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FEW things can match the glory of Olympic competition, as Levens physiotherapist Gavin Thomas discovered to his great pleasure in Athens this summer.

Mr Thomas was one of the physiotherapists accompanying the Great Britain cycling team who helped keep their limbs loose in the battle for gold.

"Being at the Olympics has been my personal career highlight," he said. "You realise after you come back, because people are talking about it, that you have been part of something that's touched a lot of people."

Mr Thomas had an unusual route into his current profession: "I was teaching science at Queen Katherine School, in Kendal, when I had a bad climbing accident and broke my leg and needed lots of physiotherapy.

"I had weeks and weeks, and months and months of it. I was 28 at the time. I had enough physio for long enough to think it was a good job and I retrained," he said.

"What I liked about it was that there were a lot of skills I thought I already had but it was related to more physical work. Being a sporty person, I was interested in that."

After training in Manchester, he did some occasional work in 1999 for the cyclists about to compete in the Sydney Olympics. He kept in touch with the team's physiotherapists and, when funding was extended for eight years after the Games, he was taken on full-time, at the Manchester Velodrome.

However, it is not always bright lights and glittering gold in the life of a physiotherapist. Mr Thomas said: "Working in the National Health Service, there are pressures of waiting lists and demand for treatment that almost always seem to be outstripping supply.

"Not every day is a good day because you can't help everybody and not everybody wants to be helped," he added.

Mr Thomas has two kinds of working patterns: the first is an early start at 7.30am for athletes training in the morning, with an early finish; the second is a later start, around 10am, but working until around 7pm for athletes training in the afternoon.

When he is not accompanying teams to major competitions, about 50 per cent of his time is spent on paperwork, and the other half with hands-on' treatment.

Physiotherapy had a huge range of applications, although sports treatment tended to get the most attention, he said.

There are physiotherapists working in: mental health, prisons, paediatrics, intensive care, adult learning disability, amputees, geriatrics, hydrotherapy and even with dogs and horses.

Career Factfile...

Qualifications: All aspiring physiotherapists need good A levels, or equivalent, and a degree in sports therapy or physiotherapy. However, graduates with a degree in related subjects, such as sports science, can retrain with a Masters in physiotherapy, involving 1,000 hours of physical contact.

Personality: You need to be a people person'; excellence in theory means nothing when putting your knowledge into practice.

Skills: You have to be able to assemble large amounts of diverse information quickly and accurately to calculate the best treatment. You need good manual skills and it is useful to be good at teaching others how to help themselves.

Salary: Typically, a graduate physiotherapist earns around £16,000. This rises to around £22,000 when you qualify for the senior two' level, usually after two years. The next stage is normally two or three years later, when you qualify as a senior one', to earn from £26,000 to £30,000. More can be earned in specialist areas such as equine physiotherapy.