpherson was surprised to find that Vicky could ride a bike. Recognition, it seems, is still not forthcoming. She sighs. "I've done pretty much everything I can and I'm still an unknown. I'm giving up on that whole thing. It's never going to happen. Never mind, it wasn't what I set out to do in the first place. Get down to training, do my job."

The day before Sarah Webb's gold medal race, Adam Gosling, her boyfriend of four years, arrived in Qingdao. They had arranged not to meet until after the competition, but a lack of wind had delayed the Yngling final by 24 hours, and Gosling was insistent - he had to see her. Webb said he could have half an hour, and went along to his hotel room. He proposed. "I actually thought he was joking," she says now. "But he'd decided he was going to do it that Saturday, and he's an absolute stickler for a plan."

Paranoid about the ring - it wasn't insured - Gosling insisted she it tie to the waistband of her tracksuit. Webb hid it until after the race, telling no one about the engagement. It was only on the podium that friends watching on TV spotted a shiny glint, and it was 10pm before her sailing partners noticed the new accessory.

They married in February and had their reception at St James's Palace, where they received special permission from the Queen to take their dog, Derek. With the Yngling class no longer an Olympic event, Webb decided to retire from sailing. She and Gosling busied themselves with plans to demolish their London house and replace it with an ecohome; she also took a broadcast journalism course and filed her first reports for BBC Radio 5 Live. As if that weren't enough, they also agreed to join a nine-day, 880-mile charity cycle from Land's End to John O'Groats, along with another recently married couple, Webb's fellow "Yngling Belle" Sarah Ayton and windsurfer Nick Dempsey. The event has been organised by Be Number 1, an organisation that Webb and her sailing colleagues have set up to raise funding for athletes, particularly those without the financial backing of UK Sport. When we catch up in June, Gosling is at the wheel of a motorhome, on the A466 in Monmouthshire, with a heavily pregnant Ayton in the navigator's seat. Webb, Dempsey and the rest of the cycling team are about a mile behind the support vehicle, at the bottom of a very steep Welsh hill.

Post-Beijing, life has changed as much for Gosling as for his wife. For the three years in the run-up to the Games, he only saw Webb one week in every four. Now they see each other every day, and it's a big adjustment although, he adds quickly, a pleasant one. There has been drama, too: on a ski slope in February, Gosling fell and broke his neck, ironically enough while turning round to check on Webb; he was confined to their house for five weeks afterwards. "It was actually really good for us," says Webb, "because we hadn't spent more than two weeks in one place together."

The year after a Games tends to be a busy one for couples. An Olympic campaign is a pretty self-centred experience, not to mention a fairly monastic one, and for athletes who do much of their training and competing abroad, in warm-weather climates, relationships have to be long-distance. Even for Ayton and Dempsey, who compete at the same regattas, the tyranny of their respective training commitments meant that they stayed engaged for eight years before finally tying the knot last October. The bride had started her wedding preparations the year before Athens.

The quadrennial round of engagements, weddings and pregnancies is an established part of the Olympic cycle. Chris Hoy proposed to his girlfriend, Sarra, on a trip to Prague in April. They met three years ago in a pub in Edinburgh and he says he knew straight away that she was the right girl for him: "It was just about me trying to persuade her likewise." But with Sarra working as a solicitor in Edinburgh, and Hoy training full-time at the velodrome in Manchester, they had become used to a weekly routine of emotional ups and downs: the anticipation of a Friday-night meeting, and the misery of the drive back to the airport on Sunday. Since the engagement Sarra has found a job in Manchester - Hoy, injured in a crash in February, is back on his bike and preparing for October's World Cup. "Finally we'll be able to spend time together," he says. "It's nice to have something on the horizon just for the two of us."

Pendleton didn't even have time for a relationship before the Games. She had been out on a few dates with sports performance scientist Scott Gardner, but that was as far as it had got - the Olympics, naturally, came first. She says that one of the best things about post-Beijing life has been having time to develop that relationship, and spend more time with family - her parents, her sister Nicola and her twin brother Alex.

Gardner has since moved in to Pendleton's house in Wilmslow, Cheshire. She says she has been lucky to find a man who is willing to adapt his lifestyle to that of an elite sportswoman. She is tyrannical about her sleep regime - she goes to bed early, gets up late, and hates to be disturbed - and has similarly inflexible eating habits. "Scott lives by my rules," she admits. "I have to do things certain ways for the sake of my performance, so anyone else has to fit in. It sounds terrible, but he understands. After all, it's not forever."

But it is not always so easy for athletes to slot into a new, shared lifestyle. "What Sarah [Ayton] and I have noticed most since Beijing is how selfish you are," says Webb. "How hard it is to be normal and not put yourself first in everything." Triggs Hodge, too, admits to a nervous anticipation of September when his girlfriend Anneka, who currently lives in the Netherlands, is due to move in with him. "There is a good chance that she'll be astonished at how little I am going to be at home," he admits.

Webb still weighs her porridge out on the scales each morning - 25 grams only - and religiously records her heart rate data, uploading it to her home PC "which is of no use to anybody". Gosling notes that without a goal to pursue, she became quite low. "This cycle ride is the first time she's really come alive again," he says.

So will Webb change her mind, and come out of retirement? She looks torn. "In the lead-up to Beijing, even before we'd won, we'd done it so well I didn't know how we were going to better it." There's a long pause. "But then, when you see everyone else sailing you think... it's very hard. It would be a bit premature to say never."

"Becoming Olympic champion seems like an end goal," says Brabants, who will defend his K1-1,000m gold in 2012. "But it ends up being a stepping stone. It's hard to put away that drive and determination."

Witness Pendleton who, only five days after her victory in the Olympic sprint final, put herself back in training for March's world championships. The team management had told the gold medallists they need not compete - they had too little time to prepare properly, and scarcer motivation. Pendleton knew all this - no track cyclist had ever followed up on their Olympic title at the next year's world - but she couldn't help herself. "I just can't bear the idea of someone else standing on top of that podium and putting my jersey on," she told me, after defending her sprint title. "An individual medal won at the Olympics isn't going to sustain a lifetime of satisfaction for me."

When Hoy crashed in February, the injury to his hip forced him to sit out 10 weeks of the cycling season, and miss the world championships for the first time in his career. It was the longest he had been off his bike since he was seven. "If I'd sat at home watching the world championships and thought, 'You know what, it's quite nice to be sitting here with a beer in my hand watching the TV,' that would have been a bad sign," he says. "But I was desperate to be up there. Even though it would have been a very compromised preparation and I wouldn't have been in the best shape of my life. I may not have won anything at all, and I knew that was a risk, but I would never not race just because I was afraid of losing."

Pendleton worries that winning the sprint again in 2012 will not be challenge enough for her; she is hoping that the Olympic committee will expand the women's track cycling programme to include more races that she can contest. But you wonder whether anything can bring her true satisfaction. And she's not alone.

"You come away with two gold medals and you think your life's made," says Webb. "But I'm not sure anything's different at all."

Q+A: James DeGale

How does life compare with last year?

The change is unbelievable. People recognising me, stopping me in the street. I'm not a millionaire but I'm comfortable now - it's much easier to buy the clothes I like.

How are you finding professional boxing?

Fantastic. Your attitude has to be different, no nonsense. I was very nervous before the first fight, and I still find the dieting hard.

Do you still have a party lifestyle?

I'm normally too knackered. I'm training twice a day and by the time I get back from the gym all I want to do is sleep. But it ain't totally stopped ...

Q+A: Victoria Pendleton

Have you had a holiday since the Games?

After the worlds I went to Tasmania - I really needed a break by then. I tried to relax but I still got edgy and ended up going to the gym.

How have you found the return to training?

I feel so out of shape I hate myself. And I have off days where I hate riding my bike. When you've been in form like you were at the Olympics, everything else is a step down.

How do you motivate yourself for 2012?

I am still working on that. If it wasn't in London I don't know if I would bother.

Q+A: Sarah Webb

How did you find the post-Games hype?

You get swept away on the emotion of it; when it stops it's hard because you think: now what?

And now you've gone into journalism...

The people in radio always seemed really nice, and I'd thought in Athens that I might like to try it. So I went on a couple of courses and I've just done my first show for BBC 5 Live.

Do your gold medals change your outlook?

I don't sit and look at my medals, and I'm quite shy about showing them to people. But it does make you realise that you can do anything if you decide to do it.

Q+A: Chris Hoy

Are you enjoying the attention?

It's lovely, but it takes some getting used to. It makes getting sponsorship easier, but I'm not earning a footballer's salary.

How did the crash affect your year?

Because I wasn't training I've been trying to cram in all my other obligations, and it's exhausting. It sounds pathetic but it really is.

After three golds, what goals are left?

Two more in London would give me five golds and a silver, which is more than anybody has won for Britain. That's a nice target.

Q+A: Tim Brabants

Have you been asked to do a naked calendar?

No, and I'd turn that down. I was emailed asking what my favourite biscuit was, though.

Did you need time off from kayaking this year?

Not so much time off as time to move my medical career forward - it's difficult to progress when you're only working part-time.

Has interest in your sport remained?

I think sports in which Britain did well will stay in the public eye more through to 2012. I hope it inspires kids to realise they might have talent in a sport that isn't football - often you are only exposed to what's available.

Q+A: Andrew Triggs Hodge

What did you do after Beijing?

I took a three-week holiday, at a profitable time for medallists. But I needed a break and the Azores haven't heard of the Olympics.

How easy is it to go back to training?

It's "welcome back to reality". But I do regret that I don't have a social life any more.

Does the gold improve your 2012 chances?

The medal is just this bit of metal and I've got to make sure I am ticking Jürgen's boxes now and not then. It's like walking a tightrope: the further you get from base the harder it gets.

Find out what Britain's Olympians did next, in Observer Sport Monthly, Sunday 26 July

• Gold for British teenager in 10m platform event in Rome
• Relive the best of the action with our gallery from the final

Tom Daley last night became Britain's first individual world diving champion after taking gold in the 10m platform event. The 15-year-old was fourth with two rounds to go but a flurry of perfect scores brought him a dramatic victory.

It still needed mistakes from the three other leading contenders to give Daley an unexpected win which illustrated how mature a competitor he has become. Even a phone ringing as he stood on the board for his fifth and crucial dive did not disturb his focus.

"Getting into the final I just thought, 'Go out there and do your best and see what happens'. I thought I was going to come fourth and I would have been really happy with that. But then to come away with a medal was going to be great, then a gold medal was just insane," said Daley, who became the first British diver to win a world or Olympic title. "Today was never the day when I thought I would become world champion. I woke up and thought just go out and enjoy it. To come away with a gold medal was unthinkable. It still hasn't sunk in. Now I want to do it again in 2012."

Since he came to the public's attention, Daley has become the national under-18 champion at 10 years old, and the European senior champion last year, as a 14-year-old. But last year at the Beijing Olympics there was a serious blip on the upward curve when a well-publicised spat with his partner, Blake Aldridge, in the synchro competition was followed by a down-beat performance in the individual 10m, where he finished seventh.

This summer, though, Daley has looked the real deal again, hitting a remarkable personal best of 554.90 when he won the Fort Lauderdale grand prix in May. Even so, what happened here was still, as the schoolboy put it, "insane".

With four dives to go, the youngest and just about the smallest competitor in the field was more than 18 points behind the leader Bo Qui, from China, who had beaten Daley to the world junior title last year and the second youngest diver, at 16, in the line-up.

The Olympic champion, Australia's Matthew Mitcham, who had halted the Chinese clean sweep in Beijing, was in a close second and Zhou Luxin, the Olympic silver medallist was lying third.

Daley, with only Mitcham and Bo diving after him, had to produce something special just to have a chance of bronze, and with the lowest degree of difficulty of the four leading divers, nothing less than perfect scores were required, and nothing less than perfect scores were delivered, Daley hitting eight 10s in his final two dives. Zhou failed on his fifth dive, Mitcham had two ordinary (by his high standards) final dives and Bo's poor entry on the last dive of the competition settled it.

"I really thought they were going to get it," said Daley. "For them not to do so is really crazy. I can't believe it. I really can't believe it. It's been a lot of hard work; lots of ups and lots of downs. Everything I've put into it has now become worth it."