Why we care for the good doctor who ruled the world . . . on her day off

The Stephanie Cook interview: Sydney's golden girl has one more mission in mind before retiring. Andrew Longmore meets a champion for purists

Dancing on a sunbeam. The evocative phrase was used by Andy Ripley, the former England flanker and caretaker chairman of the Modern Pentathlon Association, at a recent press conference to launch the world championships.

It caught the mood. Since the Sydney Olympics, the unsung sport of modern pentathlon has never had it so good. As proof, behind Ripley sat arguably the most powerful women's team in British sport, led by the sunbeam, who smiled graciously.

The sunbeam will not be with the sport much longer. In a fortnight, at Millfield School in Somerset, Dr Stephanie Cook will swim, fence, shoot, ride and run in individual and team competition for the final time. On 1 August, the GB tracksuit will be swapped for the white coat of a senior house doctor and the specialist disciplines of a different modern pentathlon – accident and emergency, orthopaedics, general surgery, plastics. Most people who have spent recent months criss-crossing the countryside around Bath, meeting team-mates intermittently en route like characters in a James Joyce novel – 10.30 swimming training, 12.30 fencing lesson, 1.30 riding lesson, 3.00 psychology session – would regard the week of transition as a time for contemplation, reflection, recovery and renewal. Perhaps she might be tempted to rerun the video, to review one more time that sunlit afternoon in Sydney when every fluttering Union Jack seemed to herald new heroics and, step by agonising step down a corridor of white tape, the slim young doctor from Bedford brought home the last of Britain's 11 gold medals.

Not quite. If current plans are realised, Cook will travel to Nepal to help publicise an aid project set up by Merlin, a British medical charity. Cook, all eight and a bit stone of her, lives life as she does her sport.

Cook's triumph capped a record-breaking Games for the British squad, but that does not fully explain why, way beyond the traditional cooling off period for the golden afterglow, one member of the staff of Matchtight Media, her agents, spends four mornings a week organising her diary. Cook's celebrity shelf life was prolonged by an injury which ruled her out of a return to training earlier this year; then there is her infectious personality, but most of all Cook's gold unlocked that strain of glorious amateurism which still lies at the heart of the nation's attitude to sport.

"A lot of people might not know my name, but when I'm introduced, they say: 'Oh yes, you're the doctor, aren't you?' I think people do remember me for that as much for the sporting side," she says. We have an uncommon affection for gallant losers, a healthy respect for serial winners, but reserve genuine affection for those who beat the rest of the world on their day off.

It helped that Cook is pretty, blonde, bright, the face of National Smile Week and that a last-day golden double with the super-heavyweight Audley Harrison stirred the creative juices of the tabloids. Beauty and the Beast and all that.

Strange to think that as she approached the finish at the end of the cross-country course at the Olympics, the gold medal in her pocket, a crazy thought meandered through her head. What if she stopped, turned round and ran the other way? The hidden fear was that her life would change, that she would lose control, become public property, be railroaded down tracks which led nowhere. She still harbours the fear. "I hope that none of this has fundamentally changed me as a person," she says. "I don't think it has. Or if it has, I hope it has changed me for the better. I still have the same principles and values I had before. It's why I want to go back to being a normal person because that's what I am."

Judge that for yourself after a day in Cook's company, being whisked from rendezvous to rendezvous in a sleek sponsored burgundy Mercedes, the one tangible benefit of Olympic success. For all the fact that in Cook, Kate Allenby, the bronze medallist in Sydney, Georgina Harland, world ranked No 1, and Sian Lewis, Britain have four athletes in the world's top 10 and come to the world championships on home soil as hot favourites for team gold, there is still a delightfully haphazard element in modern pentathlon.

Fencing lessons are staged in the clubroom of the Bath and District Civil Service Bowling Club, beneath bright wooden noticeboards etched in gold which announce to visitors that they are in the presence of the 1999 champions of the Somerset County League, Division Two (East). Welded to one wall like mini air vents are the targets for the shooting. You only hope that practice does not coincide with the Monday women's foursomes.

Fritz Foldes, the fencing coach, and Cook check and parry in a choreographed waltz across the linoleum. This is the discipline Cook began last and likes least. Her lack of confidence was easily exposed earlier in her career; now she survives. Dominic Mahony, the team manager, recalls a critical moment in Sydney. Cook had lost four bouts in a row and was on the edge of mental collapse. "She could have been blown out of the water right there," Mahony recalls. "But I watched her very closely. She just clenched her fist, pulled down her mask and put together four wins in a row."

Cook credits Jeanette Dymond, her psychologist, for the transformation. "At the time, I was remembering what Jeanette had told me: 'Look confident and you'll be confident.' And it worked. A year before that and I probably would have thrown the whole thing away." The perverse aspect of her pending retirement, Cook reflects later, is that she is beginning to get the hang of fencing, the only discipline in the pentathlon which is confrontational. "The problem is that I'm not an aggressive person. I don't like confrontation or arguments, so I've struggled with that aspect. But I like the technical side. When you get the timing right, it feels great."

The timing is right today and Foldes, a spiky-haired Slovak brought up in Hungary, is delighted with the progress. "Good timing, good lesson," he says. The frustration for head coach, Jan Bartu, is that Cook's best years could still lie ahead and he has not altogether given up hope of attracting the flying doctor back into team competition in time for Athens 2004.

It is not impossible. Nothing in Cook's sporting graph has been truly planned. There were no childhood dreams of Olympic gold, no inspirational posters on the walls of her room, no discernible champion's qualities at all apart from a cussed insistence on trying to keep up with her sister, Vanessa, four years her senior. As a 15-year-old, Cook suffered from Graves' disease, a stimulation of the thyroid gland which caused constant nose bleeds and a swelling in the neck. Only slowly did the components for a pentathlete fall into place: swimming and riding as a child, cross-country running at school, then a casual collision with pentathlon while completing her medical qualifications at Oxford and a belated realisation that this was a sport which appealed to both the athletic and cerebral side of her nature. In 1997, Cook was selected for her first national squad, completed her final examinations, ran cross country nationally and did a fair impression of the Superwoman portrayed in a double-page spread in a national newspaper early last year. "A pretty crazy time in my life," she says. "I was just trying to juggle everything." In comparison, being a full-time Lottery-funded athlete, which Cook became a year before Sydney, was a luxury. But she is still hard put to explain how the trail was laid so perfectly.

"I suppose her sister's interest in riding started it all off," explains Valerie Cook, Steph's mother. "Steph just went along with it. The thing about Steph is that she always wanted to succeed at everything she did. I can remember her running against the senior girls in the school when she must have been only about 14 and she did pretty well. She ran a good tactical race, but she would never be dispirited or downhearted, she always tried her hardest."

In her gap year, instead of wandering off round the world in pursuit of maturity, Cook grew up quickly working in the ambulance service in Jerusalem. It was the time of the Temple Mount riots which claimed 21 lives and, though Cook was not on duty that day, she can remember her own sense of excitement. "It sounds morbid, I know, but to be on the front line of medicine at that time, it didn't put me off at all, if anything it attracted me." She admits that in 10 years' time she is more likely to be found tending the wounded in a war zone than diagnosing rheumatoid arthritis in the NHS.

We sweep through the country lanes to a riding stable in the village of Clutton, west of Bath. Sian Lewis drives up and rummages around in the boot of her car trying to find the right equipment, riding hat, boots, whip. It is like conducting a mobile PE lesson. In oppressive heat, the horses are uncooperative; Lewis and Cook work angles and turns accompanied by a running commentary from Sarah, their instructor for the day. A few expletives bounce off the surrounding hills as Bazza or Simon demolishes another fence, but Cook falls easily into the language of the discipline and is clearly at ease on horseback. Back in the car, on the return shuttle to the campus at Bath University, she talks about the impact of Sydney on her own life.

"It does surprise me how much it's still in people's minds," she says. "At Sainsbury's, picking out my broccoli and someone says: 'Just want to say congratulations'. Yesterday, I was in Bath buying a watch battery and the girl behind the counter said: 'We don't get Olympic gold medallists in here very often.' When I first came back, it used to take me twice as long to do anything because people stopped me all the time. But you can't say: 'Sorry, I'm in a bit of a hurry.' It's lovely, you're being recognised for a good thing, so it's all positive, but I couldn't live off Olympic gold for the rest of my life." Well, nearly all positive. One tabloid ran a comparison of Cook, dressed in a gold Lurex number she wore to the People's Awards, and Calista Flockhart, the wafer-thin actress who plays Ally McBeal, under the headline: "Steph and Nonsense," which was perplexing. "No idea where they got that from," she laughs.

"You can't really prepare for having your picture splashed all over the front pages, but overall I was very lucky. The fact that Audley's fight was on meant more people were watching. I've a lot to thank Audley for." One goal remains. Earlier this year, she added the European to her Olympic title. Now only the world championship lies between her and a clean sweep of the individual silverware. "Pentathlon is so unpredictable," she says. "You mess up any one of the events and that's it. It would be special to make it a hat-trick, but apart from everyone else in the world, I've got three British team-mates who are in the top 10. It could be one of their days and, if it is, good luck to them.

"It's a strange feeling knowing that these are my last two weeks of training, but I know that the longer I leave medicine the harder it will be to get back in. I know this is the right time to make the break and I'm going back to medicine, I'm not dropping off the face of the earth."