Swimming: Flood can strike gold in the pool: The Paralympics, the supreme test for the world's disabled sportsmen and women, start this week in Barcelona. Chris Maume met one of Britain's brightest medal hopes

HANGING over the mantelpiece in Tara Flood's west London flat is a photograph of her strapped to her sky-diving instructor 13,000 feet up. It is not an activity she will be repeating. Until they let her do it by herself, that is.

Sky-diving had been her favoured relaxation from the five or six nights a week she spends training for the swimming events at which she excels. 'They've never let me jump on my own, for insurance purposes,' she says, 'and I don't see the point in doing it any more until they do.'

A bronze medallist in the 25 metres breaststroke at the Seoul Paralympics four years ago, she has six medals to aim for in Barcelona: the 50m events at breaststroke, backstroke and freestyle, the 100m freestyle and two relays. At the European Championships in Barcelona last year she collected seven medals and broke the world 50m breaststroke record for her category, in 1min 20sec.

She has lopped four seconds off that this year, so she can reasonably expect many more medals, especially as defeat is anathema: 'When I lose I'm vile. Absolutely vile. When I only got the bronze in Seoul I was so mad with myself.'

Seoul was not everything it might have been: 'The Koreans weren't really sure how to run a Paralympics, and a lot of things went wrong. I had all my best events scrapped when I got out there, through bad organisation. And the Koreans, I think, were so desperate to make an impression that they were chopping events that didn't involve Koreans. So that was horrendous. They've scrapped the 25m now - thank God, because it's a ridiculous length to race, especially if you're ranging from, say, 25 metres to 200 metres.'

That extreme versatility required of most disabled athletes at major championships is a problem: 'There isn't as much competition as in able-bodied swimming, and there just isn't the money to send an individual out for just one race. We're still amateur in that respect, and it probably won't be until after Atlanta in 1996 that people have the benefit of specialising.'

Things are slowly improving, however. When she started racing in 1984, she had about two major events a year; now there are four or five. And standards can rise dizzyingly fast: a staggering total of 331 new world records were set in the Seoul pool.

After an Olympics in which Britain managed one swimming bronze, it is slightly odd to reflect that Britain is one of the world's leading forces in disabled swimming. Of Britain's 179 medals in the Paralympics four years ago, 83 were won by the swimmers.

There is inevitable fragmentation, given the different competitive categories of disability. Flood swims under the Les Autres banner, a mixed bag that includes congenital deformities, various arthritic conditions, muscular dystrophy, multiple sclerosis and poliomyelitis. 'I'm in the Les Autres club, but I'm not in a local disabled club because that usually just means splashing around, and an able-bodied club won't even look at you. I used to train with an able-bodied club in Lancashire, where I come from, but I was just left in a lane on my own. So what's the point?' That sounds like their loss.

At 26, after nearly eight years of competition, how much longer does she have at the top of her sport? 'I don't want people to say, 'She should have gone a year earlier,' so I'm looking at Barcelona as possibly my last. I'm taking a year off afterwards, to see how I feel, but I'm sure I could go on for another two or three years - it's a mental thing, really.'

And come the last hurrah, does she see herself as an ambassador for disabled sport? 'Definitely. I'm grooming myself for it.' Stuart Braye, the sprinter, who works in the North-east as a regional development officer for the British Sports Association for the Disabled (BSAD) certainly thinks she has a lot to offer in years to come: 'Sometimes I get down about it all, and think I'm losing it,' he said, 'then I ring Tara and she reaffirms all my values, so I know I'm on the right track.' On hearing this she laughs: 'Yeah, we have really deep conversations about how we're going to get together and sort it all out - I'll take on the BPA (British Paralympic Association) while he takes on the BSAD.'

She intends to work full-time to achieve what I referred to as her 'master-plan', a term to which she didn't object. 'I know how I'd like to see disabled sport in five or 10 years' time. I'd like to have one national federation for each sport, get rid of all the single-disability bodies. That's a complete waste of time - all the money's being swallowed up.

'So swimming would have one set-up, athletics another and so on, with all the money being put in at a regional level, and the BPA would be just an umbrella organisation over the national federations.' This would have the entirely beneficial effect of removing the emphasis from the disability and placing it on the sport.

' At the moment numbers are going down - there are still kids out there who don't get a start at school level, especially as most of them go to able-bodied schools. The problem is everyone's got an empire - 'I'm not going to give up what I've got' - and unless that changes it's never going to be anything other than amateur, and people are never going to get serious about disabled sport.'

It is that kind of talk, that determination, that changes things. A vile loser makes a winner, and Tara Flood, a good bet for gold in the Paralympics, is perhaps an even better bet to make the right kind of waves for disabled sport when her swimming days are over.

(Photograph omitted)