Cassie Patten has admitted that she became "depressed" with post-Olympics life, and even shut her medal from the Beijing Games away in a drawer.
Petrified
"In the year after the Games, I felt lost. I got really depressed, I was really unhappy. I would come swimming and just sit on poolside and just cry. It was horrible because I loved swimming. It was a difficult time."
Patten quit the sport last summer, and even had a six-month period without swimming.
She continued: "I was petrified (of quitting swimming), of losing the one thing in my mind that I was good at. A lot of sports people really struggle, you see them when they come out of retirement and they are so lost - they feel like failures. And so I didn't swim for a very long time (after retirement)."
The swimmer has returned to the pool since though and was pleased to be involved in the London Games, where she worked as a television pundit for
Sky Sports.
"I was very proud of London. A lot of people wondered if it would live up to the expectation, if London would be able to deliver. Beijing was incredible, but it never touched London in terms of the atmosphere," she said.
"London was a sporting spectacle; it wasn't just a sporting presence. It was an Olympics for everybody, not just dedicated sports fans."
