Dean Macey’s latest bout against his body has started with the luckless athlete flat on his back and delaying another comeback. As British athletes head to South Africa for a warm-weather training camp, the Commonwealth decathlon champion will be at home nursing his latest injury.

Nobody is counting Macey out just yet, but his lack of competition since winning gold in Melbourne in March 2006 is a festering concern. “We haven’t written him off and if we can patch him up and get him to the start line then I am sure he will put in a great performance,” Dave Collins, the UK Athletics national performance director, said.

Collins previewed the World Athletics Championships in Osaka, Japan last August by suggesting he had “too many cars in the garage” and there is no doubt that Macey has a Rolls-Royce engine beneath the rusting bonnet. The tattooed former lifeguard is a national icon in waiting, but news that he now has a back problem is another worry as the countdown to the Beijing Olympics begins in earnest.

“I feel very sorry for him because he is a super-committed trainer,” Collins said. “We had a schedule for him to get healthy and go for a qualifier, and I am sure he would have benefited from the sun on his back.”

Macey, who turned 30 in December, has until July 23 to get the Olympic ”B” qualifying standard of 7,700 points and the good news is that he has been here before. After almost three years on the sidelines, Macey qualified for the Athens Olympics in 2004 by dragging his ailing body through a meeting that was so low key it was almost subterranean at Tynedale Athletics Park in Hexham,Northumberland, that July. He then plumbed the depths of his spirit to come fourth at the Olympics for the second successive Games.

He has a Paula Radcliffe-like resilience and might well look to the marathon mum as inspiration. Radcliffe returned to action after 21 months out last September and won the New York Marathon in dramatic fashion only five weeks later; Macey’s last decathlon was also 21 months ago.

He had been in good shape for the European Championships in 2006 but suffered a groin injury the day before he flew out to Gothenburg. Yet despite career-saving surgery on his hamstring, serious Achilles and elbow injuries, and missing a string of competitions, Macey has managed to finish second and third at the World Championships and become one of the best-loved athletes in Britain.

“I won’t give up until the last of my limbs drops off,” he once said. “But it’s hard – the injuries have taken me to dark places I never thought existed. I wasn’t designed to be a decathlete.”

There would be no more popular winner in China and the back problem is not thought to be serious enough to jeopardise his build-up. However, it is another setback for a man who has had more than his fair share of pain and one of British athletics’ few genuine medal prospects.