Athletics: Robb the surgeon brings his spikes back to life

English 800m runner who burst on to the scene at Olympics a decade ago is chasing one final dream on track after years of battling injury

The sun was shining over the Trafford Park track this week – behind the clouds, naturally – as England's athletes offered the media an opportunity to chat on the eve of the Commonwealth Games.

Sitting quietly on a bench, apparently enjoying the almost-sunshine, was a figure whose sudden emergence as a world-class 800 metres runner 10 years ago took him to an Olympic final at the age of 20. The ginger hair that was just beginning to recede even then is now shorn, but the face beneath it retains all the humour and intelligence of old. Welcome back, Curtis Robb.

At the age of 30, this Liverpudlian, in his own phrase, is entering the twilight years of an athletics career that has been savagely undermined by injury.

Even by 1993, when he finished fourth in the World Championships, he was beginning to struggle with the knee and Achilles tendon problems that wiped out season after season for the rest of the decade, and indeed prevented him running for 32 months before making a couple of low-key comeback races this May. A few weeks later, against all expectation, he finished third in the Manchester trials to earn his first appearance at a Commonwealth Games as the 800m heats get under way today.

Robb's biggest disappointment came in 2000, when he was not fit enough to earn a place at the Olympics. Long before the 1992 Barcelona Games, where Robb moved joyfully through the rounds before finishing sixth, his father bet on him to win the 1500 metres at the Sydney Games. He got a price of 500-1, but those odds fell to 8-1 as his boy's bold front-running tactics established him as thrillingly capable of upholding Britain's great middle distance tradition.

That Robb was unable, ultimately, to fulfil that massive potential was only partly to do with his bad luck with injuries, however. Even at the age of 20 it was medicine, not athletics, that was the most important thing in his life. And despite the urgings of numerous figures within the sport, not least the then national coach, Frank Dick, to become a full-time athlete, Robb decided to try and do a Roger Bannister by combining the two.

Ten years on he is a trainee surgeon at Sheffield's Northern General Hospital, set on a career path that he hopes will see him become a registrar and then a consultant specialising in orthopaedics. That process could take another decade. In medical terms, Robb – currently working an average 72-hour week as a plastic surgeon – is still an up-and-coming talent.

"I deal with people who come in after car accidents or who have suffered severe burns," he said as he gazed out on an infield of Lottery-supported colleagues whose lives must seem drastically different to his own.

"The work I'm doing at the moment is not very pleasant sometimes. You're shaving off layers of flesh and moving them around. If you've got a burn case you've got to take off the top layers of skin, which are dead. It's like using a bacon slicer. But you learn to detach yourself emotionally from what you are doing. You have to.

"If I didn't have a medical career I would be entering the twilight years of my athletics and wondering about what road in life I would have to start on now. If anything medicine means more to me now than it did when I began."

Needless to say, Robb's progress since the Commonwealth trials has not been without drama as the calf injury that forced him to pull up in the European trials a fortnight ago kept his participation here in doubt until three days ago.

The absurd working patterns of a Senior House Officer – when on call he can go 36 hours without sleeping – mean that training has to be fitted in where possible. Robb travels over to the Don Valley stadium at odd hours of the day and night. If it is shut, Alf Tupper moves on to the nearby Woodburn Stadium.

"You can jump over the fence there," he says with a grin. "I love training. It hasn't been a chore over the years because there's nothing I'd rather do. I'd rather do a good training session than have 10 pints of lager. You struggle, struggle for five, six months with injury, but when you get your speed back it's almost like you suddenly click into something. It's like defying the laws of physics and biology."

Now Robb is palpably looking forward to the experience of racing once again in front of a big crowd, hoping to discover new surprises. "I'm amazed to be here," he said. "I haven't been this excited since '92.

"Mind you," he adds, "I was running a lot better in '92." When he grins, it's like the sun coming out.