ANDREW LINDSAY will take on his own golden hat-trick this week. As the Paralympics pick up the baton in Beijing, the Scottish swimmer who won gold in the 100m backstroke (S7) in Sydney and Athens will attempt to make it three in a row in China. The spotlight on the paralympians is not as bright as it was for Chris Hoy and the other able-bodied athletes last month, but three golds is three golds. An open-top bus parade through his native Cowdenbeath, perhaps?

“Maybe,” he says through a smile. “I’m not thinking about it like that at the moment. The closer I get to my events I’m sure it will creep into my mind that there is the possibility of winning for the third time.”

Maybe that moment will not arrive until after the race, either the sense of a formidable treble that would leave his mark on the race for good, or regret at coming within touching distance of that achievement. He already knows well the man most likely to stop his winning streak.

Jonathan Fox of Cornwall, a teammate at these Games, broke Lindsay’s world record at the Olympic trials in April, lowering by 0.29secs the mark set by the Scot four years ago. Fox is a swimmer who has only recently developed into a world class competitor and Lindsay is wary of the threat posed by the 17-year-old. “He is one of the newer faces on the team,” says Lindsay.“He was thrown in there as a youngster but over the last 18 months to a year he has really developed. We get on great, I can’t fault him, but we’re both here for the same thing.”

Certainly the supremacy held by Lindsay at the last major final the two raced in — the 2006 world championships in Durban, South Africa, where Lindsay won gold and Fox was fifth — has been eroded, if not usurped, by the teenager. But Lindsay has been over this terrain before.

Beijing is his fourth Paralympics — he also won silver in this event at Atlanta, missing gold by nine hundredths of a second — and he knows the ways this arena can effect those who enter it. “At Sydney there were 17,000 people coming to the pool every day. Heats, finals, it was always packed. Every time you went there there was a lump in your throat and the adrenaline hit you.

“There were thousands of people shouting you on. Athens was the same, and even Atlanta, there was 80,000 at the opening ceremony. It’s just totally different to anything else. An experience you never forget.”

The two have been training together both in China and during a 10-day camp in Macau. As well as the 100m backstroke, they go head-to-head in the 400m freestyle, an event in which Lindsay has never medalled at the Paralympics but is currently ranked No2 in the world.

In both races it is a classic case of youth versus experience and if the Scot can defeat his talented teammate it may be the greatest win of a stellar career that has also included four world titles and world records at five distances in backstroke. He is not the only Scottish member of Team GB seeking a formidable legacy. Also in the pool, in the S2 category, 45-year-old Jim Anderson is at his fifth Games and looking to add to his six golds — four of which were won in Athens four years ago, a performance which earned him an MBE and the nickname ‘Jim the Swim’.

In the same velodrome that was conquered by Hoy, Aileen McGlynn (also an MBE) defends her Olympic title in the kilometre time trial. Both she and Hoy took gold in the event in Athens but while the kilo was killed off for able-bodied athletes, it survives at the Paralympics. McGlynn, who is partially sighted, rides a tandem piloted by a sighted athlete, Ellen Hunter.

While Lindsay, Anderson and McGlynn are veterans of the Games, among those experiencing the Paralympics for the first time are 16-year-old wheelchair tennis player Gordon Reid and 60-year-old grandmother Kate Murray who took up archery only five years ago and proceeded to win a bronze medal at the world championships.