In the first of a series of interviews with our hopefuls Reflect talks to the current K1 World Canoe K1000m Champion Tim Brabants (Medicine 2002) who’s dreaming of not just of one gold medal but possibly two!

Former Nottingham students are entering the next phase of preparation for the Beijing Olympics as they bid to bring home gold medals for Great Britain.

Current World 1000km canoe champion Tim Brabants has had the best run up possible to the most important sporting event of his life.

“2007 was the best season of my career so far, winning 9 international medals, 4 of them Gold. It shows that I am training well and doing the right training for me. This gives me more confidence in what I am going to do over the next 8 months to the Olympics.

“Great Britain hasn’t had a World Champion in over 20 years. It is something I have been striving to achieve since I first started to compete internationally at senior level in 1995. It is a new experience for me to be going into an Olympic Games as World Champion and in reality I couldn’t hope for better!

“Of course there is increased pressure to reproduce this performance at the Olympics but I use this as a positive factor. There are many very talented athletes who I will be competing against and of those, only a few of us are capable of winning. It will come down to who performs the best on the day, and I am training hard to try and make sure that is me!”
 
Eight years ago Tim won a bronze medal at the Sydney Olympics and four years ago he finished a disappointing fifth. This winter Tim has already spent two weeks training at altitude in France and six weeks in the warm weather of Cape Town. The rest of 2008 will be spent with more training both at home and in Spain, the European Championships, three World Cup events and of course, the Olympic Games.
 
“Training has been going really well this season so far and providing I remain injury free I will have as good a chance of winning a medal as I did at the Worlds last year. I will be very disappointed not to at least win a medal at the Olympics.

Tim ‘s heavily focused on Beijing at the moment but he’s passionate about his and believes he’s still young enough to go on to compete in London 2012.
 
“I qualified as a medical doctor at Nottingham University in 2002. Since then I have worked part-time and full-time. The last 18 months I have been training for my sport full time and doing medical courses occasionally to keep my skills up and brain working! I always plan to return to medicine when I retire from my sport, hopefully in emergency medicine.”

“I always kept a very low profile at the University as I was training before and after lectures every day and at weekends. I had very little time to socialize much with other University students. I still see a few of my closer colleagues around and keep in touch from time to time. I still own a flat in Nottingham and stay there quite a lot when I am back in the UK. It’s a great city and there are superb facilities all close by for training.

“My real dream is to win an Olympic Gold medal. I shall be competing in two events at the Olympics so in reality, I hope to win two medals, maybe even two Golds! After that I shall focus on my medical career for a while but keep up the training too and see what happens.”