GREAT BRITAIN’S elite rowing fraternity remember Rebecca Romero as the grumpy one. She won a silver medal at the Olympics and a gold in the worlds, but they hardly saw her smile in 10 years. Yet now they see her with two gold medals for cycling, and she never stops smiling.

It has been some liberation. “They are quite right,” Romero said yesterday. “I was a misery guts. When they asked me why I was like that, I just used to say, ‘I hate this’ – and I did.”

Romero is a strong-minded person. Two years ago, aged 26, she decided the time had come to give up rowing.

“Even if I had been guaranteed a gold medal in rowing at the Beijing Olympics, I was getting out. It was a waste of life. If you can’t do something in a whole-hearted and completely committed way, I would rather not bother,” she said. “I would rather do something to the best of my ability in obscurity. I’m a perfectionist.”

So what was wrong with the rowing programme? “There was a mental struggle for me every day and it just wasn’t necessary,” she said. “There was no trust in our individual drive and desire. We always trained in a group with the coaches watching. It was regimented, a daily grind.

“My aim is to be able to go to the starting line at a major championships or Olympics and look at the other competitors and know that I have done everything I can, that I have left no stone unturned. In Athens, I couldn’t say that. But here in Manchester, I could.”

So what is different about her cycling life? “It’s like the difference between school and university,” she explained. “Suddenly you have freedom and responsibility.”

Romero could easily have been lost to sport. She was resigned to getting a proper job and finding a leisure pursuit for the weekends. “The idea of taking up another sport at the top level was ridiculous,” she said. “But during my teenage years I always tried different activities. That’s how I found rowing. So I thought I might give track cycling a go. I looked at a velodrome website, but I didn’t really understand what it was about.”

A friend to whom she mentioned her idea happened to know one of the British cycling team coaches, Dan Hunt. So it was that in March two years ago, Hunt made the phone call that changed Romero’s life.

“I did a bit of research on her and invited her up here to Manchester,” Hunt said. “She came for a day and we started by giving her a ramp test on a stationary bike. She had good power outputs, with great aerobic capacity, although we weren’t surprised about that.

“The numbers were good, but they were not what impressed us. She turned herself inside out on that testing rig. I could see she had a capacity to hurt herself. And since then I have seen it to an extent I’ve never seen before. That willingness to go through pain is the same as the will to win.

“In the afternoon on that first day, we put her on a race-bike and let her ride round the track. I could see that she is a natural pedaller with good balance and a flowing technique. Pure strength does not always bring speed, but I could see she could lay down the power.

“I could also see that she is brave. It took bravery to give up rowing, where she was likely to get another Olympic medal, to take a leap of faith into another sport. It took bravery to come up here and test out with all the national coaches watching her. She showed no fear. I’ve worked with elite female athletes for the past seven years and she is the most driven athlete I have met, male or female.”

Romero had found her sport. She had to learn the skills of riding at speed, of handling the bike, which she achieved remarkably quickly; she also had to adapt to competing in an individual sport, the 3km pursuit.

That suited her perfectly. “It was just me at last. I crave self-responsibility and now I had it. The big test came at last year’s world championships, when I competed at the top level by myself – not in a team – for the first time. I have great belief in myself, that I will always pull something out of the bag when I need it most, that I’m the one to back, but I had to prove it.”

Romero won the silver medal in Palma a year ago and has improved considerably since then. Now, as world champion, she has established herself as favourite to win gold in Beijing.

“In December I told Dan that I wished I had an extra year before the Olympics. I’m getting better at cycling, but I’ve had to cut some corners. I still think I can do it. I’ll just have to work extra hard,” she said.

Romero will have a week off, followed by a week’s easy riding. Then the hard work starts. She’ll be ready.