It is a measure of the crippling injuries that have blighted Denise Lewis's career that even her greatest victory - the Olympic gold medal she won five years ago in Sydney - is remembered as much for her tribulations as her triumph.
Yesterday the West Bromwich-born heptathlete yielded to the aches and pains that have inhabited her body for most of the 12 years she has been an international sportswoman, and announced an end to an illustrious career in which she has won Olympic, European and Commonwealth titles.
"My body has had enough, it has been taken through the mill," she explained.
The 32-year-old will go down in British track and field history as one of the best female athletes ever to grace the national vest and will be mentioned alongside greats like Dames Mary Peters and Kelly Holmes. A lifetime achievement award from the people at the BBC Sports Personality, beckons as sure as silver follows gold.
But her athletic epitaph will be that of a talented and gritty competitor whose reluctant limbs could not stop her scaling the highest sporting peak on the planet.
Not that they didn't try. Forget for a moment the crushed ex-champion who relinquished her crown in Greece last summer and cast your mind back even further - to the year 2000 and a balmy September night on the East coast of Australia.
It was then that Lewis answered her calling. Throughout a 20-year career she had identified Sydney as 'her time'. An Olympic bronze in Atlanta was all very well but she maintained her date with destiny was in the new millennium. And so it proved.
But it wasn't just a case of turning up and enjoying the adulation of her rivals, Lewis did it the hard way.
While Kelly Holmes crossed the 800m finishing line in Athens with a mixture of disbelief and joy on her face, Lewis's was twisted by the pain in her calf and Achilles tendon. Even during her greatest hour her body wanted to have its say.
Her mother Joan sat in the crowd and wept. "I think she's forgotten I've won," Lewis said afterwards. Impossible.
Her tears were for a daughter she had given birth to at the age of 17 and for one she had struggled to bring up on her own on a typist's wage. They were induced by pride and relief that her Denise had come through a gruelling twoday survival of the fittest.
There were many times throughout the 48 hours when it looked as though she would turn up late to her fateful appointment.
A promising first event, the 100 metre hurdles, belied what was to become an emotional rollercoaster with more dips than your average packet of sherbert.
Things began to unravel in the next discipline, the high jump. Lewis failed three times at 1.81m and had to settle for a nightmarish 1.75 as she slipped to eighth in the field.
She responded in the shot putt, winning with 15.55m, four metres ahead of her main rival and world champion Eunice Barber of France.
That lifted her back to second until a below-par 200m saw her drop back into bronze-medal position at the end of the first day behind the Natalyas, Sazanovich of Belarus and Roshchupkina of Russia.
But then the hopes of a nation seemed to visibly deflate when Lewis revealed at the end of day one that she had been struggling with an Achilles injury for the past eight weeks.
"I have been keeping it quiet because I didn't want anyone to know," she said that night.
Well, now they did and the tension which was becoming unbearable, turned to sadness and a realisation that one of the country's favourite children probably wouldn't take gold.
Calamity. Day two began with Lewis injuring her foot in the long jump. "It felt sore and I didn't know what to do, I was not sure if I'd be able to do the javelin."
Solace came from the fact that Barber had problems of her own as a hamstring was in the process of derailing her challenge.
So Lewis rolled up at the javelin, the penultimate event, hoping to register just one throw to keep her in the competition.
Her strongest discipline proved to be the key as she turned a 57-point deficit into a 63-point lead over the Belarusian. It was all down to an excruciating 800m as a golden lining to her physical cloud at last became possible.
Moments before the athletes were due to appear for the final event, a rumour swept around the stadium, and Britain, that Lewis had been forced to pull out.
Instead she emerged, with both calves in bandages, looking better set to visit the local infirmary than take on the world's fittest athletes.
She hobbled round, gurning as though someone was removing her tonsils with a rusty spoon, desperately clinging on to the ten-second advantage her points lead afforded her.
With just three of those seconds remaining she crossed the line and she had done it. Denise Lewis had won the gold medal and was Olympic champion. Just as she'd predicted.
"You dig deep down to your soul and character," she said. "There was a fear that I would have to pull out. It was at the back of my mind but this is the Olympics and that's where it stayed."
Returning to the present day Lewis is now more statuesque than muscular, weakened by the succession of injuries that have allowed her to compete just one heptathlon since Sydney five years ago.
Her latest brush with ill-health saw her hospitalised with tonsilitis compounded by an abcess. Just as during her career she doesn't do anything by halves.
She lost more than a half stone after being fed intravenously when she could not eat or drink and it was during her internment that she realised August's World Championships in Finland and next year's Commonwealth Games - in fact any sort of elite athletic endeavour - was well beyond her.
"All the strength washed out of me," she said. "If I had to qualify by this weekend, I could not do it."
Her articulacy and good looks mean the future is certain to be as bright as the past. She will be in Helsinki later in the summer but working for a radio station and there could even be more success in light entertainment, following on from Strictly Come Dancing. Whatever it is let's hope it's not too painful.
