Birgit Fischer looked calm on the outside. Sitting in the German K4 at the Schinias Olympic Rowing and Canoeing Centre, north of Athens, there was no reason for her to be nervous. Still, on the inside, there were some doubts. “Can I still do this? Has time finally caught up with me?”

At the time of the 2004 Olympics in Greece, Fischer was 42 years old. Already in the top 10 Olympic athletes of all time, she was trying to do what no other woman had ever done before: win an Olympic medal 24 years after her first one. But winning any medal would not be good enough, of course. Fischer wanted gold.

It was not going to be straight-forward. She knew the Hungarians were the favourites, having won the past three world championships. There was also the question of how much her time away from the sport had damaged her hopes for an eighth gold medal. For the past 10 years she had raised her two children on her own. For three years after the 2000 games she had resisted the urge to come out of retirement.

In the end, she could not stay away.

Fischer was born in Brandenburg an der Havel, then in East Germany, in 1962. Her father had been a good canoeist and she soon followed her elder brothers to the local club BSG Stahl Brandenburg by the lake Beetzsee at the age of six. She credits one of the coaches at the club, Harald Brosig, for imbuing her with the necessary determination and willpower to become an Olympic gold medallist – and for making her love her sport.

There was no doubting the talent of the siblings – her brother Frank went on to win three world championships – and Fischer soon joined a local sports school. She quickly established herself as one of the best female canoeists in East Germany and was picked to represent her country at the 1980 Olympics in Moscow, the same year she joined the army (where she worked until the Berlin Wall came down in 1989).

She won her first Olympic gold that summer in Moscow as an 18-year-old, in the K1 500m, and would probably have repeated the feat four years later in Los Angeles had it not been for the Eastern Bloc boycotting the Games. Fischer was back in 1988, having married the canoeist Jörg Schmidt in the meantime. She came second in the singles final but won gold in the pairs hours later. The next day she finished first in the fours.

Another gold and silver followed in Barcelona 1992 with the same haul coming from the Atlanta Games four years later. By the time she had won two golds in the Sydney Olympics, she had amassed seven golds and three silvers. It was time, she said, to retire.

Fischer would probably have remained retired had it not been for a television crew turning up in the autumn of 2003 to shoot a documentary. They asked her to get into an old kayak: “As I sat in the kayak for the camera, it felt good,” she said. “Suddenly, the curiosity was there again and I asked myself: What can I still achieve? How fast can I get fit again?”

The 41-year-old found she was enjoying training more than ever. In the beginning she was not contemplating a place at the Olympics but the more she trained the more she convinced herself that she could still compete at the highest level. “For me,” she said in 2004, “it is important that I have a certain tension there, a goal. If I am by the starting line and don’t feel that tension then it is over for me. Then I would just start the race as quick as a sleeping tablet.”

In a few months, she had lost seven kilos and was regaining her sharpness. However, not everyone was entirely happy. The national team coach, Josef Capousek, sounded annoyed in May 2004 when he was continuously asked whether Fischer would qualify for the team. “What am I supposed to say?” he said. “I don’t know at what stage she is with her comeback.”

Soon enough, however, Fischer showed that she would be an asset. And, with the German K4 having struggled in Fischer’s absence, she had a good chance of making it to Athens.

Come August, she was a certain starter. Her three team-mates – Maike Nollen, Carolin Leonhardt and Katrin Wagner – were delighted to have her back, although the latter wondered whether the crew could possibly have been more relaxed on the eve of the final. “The night before the race we were in our hotel and could hear the party in the village,” Wagner said. “We could just have gone down for a short time but instead we were in front of the telly, watching rhythmic gymnastics, to save our energy.”

On the morning of 27 August, 2004, Fischer, Nollen, Wagner and Leonhardt did not get off to a good start. They were almost last of the nine crews after the first few metres with the Hungarians setting the pace.

At the halfway point Germany had dragged themselves to second place, 0.3 seconds behind Hungary and 1.1sec in front of third-placed Ukraine. The German commentators, sensing that history could still be made on this sunny day in Greece, urged the four women to overhaul the Hungarians.

“Birgit Fischer! It is incredible how she is forcing herself forward here. And she is, centimetre by centimetre, catching up with the Hungarians,” they said as Fischer used every ounce of her strength, determination and experience in an attempt to overhaul the world champions. A few seconds later it was all over and the commentators shouted: “The Germans have done it. They have done it again, they have won in the last few metres.”

As the German quartet crossed the finishing line, winning by 0.2sec ahead of the Hungarians, Fischer was the only one to have the energy to lift her paddle high up in the air with both arms. She looked tired, but not exhausted. Happy, not relieved. She had just won her eighth Olympic gold medal and celebrated with a clenched fist. Later, on the podium, there was a modest smile. History had been made, again.

This year, incredibly, she has once again talked about making a comeback, this time for the 2012 Olympics in London. Steve Redgrave, for one, will be watching her announcements with interest. As he said last year: “Her medals make my haul look pretty small by comparison, and the insult added to injury is that I tried kayaking once and fell in within four seconds.”

What the Süddeutsche Zeitung said: 27 August 2004

It is a silly game to compare medals. Each one has a value from the time that it was won. And so the first gold medal, that Birgit Fischer won as an 18-year-old East German in 1980, is worth neither more nor less than her eighth one, won here on Friday at the age of 42. It just represents a different time of her life.

“This one does have a special place,” Fischer said after the race here, “as you have to assume that these are my last Olympic Games.” Is that really so? “Well, I don’t really know,” she said from the podium. When they heard the translation, her rivals from Hungary and Ukraine smiled. They thought she was joking. Fischer’s three German colleagues did not laugh though. They knew the old lady and her unpredictability only too well. She wasn’t joking.

She has given many reasons for her comeback. First she said she wanted to explore her physical limits. Then she said she wanted to show women of her age what is possible to achieve. But in fact she was looking back to the only path she knows and what she can do best: one starting line, one finishing line, one boat and one paddle and to race the distance from start to finish as quickly as possible.

The coaches accepted her offer of making a comeback very gratefully. No other athlete has her will to succeed. “She brings lots of experience,” the coach Capousek said. He might as well have said: she will ignite a team that is threatening to fall asleep.

Whether this will be her last Olympic race we do not know. Only a year ago she hadn’t even made her comeback and she added that Beijing is a beautiful city. Further questions were evaded. “At some point there must be an end,” she called over her shoulder before disappearing. No more questions. She has always been in control of her destiny and will decide herself when to finally retire.