Like many elite athletes, Pamela Relph has always been certain what she wanted to do – but it was not sport.
Until two years ago, the Paralympian had never even sat in a boat, focusing instead on the fine military career she knew she had ahead of her. From the age of 13, Relph wanted to be a Royal Engineer seeing active service, following the boot prints of her father Rick and, more recently, her boyfriend Mike, who has served in Afghanistan and Kenya.
Signing up two years later, she went to Welbeck, a specialist defence college in Leicestershire. All seemed set fair when, just as Relph was about to enlist at Sandhurst, she was medically discharged. She had been suffering with arthritis since the age of seven but had never let it thwart her ambitions: now, for the first time, it had proved too strong. Her long-cherished career plans were being written off at just 20.
Disillusioned and frustrated, Relph went back to her home in Buckinghamshire to choose a more prosaic career. But her sister Monica, an elite rower, had other ideas. She suggested Pamela could use her disability to her advantage and sign up for the Paralympic team.
She took to the sport with the same obsessiveness with which she had chased a place in the military, rising to train at six every morning with three training sessions a day and one day off every three weeks.
Monica's disappointment has been the only low point in a stellar year for Pamela, which included rowing the Gloriana for the Queen's Jubilee pageant with Matthew Pinsent and Sir Steve Redgrave. It was a fitting culmination to a remarkable two-year rise. "Now I'm representing GB wearing a tracksuit rather than combats," she said.