DUNCAN GOODHEW always wanted to take the lead. In PE at Windelsham prep school, it was no different. During one lesson, when he was 10, the class were sent over an assault course, and it was no surprise who reached the rope-slide first. Goodhew leapt out, imagining he was Tarzan, only to discover the strength in his young wrists was more like Jane's. He fell 18 feet onto a tree root and landed on his lip, knocking his teeth in, blacking both eyes and causing his mouth to swell beyond his nose. Those injuries healed, but some weeks later a bald patch appeared on Goodhew's scalp. "I thought the barber had slipped with his shears," he said. Eight months later the rest of his hair fell out.

It was harsh for a boy already facing trauma every time he entered the classroom. He was bright enough to mix with children two years his senior, yet was being put in lessons with those two years younger. There was something wrong whenever he tried to read, but neither he nor his teachers knew what it was. "Dyslexia is like somebody stabbing you in your self-esteem and if nobody explains it, the cuts fester," he said. "Only when it was diagnosed did I start to heal, but that wasn't until I was 14."

Respite came through humour - sometimes he would wear a wig, and doff it at passers-by - and in the water, in the old teak-walled tank that was the swimming pool at Millfield. Famous for sporting excellence (other alumni include Ian Botham and Gareth Edwards), the public school employed Paddy Garrett, then Britain's only professional swimming coach, who began honing the natural talent Goodhew had shown from an early age. In 1972 Nigel Johnson, the British Olympian, visited to prepare for the Munich Games and let Barrett's star pupil swim along for a couple of lengths. "That night I sat down with two of my housemates and began dreaming," Goodhew recalled. "Suddenly I said, 'I'm going to the Olympic Games'."

It took just four years for Goodhew to make it. Having never swum at international level, he nevertheless represented Britain at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal. Gone were his technical faults, the untidy, wide-kicking stroke that prompted Don Easterling, his coach at North Carolina State University (NCSU), to exclaim: "Chromedome! Get your legs together! I can see the green fields of England up your ass!" Gone, too, were any intellectual inhibitions: Goodhew's high marks at NCSU, where he combined a sports scholarship and a management degree, ensured that.

Yet despite this - and a training regime that meant swimming 20km (12 miles) a day and squat-lifting 850lb weights - he still felt out of his depth in Montreal. In the 100m breaststroke heats he broke the Olympic record, but in the final he froze and finished seventh.

"I sat in the holding area with the other swimmers for 45 minutes before the race. I looked round and saw seven of the fastest people in the world, and it seemed silent as inside a coffin. Deep inside myself I questioned my right to be there," he said. He suffered the further agony of finishing second in three Commonwealth Games finals, by a small margin each time, before the inhibitions went. The former outcast thought he was satisfied just being part of the pageant: "I was embarrassed to admit, even to myself, that the object of what I was doing was trying to win."

BY THE beginning of 1980, when he returned to Britain to prepare for the Moscow Olympics in July, Goodhew was ready. He had toughened mentally, visualising his winning performance, practising "emotionalisation" - making himself feel in advance what claiming gold would be like. But, just as he had conquered his internal world, events in the outside one began to threaten. Soviet troops had invaded Afghanistan and, now, in election year, President Jimmy Carter sought a grand gesture to express American outrage. As January closed, he announced the United States would not be sending any competitors to the Olympic Games.

Canada, China, Japan and West Germany followed suit, and Margaret Thatcher, the new prime minister, urged the British Olympic Association (BOA) to join the boycott. Newspaper leaders supported Thatcher and the issue divided athletes as it did other sections of society. For Goodhew, there was a family aspect to the dilemma. His stepfather, Bill Crawford-Compton, an air vice-marshal and highly decorated second world war pilot, told him he should obey his government. "If you go to Moscow," he said, "I won't be coming."

Then there were the friends, the swimmers he had trained with at NCSU, such as Steve Gregg, the 200m butterfly silver medallist from Montreal, whose careers were effectively being sacrificed for the boycott: "It was horrible. I can't tell you how sorry I felt for the US swimmers. They were totally used. Gregg would have stood a good chance of winning gold. He competed in 1984, but by then his time was gone.

"In the end my decision was simple. Intrinsically I felt it could not be right having something as timeless as the Olympics ruined by short-term political events. There are only two areas of free exchange of information throughout the world: the weather and sport. And it seemed to me the last thing to do was to stop one of these. Athletes are young people who dedicate their lives to pushing back our perceptions of what the human body is capable of, and the Olympics are the embodiment. If you stand any political principle beside that, its importance doesn't last long."

Goodhew joined a young rowing cox called Colin Moynihan - later sports minister in Thatcher's government - as a leading voice on behalf of British athletes who wanted to compete in the Games. Though more than 50 countries joined the boycott, the BOA defied Thatcher and sent a team.

The athletes still made a protest: in the opening ceremony, with a heavy Soviet army and KGB presence in attendance, Britain was one of 16 countries that symbolically marched under the Olympic flag instead of a national banner.