The qualified doctor became Britain's first ever Olympic canoeing champion in either the sprint or slalom kayak discipline when storming to victory in the K-1 1000metres event in Beijing and just a day later he finished third in the 500m.

Now 35, Brabants is hoping to qualify for his fourth Games having also competed in Athens and Sydney, where he won a bronze, but he's not ruling out the possibility of going to Rio de Janeiro in four years' time.

"I certainly don't want to make any rash decisions about finishing my sporting career," said Brabants. "I'm 35 now so I am an athlete reaching the end of my career and whether my body could cope with another four-year cycle and withstand all the strains, who knows?

"But next year's world championships are in Rio so I might end up going there one way or another!"

And even when sporting retirement does arrive, Brabants will continue to live life in the fast lane by throwing himself back into the pressures of the Accident and Emergency wards as well as pursuing his outside interests which include mountain biking, surfing, flying lessons and building kit cars.

He said: "I really enjoy emergency medicine such as A&E so I'm hoping that's what I'll go back into when I finish with the sport side of things.

"It ticks the right boxes in terms of my personality type - working as part of a team in a hospital environment in a pressurised situation.

"I'm also a very active person and love being outdoors. Whenever I've had the time outside of training I try to do all sorts like mountain biking, surfing, flying lessons, building kit cars and house renovating.

"The kit cars is a mental thing and also a lot of fun. I built my first after Athens and drove it while I was working. But I then had to sell it so that I could return to the sport."

Qualifying

For now Brabants, who put his medical career on the back burner back in February 2010 so he could train as a full-time athlete again, must focus on earning Britain's sole spot for the men's K-1 1000m.

Although a shoulder injury and subsequent surgery wrecked his 2011 season, an encouraging winter of training in Cape Town and Seville has put him back on track ahead of this weekend's British selection trials in Nottingham - which will be followed by two World Cup events in Germany and Poland before the canoeing team is announced.

His main rival will be Paul Wycherley, who beat him to a place at last year's World Championships, while there's no 500m as a fall-back option because the event was taken off the Olympic programme to be replaced by the 200m.

But an unfazed Brabants said: "The possibility of missing out would worry any athlete but I'm confident I'm going well enough at the minute to hang on to the Olympic place. But if I don't have it then the British athlete who does will hopefully be pretty fast.

"It was a real shame on a personal note that the 500m event was scrapped from the Olympics - that's the one I got the bronze in and I was really starting to enjoy it and I was getting much better at it the more I raced it.

"But from a British point of view it's great because it's now opened up the 200m racing and we've got some very good competitors over that distance such as Ed McKeever, Jon Schofield and Liam Heath."

Home comforts

Should Brabants achieve qualification then he'll no doubt be confident of making home advantage count at Eton's Dorney Lake - effectively his second home.

He said: "We train there several times a week so it's a familiar piece of water.

"But it's also exciting watch it develop as they prepare for the Olympics. At the moment they're laying the foundations for the grandstands and one of the big screens is up already.

"So having trained there for so many years, to see it taking shape and becoming more Olympic is very strange and surreal."

Switching between two careers for over more than a decade has been no easy task but Brabants feels the demands of both environments can complement each other.

"Preparing for every Olympics has been so different," said Brabants, who is supporting Cadbury Dairy Milk Postcards campaign. "Sydney was my first and I was still at university then, training and living in Nottingham.

"In the build-up to Athens I was working part-time and trying to train like a full-time athlete would, commuting down from Nottingham to London every weekend to see my coach and fellow athletes.

"In Beijing I was going into it as world champion and as a full-time athlete for the very first time so I had very high hopes to become Olympic champion.

And this approach, I'm coming in off the back foot due to injuries but still a full-time athlete.

"I've followed a similar pattern this time to what I did after Athens and prior to Beijing - 18 months of medical work and then straight back into being a full-time athlete again.

"It worked then and it was working after Beijing as I won a silver at the world championships in my first year back and it looked like onwards and upwards from there until I tore my peck tendon off at the gym.

"Neither career is easy to pick up where you left off. Certainly the sporting career has been part of my life for so much longer so it's more of a familiar ground to get back into the swing of things.

"To a certain degree both careers complement each other quite well. You take bits of sports side into the work place and the qualities you lean in the work place into the sports environment."

Turning point

Brabants loved canoeing for the "wildlife" when he was first introduced to the sport at the age of 10 and admits it was only a lucky meeting with his coach Eric Farrell soon after which ultimately put him on the path to success.

He said: "A lot of making it in sport is nurture and a lot of it is luck in terms of being in the right place at the right time. At the club I was at, my coach came along and felt like he could take some athletes and make them better.

"He selected four of us to work with and he's still coaching me 20 years later. So from my point of view if I hadn't met him to coach me then I don't think I would have achieved anything that I have now.

"If I'd got involved in rowing or rugby I think I have the right body shape to have been good at that. But I'd never go back and change anything.

"The people I've met and the experiences I've had in my sport have been invaluable for me as a person. It's sometimes scary to think about how life might have turned out if I hadn't discovered the sport."

Despite his hectic life style he still finds time to spend with his wife Michelle and one-year-old daughter Jules, who will both be in attendance to cheer him on at London 2012 should he qualify.

He added: "Between my two or three training sessions per day I can come home and spend some quality time with my wife and little daughter. If I had a full-time job I wouldn't have that same time during the day with them."