divimg alt="" src="http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.15.1/40964?ns=guardianpageName=Sport%3A+The+star+next+doorch=Sportc3=The+Observerc4=Rebecca+Adlington%2CSwimming+%28Sport%29%2Colympics2008%2CSport%2CSport+features%2CObserverc5=Not+commercially+useful%2COlympic+Gamesc6=Anna+Kesselc7=2008_11_23c8=1120185c9=articlec10=GUc11=Sportc12=Rebecca+Adlingtonc13=c14=h2=GU%2FSport%2FRebecca+Adlington" width="1" height="1" //divpThe comedian Russell Howard said it best when he summed up what we all love most about Rebecca Adlington. 'She's so normal it's fantastic, she looks like she could work at Greggs! You know, "I've gotta go bloody fast, I've left pasties in the oven!"' As a fan of comedy, no doubt OSM's Sportsperson of the Year would roar her head off at that. It is Adlington's 'Greggs' appeal that the British public relate to; her expression of delight after winning two Olympic gold medals was so human it won over a nation. The unpretentious 19-year-old from Mansfield is instantly likeable./ppOn the morning of the photoshoot, Adlington arrives straight from the pool wearing a Team GB tracksuit, her hair wet from a 6am training session. She is not precious about her appearance. She slings her coat over her lap, apologises to the stylist about the state of her hair - 'It was in such bad condition after Beijing I couldn't get a brush through it' - and gets down to the nitty-gritty of showbiz gossip from the previous night at the Cosmo awards. /ppThere was Kim Cattrall ('Stunning in real life, not at all wrinkly'); drag queen Jodie Harsh ('At first I thought it was Jodie Marsh!'); and Trinny and Susannah ('They never grabbed my boobs, but I haven't got any anyway'); all were there to collect awards. Adlington's was Ultimate Sports Superhero, which meant having to negotiate the dreaded red carpet. /pp'I don't know how to pose to save my life,' she says. 'Someone said cross your legs, but my shoes were so high I'd have ended up wobbling and looking like a prat. You know how celebrities do that thing where they keep the same face on every single photograph? They never seem to get the whole... [contorts her face into a series of gurns] whereas I always get that photo where I'm mid-sentence and looking awful.'/ppAs Adlington chats away, the stylist applies the curling tongs and there is a loud sizzle. 'Oh my God, is that my hair? I'm gonna leave with one side bald! Oh well.' Then, spying a large curl in the mirror, she lets out a delighted squeal: 'I feel like Sandy out of Grease!'/ppAdlington confesses she is a bit nervous about being photographed in a swimsuit. Why? She's an athlete, she's bound to look gorgeous. 'Are you kidding?' she screams, 'I've got massive bingo wings, look. I've got this armpit hanging out which is my pec muscle, it just, like, hangs over because it's so big. I've got man shoulders, I'm not toned at all. And after Beijing I've put on a bit of weight.'/ppMost people can reel off a list of things they dislike about their appearance, but they're either lying to make you feel better, or they really are unhappy. Adlington is neither, just honest. She yanks up her T-shirt and grabs a handful of her stomach. 'Look, I don't have a flat stomach. I've got the tyre. All the other girls on my swim team are skinny. Like literally nothing rolls over. /pp'I do get a bit insecure,' she continues, reflecting on all these new demands to be photographed. 'The worst thing is the photographer, because you feel like they must have shot so many gorgeous skinny people and then they've got to work with someone that's not.' /ppIn fact, the resounding verdict around the studio today is, 'My God, hasn't she got great legs?' and 'Doesn't she look gorgeous?' She does. Serene and beautiful, but wonderfully unaffected as, sweating under the hot photographic lamps, she asks for a tissue. 'If you don't want to see something really disgusting, look away now,' she says, wiping the sweat from her underarms with a grin. /ppAdlington has been famous for only four months, but she has been swimming for 15 years. It started when she dived into a pool on holiday, aged four, and paddled about like a natural. So her parents took her for lessons at the local pool in Mansfield - due to be renamed after Adlington next month - along with her two elder sisters. It was Rebecca who showed the most promise, swimming competitively from the age of nine. By the time she was 12 she had joined her current coach, Bill Furniss, at the Nova swim club in Nottingham, making the 20-mile round trip from Mansfield twice a day. /ppAll those years of dedication and hard work, yet before Beijing you had to scour the internet to find anything written about her. Swimming is rarely big news - even when she won 800metres gold at the world championships in Manchester in April this year, there followed just one national newspaper article. But Olympic medals are different, and after Beijing, with golds in the 400m and 800m freestyle, Adlington was instantly hailed as Britain's most successful swimmer in 100 years. How, then, does she reflect on her achievements? /pp'You know when I wake up in the morning I think, "Is it 5.20am already?" rather than, "Oh I've won two Olympic gold medals." It's something that will never quite sink in. The weirdest thing is just the fact that you can say, "I've won an Olympic gold medal". That is the scariest thing in the world. I'm just a 19-year-old girl. Everyone keeps saying it's really special, but I don't see myself as being special. It's like how you don't think you're beautiful but someone else thinks you're stunning.'/ppAdlington says she misses the Olympics, the camaraderie of being in a gang of friends. At times she makes it sound more like a holiday camp than a highly pressured environment for elite athletes. /pp'I loved it out there. The hardest thing was having to leave after we spent five weeks together. You found yourself picking up people's accents and phrases - you do though! Like if someone's being an idiot the guys called them a tool or a weapon, so when I got back home I start calling everyone a tool. When we got back together for the Olympic parade in London we had such a laugh on that bus, just being back together again was brilliant.'/ppBut when it comes to her own performances, the memories are more sober. 'You know I was so nervous. Especially for the 800m. It is my main event, closest to my heart. Winning the 400m was an unexpected bonus, but to get a medal in the 800m, that was always my goal./pp'Before the race I got really emotional. I thought I was going to throw up, then I thought I was going to cry, then I thought I was going to pass out. I had to lie down on the floor. Then I got in the call room 15 minutes before the race and suddenly I was fine. Michael Phelps was racing in the 100 fly and we were all watching it on the TV. It was so close at the finish, everyone was like, "Oh my God!" He won it by 0.01 of a second. I can't even click that fast.' /ppWasn't her own 400m final, against the American Katie Hoff, similarly close? 'Oh no,' she says, casually, 'that was 0.07 seconds.'/ppThe battle for the 800m title was more than just a second gold medal for Adlington. Breaking Janet Evans's 19-year-old world record was a physical experience more intense than anything she had ever endured. 'It was the most painful race in my whole entire life,' she says. 'I put every little bit of me into it, mentally and physically. When I finished my body collapsed, probably because I pushed it a little bit too far, but I was so wanting to do it and so up for it that the adrenaline just took over. Afterwards my body hurt, it had never been so sore. And you're drained. It wasn't just the pain, it was the nerves, all week I'd had them. People don't realise how tiring that is. You can't eat properly because you're so nervous. I lost 2kg in two days just from the heats to the 800m final.'/ppEarly in 2005, when Adlington was 15, she had been forced to curtail her swimming when she and her elder sister Laura contracted glandular fever. The disease was not new to the Adlington family: the oldest daughter, Chloe, had gone through it five years before and suffered so badly she had been forced to give up swimming. While Rebecca battled with the disease and its after effects of chronic fatigue syndrome, the virus entered Laura's brain and she lay in intensive care fighting for her life. /pp'It was a rough time for us. Laura had encephalitis [swelling of the brain], I had my final year of GCSEs and wasn't feeling too hot. My mum was really worried. In those situations family comes first and swimming has to come last. So for a couple of months I focused on my family. My mum and dad were constantly at the hospital, Chloe did everything else - looking after the house and driving me to training, while we kept the rest of the family updated with phone calls. If there was any news, good or bad, or even if Laura just woke up and spoke to us we'd be ringing round to tell everyone.'/ppAdlington's coach, Furniss, wanted her to keep swimming so, with the agreement of her doctors, he created a pared-down regime. 'You have to keep the feel of the water going otherwise you lose your technique,' Adlington says, 'but every time I got in the pool I felt like I couldn't go anywhere. I felt as though I hadn't slept and yet I was sleeping 12 hours a night. I felt heavy all the time, like I was 40 stone. Bill was extremely good with it all. He never said, "Oh, she's ill, I'll leave her," he took a step back, made me go easy and got me right. It was hard, but I didn't ever complain because I'd seen what both my sisters went through, I was just grateful that I didn't have to give up swimming.'/ppEverybody agreed that swimming was the best thing for her, but Adlington's parents could not help but worry. 'You have two of your children with a similar type of viral infection,' says her mum Kay. 'You ask yourself all sorts of questions. We monitored Becky's training very carefully: if her appetite waned, if she couldn't sleep, if she was irritable. We didn't want to scare her, though, we didn't want her to feel this was the start of what Laura had. But she must have asked herself the question, "Will it do this to me?" In Laura's case the virus attacked both the front and back of her brain, which made it more complicated to treat. The doctors pumped her full of everything they could. It was up to her then. It was agonising./pp'We carried on with as much normality as we could. School allowed Becky to drop one of her lessons so that after morning training she could come home and have a proper breakfast, and dry her hair. Before she was ill she just used to have her cereal in the car and go to school with wet hair. That sounds awful, doesn't it? But we were always on the go.'/ppAdlington's parents shielded her from the worst of Laura's illness, insisting that the other two daughters didn't visit her in intensive care. 'They didn't want us to see her there with all the tubes,' Adlington says. 'It was a terrifying time. But it was hardest on my parents.' That is not entirely true. Adlington had been tipped as a medal hope for the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, but her illness left her unable to compete, which was a tough disappointment to take./ppIn true Adlington style it isn't long before she starts cracking a few jokes. 'You know, when Laura started getting better we were a bit nasty,' she says with a smile. 'Where the illness had impacted on her brain she was doing some hilarious things. Like she thought there were little men dancing on the end of her bed, or that the drip in her chest was a baby, or the thing you wee through - the catheter! - she thought she was leaning on a pen and she kept trying to move it. It was funny, but it was also scary.'/ppPulling through those events must have made her stronger. 'It did,' she says, 'it definitely made me stronger and I wouldn't be the person I am today without those things happening to me.'/ppWith the final photograph taken, Adlington skips off to get changed back into her tracksuit, but keeps the Fifties-Style make-up on. 'I love it!' she says. 'I definitely want my hair like this for Sports Personality of the Year.' Following on from her OSM accolade, Adlington cannot wait for the BBC awards night in Liverpool on 14 December, at which she is a favourite for the top three. She can barely contain her excitement as she talks about the outfit she plans to wear; it is her effusiveness that makes her such a genuinely appealing candidate. She has already chosen her dress and her shoes: all she needs now is the trophy. /pp· Watch a a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/osm"video/a of Rebecca Adlington collecting her OSM award./pdiv style="float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;"ullia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/rebeccaadlington"Rebecca Adlington/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/swimming"Swimming/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/olympics2008"Olympics 2008/a/lilia href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/sportfeatures"Sport features/a/li/ul/divdiv class="guRssAdvert"a href="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/click.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sportcountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227444365998112312500652405"img src="http://ads.guardian.co.uk/image.ng/richmedia=yessite=Sportcountry=(none)spacedesc=rsssystem=rsstransactionID=1227444365998112312500652405" border="0" //a/diva href="http://www.guardian.co.uk"guardian.co.uk/a copy; Guardian News Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our a href="http://users.guardian.co.uk/help/article/0,,933909,00.html"Terms Conditions/a | a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/webfeeds/1,,1309488,00.html"More Feeds/a