In these brave new days of lottery funding, decent support systems and proper athlete management, do not for a moment fall into the trap of believing that a winning life has in any way become an easy one. Tim Brabants, who won Britain's eighteenth gold medal yesterday with a victory in the 1,000 metres single-man kayak race, is a living embodiment of the reason why.

Brabants is 31 and, before the lottery, he saw medicine as his future. Yesterday, he finally nailed the gold of which he has been in pursuit for three Olympics now, and his future in medicine has not changed. The only difference is his peers from medical school are roughly five years ahead.

How much farther back should he drop? Because if he had won gold in Athens, as many thought he might, he may well have given the paddling a miss and pursued the grown-up job of being a doctor. But fulfilment in sport is like a drug. So after Athens, Brabants went back to the job. He did 18 months, including six on A&E in Jersey. But that was that, fifth in Athens was not good enough. He knew he could never leave it there. And that was where his assault on Beijing began.

In a round-about kind of way, Brabants has tried to do this the old amateur way. Previously, the amateur sportsman would work by day and train by night; Brabants instead worked for roughly half the Olympiad and then trained the second half.

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His comeback showed there is something to be said for being physically and mentally fresh. At his first World Championships back, in 2006, he got silver; last year he got gold. Yesterday, he sat on the start line as one of three favourites, the others, Adam van Koeverden, of Canada, on his left and Eirik Larsen, of Norway, on his right.

Up in the stands sat his father, Peter, and his sister, Anna. There was an emotional hole where his mother, Liz, should have been because it was she who first took him to do a canoe course one summer holidays and it was she who had followed him with Peter to Sydney and Athens. Liz died of leukaemia in 2005 and, as Brabants said afterwards, “it is hard for all of us”.

Back in the day when he did that canoe course, Brabants had been a particularly restless and energetic young boy. “Challenging and focused” was how Anna described it yesterday. The canoeing, explained Peter with a smile, was encouraged because it was seen as a way of “getting him off our backs for a while”.

Apparently, he has never really changed. Restless and energetic the night before boarding for Beijing, Brabants whiled away the time by painting the Team GB logo on the blades of his paddle.

On the water yesterday, Brabants knew that Van Koeverden would go out quick and that Larsen would finish fast. As it was, Brabants started the quickest, Van Koeverden spent the first 500 metres sitting on his shoulder and the second falling off it. At halfway, Larsen thought he had Brabants nicely within reach; with 200 metres still to go, he still thought he would reel him in, but he had never backed Brabants to finish quick, too.

“I had a very good race,” Larsen said by way of a compliment. Van Koeverden slipped as far back as eighth. Ken Wallace, the Australian 24-year-old, won bronze and said of Brabants: “I've never been to an Olympics before but I've watched this guy on video and YouTube. I'm honoured to get a bronze behind him.”

Brabants said that after just two strokes of the race he knew that victory was his. “It's easy to say that when you've won, but I really did know after that start that I was going to win,” he said. “We've been discussing all year: how to race the Olympic final. I hit it hard off the start and after those first two strokes, I was without a doubt that anyone was going to touch me.”

And as for the family in the stands, Brabants said, mentioning again his mother's absence, “to see a dream finally fulfilled, it was a pretty emotional moment for my Dad”. It would have been pretty emotional back in the cafeteria of the British Geological Survey in Nottingham. For that is where Brabants's wife, Michelle, watched the race. That is the thing about doing an Olympic sport his way: on the whole, the money is shocking and you cannot afford to fly out your other half.