Paula Radcliffe is Britain's main hope of an athletics gold at the Beijing Olympics but the 34-year-old accepts that for all her medals and titles she still has to prove herself on the ultimate stage.
Radcliffe has world, European and Commonwealth titles on the road, track and in cross country and has developed into a supreme marathon runner.
She has a host of big-city titles and owns the three fastest times ever run, including her world record of two hours, 15 minutes and 25 seconds, which is more than three minutes faster than any other woman has managed.
Yet her return from three visits to the Olympics has been disappointing. A fifth place in the 1996 5,000 metres in Atlanta, fourth in the 10,000 four years later at Sydney and her painful failure to finish the marathon she was favourite to win in Athens in 2004 and the subsequent early end to her 10,000 metres attempt.
"I've still got unfinished business with the Olympics," she told Sky News last week.
"I haven't been a failure in all the Olympics I've been to, but I just don't think I've quite achieved what I'm capable of yet and I just hope that I can achieve that this time."
Radcliffe's withdrawal in the Athens marathon when, overwhelmed by heat exhaustion and the effect of anti-inflammatory drugs for an injury, she sat on the kerb and wept, created a strange backlash against an athlete who two years earlier had been voted Britain's sports personality of the year.
Despite her progress from the nearly-woman of the track into the best marathon runner the sport has known, some observers doubted her courage and dared to label her a "quitter".
Even a cathartic victory on the streets of New York three months later did not silence the doubters and when she triumphed in London in 2005 more attention was given to a roadside toilet break than to her fantastic performance.
She was then out of the limelight for two years as she had and brought up a baby, only to storm back impressively to win in New York again last year.
With British athletics in something of a slump, she will travel to Athens with a huge responsibility to deliver and has no intention of boycotting the Games for political reasons.
"All boycotts do is harm the athletes," she told reporters.
"They didn't have a choice in choosing where that Olympic Games was going to be held and boycotts actually never solved any of the problems they were supposed to."
Radcliffe, an outspoken critic of doping, said she believed the Olympic spirit remained sacrosanct and that attacking the Olympic torch was choosing the wrong target.
"I do think that the issues in Tibet needed raising and needed attention drawn to them but attacking the Olympic flame in that way I think was wrong, because the Olympic flame symbolises way more than the Beijing Olympics," she said.
"It's about the whole spirit of the Olympics. It's about every child's right to play, to go out and do sport.
"It's about competing fairly, to go out and try as hard as you can and see the fair results of that, it's all about the spirit of that and the ethos of that, and I think that trying to put out that flame is about trying to put out that spirit and that should never be put out."