My biggest motivation is knowing what it feels like to win medals and thinking that I want that feeling again. It was incredible to succeed in Beijing and come home to your whole country behind you but, importantly, all your family and friends.

Making the Australian team is the hardest part, and going to the Olympics is the easy part. You're there representing your country - you're representing every single person in it, strangers you don't know - and there's a lot of positive energy, but you have to know to channel it the right way.

Before the last Olympics, we had meat raffles at the local surf club to get petrol money to go to training, to help out with the bills. But I know there are a lot of athletes worse off and that all athletes, at some stage of their careers, have made sacrifices.

Until 2005, I still thought of my surf lifesaving career as fulltime and kayaking as a pastime. I watched the 2004 Athens Olympics and saw people racing that I knew I could beat, and that was probably the turning point: I decided I should either do it properly or stop wasting time kayaking and concentrate fully on Ironman.