Dog Friendly Holiday House Sunshine Coast Queensland

Dogs and Robots,

I think the best remedy for anyone who's struggling to do some exercise is to get a pet dog, because they don't care if it's raining. Rain, hail or shine, they don't care if you've had a bad day - they need a walk."

Since giving up life in the fast lane, former Olympic swimmer Giaan Rooney has dived right into a new career and she couldn't be happier.

Giaan Rooney is standing looking over the wintery waters of Sydney Harbour while Australia is in the midst of Beijing Olympics fever. But ask her if she misses being part of the greatest sports show of all, and she answers easily. "Not. At. All."

Deliberately emphasising each word to make sure I haven't misinterpreted her, Rooney punctuates it further with one of her trademark megawatt smiles. "I think I'm one of the lucky few, in that I have no regrets," she beams. "I actually reached a stage in my life where I was proud of what I'd achieved. And, at the end of the day, I've found something I love just as much, if not more, and it requires no physical pain on a daily basis."

The Olympc gold and silver medalist may have spent most of her life churning up and down pools around the world, but she's now a poster child for life after sport; proof positive that once the applause has died and the Speedos have been hung out to dry, elite athletes can - and do - reinvent themselves. In her case, in a number of ways.

Now 25, she's a rising star at the Nine Network as a presenter on lifestyle and sports shows. She's also a spokesperson on animal welfare, a crusader for responsible drinking (catch her on TV advocating moderation) and makes occasional appearances in commercials, currently including one for David Jones.

With her dance card fuller than ever, this is a lightning-fast trip for the sunday magazine shoot to Camp Cove, a tiny beach nestled in one of the most expensive corners of the harbour. It's picture-postcard perfect, yet Rooney can't help waxing lyrical about how great life is in Melbourne, her adopted hometown since 2002, when she moved from the Gold Coast to work with coach Ian Pope, who now trains Grant Hackett.

"I can't see myself going anywhere else," she says. "I absolutely love it. For me, Melbourne's greatest attraction is its people. They love sport; they're so supportive of it. I mean, in what other city in the world can it be 15 degrees and pouring with rain, and you'll still have 50,000 people turn up for a football game? They're so passionate about sport, yet the same people who go to the football will go to the theatre; they'll try anything once and embrace everything life has to offer. They love their food and their art - they're all-rounders."

Rooney bought a workers cottage in Port Melbourne two years ago and has woven herself into the tapestry of the neighbourhood. "I'm one of those people who loves being settled. As much as I enjoy travelling, I think your home is the most important thing; a place that's completely yours and where you feel comfortable being who you want to be." But even with her growing TV profile, she says she's more often recognised as the owner of a three-legged Jack Russell-fox terrier named Lester, on their daily stroll from Port Melbourne to St Kilda and back again. "I'm probably recognised more in my trackies, when I'm trying to be inconspicuous, than when I'm trying to be glam," she laughs.

Rooney adopted the pooch from Melbourne's Lort Smith Animal Hospital, of which she's an ambassador. "I'm not sure how he lost his leg. He was an eight-week-old puppy who had lost it about a week-and-a-half before I got him. It was love at first sight. He was already named, and I thought he had enough issues to deal with, so I didn't change it."

And Lester is the main reason Rooney stays fit these days ("I worry about how much exercise he'd need if he had four legs") along with her regular Pilates classes. "I find this hilarious - I have so much more energy now than I ever did when I was at peak physical fitness, and my health is so much better now than it was then."

Was that due to exhaustion from training at an elite level? "Yep, exactly. I guess when you're in the thick of it, you're always pushing that boundary in over-exercising and doing enough work for your sport. I think the best remedy for anyone who's struggling to do some exercise is to get a dog, because they don't care if it's raining. Rain, hail or shine, they don't care if you've had a bad day - they need a walk."

Rooney shot to fame when, as an unknown 15-year-old, she won gold in the 100m backstroke at the 1998 Commonwealth Games. She had only been swimming with a club for three years, but was a natural water baby, having grown up in the lyrically named Mermaid Waters on the Gold Coast, where she lived with parents Jan and Bruce, and younger brother Byron, until she moved to Melbourne. She hated training, but persevered because she loved competing. "I think there are a few swimmers there who love training too much - Grant Hackett may be one of them, the machine that is Grant Hackett - but, for most of us, we love racing and competing, and we can't do one without the other."

At the age of 17, Rooney made the team for the Sydney 2000 Olympics, where she won two silver medals in the relay events. Four years later, in Athens, she won a gold medal in the 4 x 100m medley. It was the highlight of her career. "If you ask a swimmer what they'd love to take out of the sport more than anything, they'll say an Olympic gold medal. That's the epitome of success in our sport. You can never take that away from me. I can be 100 other things, but I will always be an Olympic gold medalist."

The 'golden girl' glory of Athens had barely faded in 2006, when Rooney was named captain of the Australian Commonwealth Games team for Melbourne, where she won two silvers. It was her last big meet because, soon after turning 23, she had a "light bulb moment" and decided to retire. She believed she had nothing more to prove to herself, or anyone else for that matter, and wanted to go out on a high.

"I reached a point where I was almost like, if I die tomorrow, I can't think of anything worse than if the only thing people could say about me was that I could swim," she says. "I felt it was time for the next journey, time for the next chapter, and there were so many other facets of myself that I was ready to explore, which you just don't have the chance to do when you're a full-time athlete."

Rooney wanted to be a journalist long before she wanted to be a swimmer, and made the transition to the media with ease, having been schooled in the immediacy of television for the breathless, post-race interviews. She would have been happy behind the camera, but with her high profile as a swimmer (boosted by a previous two-year relationship with fellow Olympian Michael Klim), plus good looks and ebullient personality, Rooney was a natural on screen.

Her first television gig in the 2006 Torvill & Dean's Dancing on Ice was cut short when she injured an ankle during training. However, the Nine Network saw potential and signed her up. She was elevated to the role of revolving co-host of Wide World of Sports in 2007 and had fill-in gigs as a reporter and weather presenter on Getaway, What's Good For You and Today. "I'm not a morning person; I definitely needed a nanna nap doing the weather," she admits. "I don't know how beautiful Stevie Jacobs does it year in, year out - it's a tough one."

Rooney describes her hybrid role at the network as her perfect job, even if she occasionally does ridiculous things (she recently took part in a wife carrying competition at Singleton in the Hunter Valley, even though she's nobody's wife - yet). "I wouldn't change much if I could. I do a little bit of everything. Coming from the monotony of swimming, where every day is the same as the day before, I needed something quite varied and mixed up. Each day is different, which is exactly what I want and I couldn't be happier."

However, she does have her sights set on covering an Olympics and, given that Nine has the Australian broadcast rights to the 2010 Winter Games in Vancouver and 2012 Summer Games in London, she might yet have her chance. This month, though, she's been content watching like a "proud mother" as her former teammates, and the 2008 additions, showed Australia's swimming strength at the Water Cube in Beijing.

While she prefers to focus on the positives of the sport, Rooney doesn't shy away from talking about the recent Nick D'Arcy-Simon Cowley incident that cast a shadow over swimming's cleanskin image and torpedoed D'Arcy's Olympic dreams.

"It's such a catch 22. I feel really, really bad for Nick, because the Olympics rock around once every four years and some only have one shot at it. But, on the other side of the coin, we need to uphold that tradition of not standing for something that puts a black mark against our sport. So many other sports deal with it on a weekly or monthly basis. I think that when swimming is in the spotlight for all the wrong reasons, it needs to be dealt with.

"Simon Cowley has been a very good friend for years. He's the most placid, non-confrontational, non-aggressive person I've ever met. I know there are two sides to every story, but I can't see Simon ever being involved in something that would warrant action."

Rooney has seen Cowley since the altercation, during which he sustained serious injuries to his face that required reconstructive surgery. He was in pain, she says, and "aching for a steak". "He's going well. You wouldn't be able to tell by looking at his face, but when I had dinner with him, he still had his mouth wired shut. That was six weeks later."

Meanwhile, back on TV, Rooney has just finished filming Battlefronts, a lifestyle show in which two teams go head-to-head converting two front yards in eight hours with a $10,000 budget. She admits she knew little about gardening when hosting the show, which involved 20-hour days and left little time for her new boyfriend, media executive Hamish McLachlan.

The couple met not long after Rooney broke up with fellow Olympian Patrick Murphy, with whom she lived in Port Melbourne. Rooney and McLachlan (who dated Nine's Livinia Nixon for four years) co-hosted an event for the Lort Smith Animal Hospital last November. They had their first date at the end of December, when McLachlan invited her to a family barbecue at his brother's house. And that's all she'll say. Sort of.

"I'm a very private person, that's about as far as I'll go but, so far, it's all going very well," Rooney says, flushing with embarrassment. Then, almost apologetically, she adds: "I love a love story as much as anyone else but, at the end of the day, I think we put enough pressure on relationships ourselves and there's enough pressure on them to survive from our inner circle, without (adding) pressure outwardly. I can't wait to bare all in a tell-all interview about the love of my life and when I'm planning on getting married and all of that, one day. Until then, I guess you'll have to wait and see how it goes."