Amy Williams: Olympic gold – now what?

After winning Britain's first individual gold medal at the Winter Olympics for 30 years, skeleton bob racer Amy Williams now faces an even tougher challenge - handling the media onslaught when she gets home.
 
The 27-year-old from Bath will no doubt be afforded a hero’s welcome after her triumph at Vancouver. But despite her good looks and personality, Williams is unlikely to spend long in the public eye.
 
After the headline writers are done with her, she will in all probability return to obscurity, at least until the next Winter Olympics, just like her team-mate Shelley Rudman, who enjoyed her 15 minutes of fame after winning silver in the same event at the Turin Games in 2006.
 
What's more, Williams's victory is unlikely to have long-term implications for the sport of skeleton bob - in which athletes hurtle headfirst down a bobsleigh track at speeds of up to 90mph while basically lying on a tray. Even if a generation of young people were inspired to follow her lead, they would be hard pressed to find a local luge track to practise on and the press will not be dedicating pages and pages to the event despite Williams's success.
 
But that's the long term. In the immediate future, there will be weeks of media frenzy - and how she handles it could affect the rest of her life.
 
PR guru Max Clifford believes Williams has the potential to earn as much as £300,000 over the next year. "The fact that she's an attractive-looking girl, the fact that she's won for the first time in 30 years – she could have a wonderful year or two or three," he says.
 
But another publicist, Mark Borkowski, believes her fame will be "a short-term thing rather than developing [into] something significant". The problem is that skeleton is such a minority sport that once she returns to competition there will be little or no press and TV coverage and she will slip out of the public eye. And back in celebrity-land there will be plenty of others, from reality TV stars to wannabe popstars, lining up to take her place in the papers and on the red carpet.
 
Williams has been offered advice from other Olympians who achieved greatness and then found fame thrust upon them.
 
"Beforehand, nobody is interested in you. Then, all of a sudden, they want to know everything about you," says Rhona Martin. For anyone who needs reminding, Martin was a gold medallist at the 2002 games with the British women's curling team.
 
"Amy needs to enjoy it for the moment and make sure she has plenty of long dresses, because she is going to be invited out to lots of things. Enjoy it for now, I would tell her, but don't lose focus on what else you want to achieve."
 
Sir Matthew Pinsent, who won four rowing golds, says: "The initial six to eight weeks will then be pretty crazy... It's really important she stays relaxed and enjoys it. It can be quite freaky - you're suddenly not sure where it will all start and stop, and what it means."
 
He draws a comparison with Britian’s instant star of the Beijing Olympics. "Look at Becky Adlington... she went back to the pool and the film crews had gone, it was back to reality. It will be for Amy, too, at some point."
 
Paradoxically perhaps her best chance could be a career in the media itself. England cricket captains are – it seems - apparently automatically offered jobs on Sky TV when they retire and the likes of Sue Barker and Gary Lineker have become household names on the BBC.

Graham Bell, the former downhill skier, has managed to fashion a new career as a TV presenter. Four years ago Williams worked as a summariser for the BBC at the Turin Games suggesting she could follow in his footsteps and swap the ice and snow for a TV studio. ·