IT all began with a boat bought from eBay but has turned into an Olympic dream.

A decade-or-so ago, Flora Stewart’s brothers had tried sailing on a school trip and on their return, suggested their sister have a shot.

From the moment she set foot on a boat as a 12-year-old, Stewart loved it and so the next step was persuading her parents to get on to the online auction site to buy her that all important boat of her own.

After much begging, she got that boat but it was something of an inauspicious start in the sport; she was, Stewart says, “absolutely rubbish”.

Ever since she was a child, Stewart had always harboured the ambition of competing in the Olympic Games; a competitive swimmer before she took up sailing, it was in the pool that she thought she might fulfill her dream.

However, as soon as she began sailing, she knew that was the sport that would take her to the greatest sporting stage of them all.

There was one particular moment which gave Stewart the drive to succeed and even all these years later, she remembers it clearly.

“I applied for the Scottish squad when I was 15 but didn’t get in even though I’d met the criteria,” she says. “But that just made me so much more determined because I really, really wanted to prove those people wrong.

“I absolutely loved the sport so I thought why is someone saying that I can’t do this when I know I can?

“So that rejection just fuelled my motivation and I did prove them wrong. And now, I just need to keep going to the Olympics.”

Stewart is originally from Edinburgh but is now based at the GB Sailing training base in the south of England.

She, along with her sailing partner, Englishwoman Jess Lavery, compete in the 470 class and the pair go into next week’s European Championships in Monaco in confident mood, despite Stewart having a less than ideal build-up to the competition.

“I’ve been off training with a vistibular migrane which is really just like a migrane that lasts for weeks,” she explains. “No one knows why this has happened but I’d done a huge amount of travelling and sailing at the start of the year so it might just have been that I’d done too much and my body couldn’t cope.

“It’s been really frustrating because I just want to go sailing so it’s been very tough suffering from something so debilitating and being completely sofa-bound.”

Despite that, Stewart is looking to improve on her 20th place finish from last year’s European Championships and is targeting finishing in the top-12 of European boats.

However, it is the World Championships which take place this summer in Greece which is Stewart’s primary focus and with sailors having so many variables to contend with during races, the preparation for that event in July has already begun.

“We’ve already started looking at the weather at the World Champs venue and we’ll go there early to make sure we get a feel for things,” she says. “As a sailor, you’ve got to be really adaptable and not get stuck in your ways because so much can happen during a race.

“For us, the Europeans is a very important stepping-stone towards the Worlds so we’re looking forward it”

As a member of the GB Sailing programme, Stewart is part of one of the most lauded and successful performance programmes in the world.

FIve medals at London 2012 was followed by another four medals, including three golds, at Rio 2016 which is an impressive return by anyone’s standards and Stewart is secure in the knowledge that she is part of a training regime that is proven to produce Olympic champions.

“It’s really cool being part of the GB team and it gives you a lot of confidence to be a part of this programme because having seen all of the medals that GB has won, you know that the system really works,” she says. “It’s a real privilege to be a part of the squad.

“Sometimes you put your team top on and it’ll be covered in suncream and you’ll think that this isn’t very cool or glamorous but actually, when I sit down and think about things, I realise how lucky I am to be in such an incredible sport and one which is so well supported.”

Already, Stewart’s thoughts have turned towards Tokyo 2020 and with a plan leading towards Tokyo already in place, Stewart is sure that things going well, she has every chance of being in Japan.

“Tokyo is already right at the front of my mind,” she says. “We’ve got a lot of work to do between now and then and so while we know the next three years will fly by, it’s very exciting.”