Natalie du Toit, the Olympic and Paralympic swimming sensation, said yesterday that she did not consider it a contest between her and Oscar Pistorius to become the first person to qualify for the Olympic and Paralympic Games in the same year. “For me it was never a race, but for a lot of people, because we're disabled, it was a race,” Du Toit said.

As she is South African and an amputee, like Pistorius, the comparisons with the sprinter, who is attempting to overturn a ban on him competing in the Olympics with prosthetic limbs, are perhaps inevitable. But they are not close.

“He lives in Johannesburg, I live in Cape Town,” Du Toit said. “It's also very different because I have a through-knee amputation, whereas both his legs were amputated below the knees. My rule states that I am not allowed to swim with an aid, whereas he can't run without an aid. If he works hard and trains hard, then he should be allowed to follow his dream. I believe everyone should be allowed to follow their dreams.”

Du Toit is in Manchester for the Paralympic World Cup and has just flown in from Seville, where she qualified for the Beijing Olympics after finishing fourth in the 10km open-water world championships.

Du Toit can arguably soak up more pain than any Olympian on the planet. “I can swim an 800metres, I can swim 1500metres, or a 5km, or a 10km and I can go the same pace the whole way,” Du Toit said. “No matter if I am hurting or in pain, I go 1min 11sec [for every 100 metres].”

Her secret? “It's just training and training,” she said. “Obviously I know I don't have the sprint, so I have to put in as much effort as possible in the middle. On the 10km, I cramp easily on my hamstring - you can feel a massive knot in my hamstring always. I could feel the cramp in that 10km in Seville, so I had to rely on my arms.

“I wasn't expecting to do that [qualify for the Olympics]. Normally I am in the leading pack for 8km and then everyone passes me in the last 1km. They know the way I race, but this time I'd put in a bit more mileage so I was able to last that much longer.”

Du Toit has always been one of the great hopes of South African swimming. As a 14-year-old she went to the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur in 1998 and, after narrowly missing out on the 2000 Sydney Olympics, was preparing for Athens. Then she lost her left leg in a horrific motor-scooter accident. Six months later, on the same evening that her bandages were taken off, she was back in the pool. Less than 18 months after the accident she competed in the 2002 Commonwealth Games in Manchester.

She recently measured the top of her right leg as 17.5cm bigger in circumference than her left, but there is no accurate measure for how much power she loses. “It's 20 per cent, easily,” Theo Verster, one of South Africa's swimming coaches, said.