Kruse bid for glory is not a pipe dream

When the 28-year-old is not battling it out against the elite on the piste, he can sometimes be heard from a distance in his local park playing the bagpipes.

"I'm the crazy guy in the park," he said with a smile. "There are two very clear reactions I get. Half the people look at you with hate and then walk away in the other direction and the other half stop to listen and seem to appreciate it."

Kruse, who boasts Scottish origins, has played from a young age and performed at a friend's wedding.

His other main hobby is the martial art Wing Chun, which Bruce Lee made famous and which Kruse practises with a friend in St Albans.

Almost all his time in recent months, however, has been spent preparing for the worlds either at the University of Bath - where Kruse has been training with the Japan team - or else at the men's foil squad's new base in a corner of Lee Valley Athletics Centre.

Previously, Kruse had trained at the Lansdowne Club in west London and the move to Lee Valley so close to the Olympics is a gamble.

"At Lansdowne, we had less and less space, the piste wasn't big enough and that makes preparations tough," he said. "We've now got a big enough space which is great but the change should have been done at the beginning of the cycle. To change the system a year out from the most important Games in my life - I don't know whether that's the right thing to do or not."

Either way, Kruse believes he is in the form of his life, better even than 2009 when he won silver at the Europeans, was briefly ranked No2 in the world and also won World Cup gold in Copenhagen.

"My training's the best it has ever been and I've been matching the Japanese fencers we've had with us in Bath," he said. "I'd like a medal and I don't think that's beyond me."

The goal for next year's Olympics is similar. "Fencers tend to reach their peak in their late 20s and next year I'll be 29 so I'm very luck to be at my peak at the right time," he said. "I believe I'm good enough to get a medal. It's about time we did - British fencers haven't won an Olympic medal of any sort for about 50 years."

Kruse and fellow foil fencer Laurence Halsted are the only two capable of changing that. Kruse has twice been in the Olympics, finishing eighth in Athens in 2004 - the best result by a British fencer at a Games in 40 years - and then losing 10-9 against Germany's Peter Joppich in the last 16 in Beijing.

"I feel like I have to win an Olympic medal now," added Kruse, who until 2009 when he went full-time as an athlete was working as an engineer on the Olympic Park. "The engineering is something I might go back to but I'm not sure how long I'll fence for. In the extreme, some go on until they're 40. I'll worry about that after 2012."

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