Cassie Patten has been through a lot to get her “pat on the back”. Her journey to the Olympic podium encompassed dismembered jellyfish and a disintegrating tongue, a dead dog and a scarred body. There have been rogue Germans and second mortgages, but only a footnote in the British revival in Beijing. Her friends, she confesses, wonder if she is mad.

For those with short memories, Patten won a bronze medal in the ten-kilometre open-water swim at the Olympics. The temperature was so high that she began to drink the rowing lake as she ploughed through it. However, she is, perhaps, better known for hijacking the post-race interviews after Rebecca Adlington’s 800 metres freestyle gold medal to say: “And Queenie, if you’re watching, Dame Rebecca Adlington.”

Life has drifted back to normal for Patten. Like the majority of success stories from Beijing, she is back to training and bean-counting. Although grateful for her lottery funding, Patten knows her 2012 Olympics ambitions are on a financial knife-edge and injury or loss of form could cripple her hopes. “It’s difficult in swimming because there is next to no prize-money,” she said. “I heard some track athletes talking about competing at the London Grand Prix and how they would get $11,000 [about £6,000] for a win. We’re lucky if we get £50. It’s a pat on the back and ‘well done’. Last year [when not funded], my parents remortgaged the house to pay for me.”

This is not a protracted whinge but the reality of an Olympian’s life in a minority sport. It is why Patten is one of those to have signed up to a website being launched today. Hugo Ambrose, a director of Lynx Sports Management, says that he wants to combat a £100 million shortfall in 2012 funding by getting the public to raise money for Olympic hopefuls. Each athlete on the site - www.benumber1.co.uk - has his or her own webpage made up of 999 pixels, which can be bought for between £20 and £1,000 each. In return, backers get their own page.

Sarah Webb, twice a gold medal-winner in sailing, is also involved. Despite the success of the “three blondes in a boat” in the Yngling class, Webb estimates that the team need to find £130,000 a year and that the campaign is £80,000 in debt. That is with lottery funding and a private sponsor, Mirabaud Securities, the London stockbroker.

Patten was living on £4,000 a year when she was training for last year’s World Championships in Melbourne. How she achieved her silver there is a faith-restoring exercise for anyone weary of sports stars behaving badly. “The day before, the jellyfish were two metres below the water and I remember saying, ‘Imagine if they were near the surface?’ ” she said. “I jinxed us all because the tides changed and washed them up. A lot of people dropped out. There were hundreds and I was stung countless times. It was worse because the boats cut them up and so you ended up being stung by four blobs at once. And I’m allergic to their sting.”

When showering a couple of weeks later, she noted that her body was covered with raised lumps. “It was like I’d been whipped repeatedly,” she said.

Pain is a recurrent theme with Patten, a 21-year-old from Cornwall due to start university. “You spend so long in the water that the costumes end up cutting you like a razor blade,” she said. And then there were the layers shed from her tongue because of the salt and the dead dog. “That was in a river in China,” she said.

The problems continued in Beijing when winning the bronze. “I had my ankle pulled back by a German called Angela Maurer with about 100 metres to go,” she said. “The judges didn’t see it and, even if they had, all they could have done is given her a yellow card. It can get quite rough.” That is the price of success. Whether the public will buy it remains to be seen.

Seafaring

Born January 1, 1987, Cardinham, Cornwall

Lives Manchester

Club Stockport Metro

Achievements Silver in ten-kilometre open-water swim at 2007 World Championships in Melbourne, despite being stung by jellyfish; bronze in ten-kilometre open-water swim at 2008 Olympics in Beijing

Random fact Got lost and suffered from seasickness during her first open-water race