If there was one sight guaranteed to pain Andy Baddeley as his Olympic dream soured last summer, it was not the bloody leg but the image of Nick Willis running into what the New Zealand media termed “sporting immortality”. The fresh-faced Kiwi had taken an unlikely bronze medal in the 1,500 metres final and gushed about how he would pay off the mortgage. Baddeley, by contrast, went to the airport, where he expected a dressing-down from Lord Coe.

Having beaten Willis at the World Championships the previous year, Baddeley knew that a place on the Olympic podium was tantalisingly close. He made a bid for home but his legs tied up. He had been spiked and had missed three weeks of training before the Games, but he did not proffer that as an excuse. For him, ninth was nowhere.

Hence, when he found himself standing next to Coe, part of Britain's middle-distance holy trinity from the 1980s along with Steve Ovett and Steve Cram, at Beijing airport, he feared the worst. “I was a bit worried because I thought he would be critical,” he said. “Some people were saying I must be happy to have made the final, but I don't train to make finals. But Seb actually put a few things in perspective. He asked how much I was training and thought I was doing it right. He pointed out the very high quality of the 1,500 metres now. He was very positive.”

Baddeley, who has a cardiac monitoring device in his chest because of an irregular heartbeat, returns to action today in defence of his four kilometres title at the Bupa Great Edinburgh International Cross Country meeting. Also competing are Steph Twell, the rising British star, and Eliud Kipchoge, the Olympic silver medal-winner from Kenya. Baddeley will then race indoors in the United States before heading Down Under, where he will take on Willis in an invitational mile in Christchurch. Having won the Dream Mile in Oslo last year, becoming the first Briton to do so since Peter Elliott in 1991, and recording the third-fastest time of the past three years, Baddeley should expect to have the beating of the Kiwi. But, then, he did in Beijing, too. “It's a motivator and a frustration,” he said of Willis's Olympic bronze. “It could have been me. I suppose the more people who can get up there, the better it is for the non-Africans, but I've never been daunted by running against the top Africans.

“The first time I put my GB kit on for the Olympics was to get on the plane and I could barely walk because of my Achilles. The main aim was to get through the flight and have some physio. I didn't mention it at the time because I did not want to make an excuse and a lot of people were in the same situation, but the more I reflected, the more I thought that what was missing was those three key weeks.”

Baddeley's progress last year was impressive. Even with a disrupted build-up he said that he ran his best race in a loaded Olympic semi-final. The time did not show it, some three seconds adrift of his best of 3min 34.36sec, but the tactics did. Willis was only fifth, the last of the qualifiers, while Bernard Lagat, the world champion from the United States, crashed out.

Times can be deceiving when it comes to the championships, though. Willis was only the twentieth-fastest man in the world last year and Baddeley said: “The Dream Mile is the only quick-paced race I've had in the last few years and it's just unfortunate it was not a 1,500 metres.”

Married in October, he said that he has delayed plans to remove the ECG (electrocardiogram) device in his chest until after the World Championships in Berlin in August - the batteries died long ago. Baddeley, though, insists that there is plenty of life left in him. “I'm 26 now and know what I'm capable of,” he said. “Medals are the aim from now on.”