Contrary to popular belief, The Times can reveal today that exchanging a programme of healthy eating and high-intensity athletic training for the party life does not result in weight gain. Indeed, the evidence shows that, if your name is Chris Hoy and you have just won three Olympic gold medals and you have thereafter spent seven weeks taking less exercise than at any time in the previous ten years, you lose weight.

It helps if you are prepared to embrace the new world that is desperate to embrace you. It helps that you like to say “yes” to invitations, such as the one when Ozzy Osbourne asks you to attend the Classic Rock Awards or when Samuel L. Jackson asks if he can have his photograph taken with you.

It helps also if you take a different approach to the one Bradley Wiggins followed after the Athens Games in 2004. Anticlimax is no rare phenomenon after an Olympics and Wiggins dealt with his by drinking a dozen pints a night. And it is not that Hoy does not fancy a drink, or has not stopped to question the meaning of post-Olympic life, it is simply that, by grabbing early-morning flights plus half a sandwich to get to the raft of gold-embossed invitations dangled before him, he has had time neither for existentialism nor the beer.

Indeed, since Hoy won his third gold in the early Beijing evening on August 19, he has not had a day to himself. He has not sat down in his home and watched any of his races and he has not had one night out with his friends. Pretty much the closest his friends have got to him was in an Edinburgh pub, where they heard a man impressing a woman at the bar by claiming that he was Chris Hoy. (“And apparently he didn't even look like me,” Hoy said.)

The easy conclusion is that he has turned celebrity luvvie. But that ignores his personality, the sense of loyalty that nags him with the obligation to sponsors, charities and fans who want a piece of him, and the extreme control that means that, although he might enjoy hanging out with Ozzy Osbourne, after another month of this with only three days off, he will take a two-week holiday, then flick a switch and return to the track, whence he came. In his words, it will be “complete shutdown”.

Actually, he said, he is already “itching” to get back. “I'm not eating well,” he said. “It sounds pathetic, but it's really tiring.” And if anyone doubts that Hoy can perform this switch from celebrity to cyclist overnight, they need to understand his control and his control of his chimp. All the Great Britain cyclists in Beijing had a chimp; in fact, every athlete at the Games

had one, although most did not know it. For chimp-management, Hoy deserves a fourth gold medal. The chimp was introduced to the Britain cyclists by Steve Peters, the team psychiatrist. “Your emotional side is your chimp,” Hoy said. “If you let it out, then all these emotional, irrational thoughts come out, you start thinking about the consequences of the race, the ‘what ifs', the negative side. You can let your chimp out after racing, or even for a burst between races, but you have to lock it up firmly before your race.”

And what is interesting - surprising - about Hoy is that he has one hell of a chimp. There have been occasions, before the start of races, when he has wished that he could be transported anywhere else in the world. He can relate, therefore, to Jonny Wilkinson, who said he would have taken a bus ticket out of the England dressing-room before the biggest rugby matches of his life, or to the passage in Sir Matthew Pinsent's autobiography in which he recalls the journey to his last Olympic rowing final, when a part of him is hoping for the bus to crash and an ambulance to take him away.

“Athletes often have this outward exterior, this façade of extreme confidence, where nothing can break that concentration or belief in themselves,” Hoy said. “But 99 per cent of the time that's not true, no matter what anyone tells you.”

But in Beijing there were only “nanoseconds” of self-doubt. “In the keirin, for instance, you think anything can happen, you can get boxed in, someone can crash and take you down,” he said. “Or, generally, you can look at the crowd and think, ‘My family have come all this way, what if I don't win? What are the consequences of failure?' But then it's, ‘Snap out, come on, keep the chimp in the cage.'”

Hoy's achievement was that he kept the chimp under control for five days of racing. Yet, as he said: “Of all the championships I've ever done, that was my best-ever performance, the closest I've come to perfection. It almost felt easy. It didn't feel the same challenge as before, I wasn't beaten in a single qualifying race, either. That was the closest I've ever come to feeling invincible on a bike. And the right time to have that, too.”

And thus the rewards, the celebrity weight loss and such a level of renown that chancers in pubs are attempting Hoy impressions to make them more attractive to women.

To do a believable impression of Hoy, though, you need to understand his exercise of self-control, plus those nagging doubts, for it is this potent combination that has driven him to such heights. You can be taken in by the “façade” like in Beijing where the French opposition “raised the white flag”. “It was a pretty nice feeling,” he said. “To think that psychologically we'd killed them off so early on.”

In the media, too, he said, “sometimes I feel I'm misrepresented”. As the school head boy? “Hmm,” he acknowledged. “I'm far from perfect.” Which was not how it appeared in Beijing. How could he improve? “Well, I'm very self-critical. And then I get annoyed with myself for having self-doubt. Because then you get to the race and you go fine and you think, ‘What were you worried about?'”

In our interview, in the royal suite in the Dorchester hotel, London, where he was preparing for the Olympic Gold Ball, there seemed little to be concerned about. When asked to pose for Vanity Fair magazine, he did display a smidgin of concern - he knew that this was the celebrity luvvie shot - but he also knows that time is running on this phase of his life.

He will do the functions for now and then refocus. London 2012? “I'd love to win three more events and win three more golds.” The 2016 Games? “I'd be 40. There would have to be a really special reason to want to keep going. I want to go out on my terms and you have to know when to stop.”

And he is pondering a world record attempt, too: the 200 metres, in Moscow, where the track is perfect. “The flying 200,” he said a little dreamily. “That's a big deal. You'd be recognised as the fastest man ever.”

All this, no doubt, will be executed with the same cocktail of self-doubt, self-analysis and self-control. So expect it to go well.

Some time, at the end of the year, he has pencilled in a friend's stag weekend, when he will finally catch up with his friends. He will probably do that rather well, too.