She suggests Starbucks cafe on the High Street in Marlow. I wonder how she will get there. Her mum Maureen, her dad Robin, her sister Sue, maybe a friend will take her. It is a wet and miserable morning in Marlow, cars sit bumper to bumper on the High Street, parking is hell and then into Starbucks rolls Helene Raynsford, guiding her wheelchair between the tables and chairs, steering a line like Lewis Hamilton at Silverstone.

A small bag blocks her route. “I’m so sorry,” says the lady owner of the bag, as if admitting to the crime of the century. “Oh, it’s okay,” says Raynsford, as if it was nothing. She comes to the table, and in the instant it takes me to pull a digital recorder from a jacket pocket, she has slipped from wheelchair to Starbucks seat.

“You came alone?” I say. “Yeah, of course. Why, do other people bring their friends when you're interviewing them?”

“No, but. . . I’ve never seen someone in a wheelchair come into a coffee shop on their own.”

“You haven’t?” she says with a faint suggestion of disapproval.

At this table, over my cup of tea and her frappuccino, there is a conflict taking place. She is a 28-year-old woman who leads a normal, if more-than-commonly-interesting life. She works for the Youth Sport Trust but, just now, she’s in full-time training for the Paralympics in Beijing, which take place in early September. A single sculls arms-only rower, she hopes to win the gold medal and, for the second time in her rowing career, have someone play the national anthem just for her.

Here’s the conflict: what Helene Raynsford sees in the mirror is “little old me, going about my life”. The interviewer sees the wheelchair that came in the same year as her 21st birthday. How does it not change every-thing? “I don’t see myself as having a disability, I never have. This is just my life.” The disabled athlete I have come to interview hasn’t turned up. The woman who has sees the flicker of confusion and gets on with it.

For that has been the way or, rather, the story of her life.

HER EARLIEST memories are of her passion for music and how it moved her to dance. It came naturally and when she saw how it entertained people to see her move, that pleased her all the more. Her mum Maureen tells her she was like that from the age of three and reminds her of the day she went pirouetting down the aisle of the super-market, or the day she flowed to the background music at the optician’s.

What Raynsford remembers was the urge to dance all the time - the excitement of putting on a tutu, throwing her arms into the air and taking off. Her older sister Sue made the Great Britain team at synchronised swimming, her parents learnt to coach swimming, but their younger daughter simply wanted to dance.

They brought her to the Lorraine Day School of Dance in Frimley and it became like a second home. Each evening after school she would be there, sometimes in classes too advanced for her, more often standing discreetly at the back of classes for which she was too good and practising the most difficult step. “I practised at home too. Mum and Dad, bless them, put a bar over the French doors in our living room which helped me no end, but everyone else had to do limbo to get to the garden.”

At age seven, Raynsford became a junior associate of the Royal Ballet School and at the weekend would practise with the Royal Ballet on the Talgarth Road in Hammer-smith. Four years later she received a grant from Surrey council to enable her to attend Elmhurst Ballet School in Camberley. She was into all forms of dance, but classical ballet was her favourite. As well as the thrill of performing, she loved the discipline of dance school and its unrelenting demands.

When it is deemed that girls’ feet are strong enough, they start doing pointe work which involves standing on their toes. Raynsford remembers the excitement and dread of Mercia Hetherington, an inspirational teacher at Elmhurst, allowing the girls to start on their pointe work. “You thought, ‘I’m going to dread this session’, but you knew it was for your own good and people were helping you to become the best you could possibly be.

“If something didn’t come easily to me, I worked at it. I remember sneaking into the theatre at the school, when nobody was there, so I could practise the bits that needed extra time. I felt I was lucky to get the opportunity to give everything to it.”

After doing well in her GCSEs and excelling as a dancer at Elmhurst, Raynsford received a place at the Upper School of the Royal Ballet. What had been her dream was now her destiny: she would be a professional dancer. At the age of 17, her left foot began to hurt; there were scans and assessments, physio sessions and rehab exercises, and when it recovered, she could walk and run but she could not dance.

“There was a couple of months when it was like, ‘Can we make this better, or can we not?’ In the end, it was, ‘No, we can’t’. At the time I would have been devastated because it meant leaving my dream behind. But whatever bad breaks I get in life, there’s always the thought, ‘Well, what am I going to do now?’ I move on to something else. You can’t sit there and soak yourself in self-pity.”

She put greater emphasis on her A-levels, got excellent grades in biology, chemistry and geography and accepted an offer to study medical biochemistry at Royal Holloway College, part of the University of London. It might be said that the first hint of a sporty Helene surfaced when she joined the college’s fencing club, but she just wanted to meet the kind of people who wanted to fence and when she discovered she had to wear white tights, she wondered what she’d gotten into.

University suited her and she fitted easily into a life of playing and working hard. A month before the start of her final year, she suffered a brain injury that left her with catastrophic symptoms. She no longer had any control over her muscles, she couldn’t speak in structured sentences and had no short-term memory. A bright, outgoing 21-year-old suddenly became a young woman who couldn’t do anything for herself.

Doctors said most of the improvement would come in the first six months of recovery. “I don’t remember how I felt at the time but other people have told me that I didn’t realise I had as much of a disability as I had. But that’s the nature of a brain injury, to not comprehend how affected you are. The fact that I have no memory of the nine months after the injury is a very good thing for me. It was harder for my parents and my sister.

“I was told, ‘You won’t be able to do this, you won’t be able to do that’, but that was just a spur to me to do those things. I have made a massive recovery, my brain learnt to compute stuff again, my muscles relearnt the fine motor skills they had lost and my speech returned to normal.” Raynsford doesn’t mention she never recovered the use of her legs, and if this had been politely pointed out, she would have said: “Well, that’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?”

She went back to Royal Holloway that autumn, a few months after her accident, but she wasn’t anywhere near ready to finish her degree. At the beginning of the following academic year, she started again and the following summer, she graduated with distinction. By that point, she had gone on a 10-day holiday with a friend to an inclusive sporting facility at Scarborough, just outside Toronto in Canada.

There she saw athletes of all abilities, and some with disabilities, compete in various sports. It opened her eyes to new possibilities and soon she was a member of the Rushmoor Mallards wheelchair basketball team, good enough to earn a place in the Great Britain squad. She was a reserve for the Athens Paralympics and thought that when Beijing came round, she wanted to be in the team.

Early the following year, when the basketball season ended, Raynsford sought a sport that would allow her to stay in good shape. Through her work for the Department of Health, she had been sent to Dorney Lake at Eton for a rowing competition and noticeda guy in a wheelchair wearing a GB singlet. Rowing, she decided, was something she had to try. She started at Ardingly Rowing Club in Sussex, later moved to the much-closer-to-home Guildford Rowing Club and what started out as an exercise in staying fit for basketball became her new passion.

“I rocked up at Guildford, who train on a stretch of river in a leafy part of Surrey. There was a step at the door, one of the guys builta ramp and we were in business. At the time, I was the only person at the club with a disability but Peter Hopkins, Paul Woowat and Jere-my Larcombe, would carry my boat to the water and put me out on the river. For people with a disability, there are little floats under our riggers that stop us capsizing.

“Peter took on most of my day-to-day needs at the club; he doesn’t look for any credit but he’s a great support to a lot of people. As I’ve gone on in rowing I’m conscious that I can be nothing in this sport without the backing of a great team of people, first at Guildford and now with the GB squad.”

Two years ago, Raynsford won the gold medal in the arms-only single sculls when the world championships were held at Dorney Lake. After winning her heat on the Friday, she watched television coverage of the championships on Saturday and heard Sir Steve Redgrave speak about “the amazing feeling of hearing the national anthem being played and knowing it’s for something you’ve done”. She wanted that feeling and the following day she dominated her final and afterwards discovered Redgrave hadn’t been wrong.

Her parents and sister were there, wearing T-shirts emblazoned with her picture, her friends Zoe and Steve Norbourne had a video camera and many of the members of Guildford Rowing Club ran the 1,000m on the bank of the lake, cheering her every stroke. At the end, she glanced up at the giant plasma screen near the finish line and looked at herself with a little amazement. “I better do something,” she thought, and raised an arm in victory and was reminded of just how exhausted she was.

Now, there are just seven weeks to her event at the Paralympics and the gold medal is again her aim. WITH her body confined to a wheelchair, I wonder if there aren’t dark moods and bleak days. Yet she sees not disability but something greater. “I actually think I’ve been lucky, to experience all the things I’ve experienced. Most people don’t get the chances I’ve got. What you experience shapes your life, the good and the bad. You look at the next person, they’ve had ups and downs. I’ve had some good, some not-so-good things happen to me. I hope I have grown as a person from the not-so-good.

“I don’t know what I would have done if it hadn’t happened, but as a result I know I’ve learnt so much about what life has to offer. I think that’s something for me to celebrate.”

You know you’ve seen her somewhere before ...

Helene Raynsford can now be seen in the new TV advertisement campaign for The Sunday Times. The commercial was filmed in June and will be broadcast throughout July and August. It was shot on the water and at a basketball court near her home in Surrey.

Raynsford, who was born in Halifax in 1979 and went on to be a student at the Royal Ballet School, took up basketball as part of her rehabilitation after being left disabled in 2001. In 2005 she won a World Cup silver medal with the British women's wheelchair team. She is also world champion and world record-holder for the women's arms-only single scull in rowing.

In addition to her sporting talents and commitments, Raynsford has a degree in medical biochemistry and works full-time in public health, setting up an outreach programme for young people. Helene also serves as an athlete mentor on Sky Sports Living for Sport, a free sports initiative for young people who are finding life hard at school. To find out more about the initiative visit www.sky.com/lfs.

The Sunday Times campaign also stars Oscar-winning actor Peter O'Toole. For more on The Sunday Times redesign and advertising campaign, please visit www.timesonline.co.uk.