Christine Ohuruogu tapped the Olympic gold medal tucked in her tracksuit pocket here today and talked of her dream of winning another one when the Games arrive on her Stratford doorstep in 2012.

Relaxed and smiling after a sleepless night interrupted by a stream of congratulatory telephone calls, Britain's new 400metres champion was already thinking ahead to defending her crown four years hence. And she joked that if she didn't make it in London, a superior Ohuruogu mark two would be there instead: her little sister Vicky.

Following Ohuruogu's historic win as the first British woman to lift the one-lap title, the debate resurfaced here about whether the athlete who served a ban for missing three drugs tests could now safely be repackaged as the face of 2012.

Yet as she laughed about staying at her mum and dad's house in 2012 instead of the Olympic Village less than half a mile away, and chuckled about the thought of the exotic Team GB training camp in Aldershot, Ohuruogu said: "Whether I'm the face of 2012 or not, I'm going to be honoured just to be at the Games in my home town. Of course, I'm going to be there.

"When you've been to one Olympics, you want to go to the next - you kind of catch the bug - but the big pressure is going to be going there as defending champion. The good thing is that I've dealt with pressure here and, hopefully, I'll be able to view 2012 as the Olympics and not some local meet. I mean, literally, I won't have to go anywhere."

Nor did Ohuruogu rule out the possibility of 15-year-old sister Victoria, the national Under-15 record holder at 300m, lining up against her in the next Games.

"If I'm not there my sister will be," said Christine. "Vicky will be 19 then and it's a possibility she'll be there, maybe racing against me. She's going to be better than me - that's what everyone says."

If that is the case, she will be some athlete because her big sister today outlined that her next goal is to achieve the Grand Slam of major titles - Commonwealth, European, World and Olympic - a feat only ever achieved by Daley Thompson, Jonathan Edwards, Linford Christie and Sally Gunnell.

"I want to collect the set now," said the 24-year-old, who already owns three of the four. "I'm going to defend my world championship title next year - it would be nice to do it again if I can - then win the Europeans in 2010 in Barcelona because it's the one I don't have.

"But because I've simplified the Olympics so much, trying to make it in my mind the same as any other race, I don't really think I really understand the magnitude of what I've done. Maybe it will take me until I retire to realise."

Few would back against her, especially since Chrsitine revealed she managed to eke out victory yesterday despite having suffered troublesome preparation after her semi-final on Sunday.

She said: "I didn't sleep very well for two nights. I was very tired, my legs were heavy and I was worried about it. I was so tired, I hadn't slept, I'd got a headache I was hot and everything was just getting to me. It was hard but I just thank God I got through it."

Ultimately, she prevailed in the final because the hot favourite, American Sanya Richards, "panicked" in the race, pushing it too hard, too soon, after putting on a convincing show in the warm-up that she was super-confident.

"I thought Sanya was very calm; it was bordering on the line of extreme confidence from what I saw," said Ohuruogu. "It worries you to know that someone's that confident when the rest of us are wetting ourselves. But maybe she was trying to fool us into believing everything was all right.

"Sanya panicked and that's why she tensed up. I'm glad I was in my own bubble.

"If she'd be in the lane directly outside me, going off at 22.8sec for the first 200m would have just messed my head up completely."

Yet Ohuruogu kept her head. "The funny thing is I wasn't panicking even when I was way down," she said. "But I like to pride myself that I like working under pressure. I get kicks out of being challenged, being told you can't do something and then going out and doing it."

Victory left her more elated than when she lifted the world title in Osaka. "Last year it was more relief; this time, I think I'm more happy than relieved. I didn't feel any pressure to be honest." As colleagues within British athletics today pleaded for her to be accorded the acclaim she deserves for becoming an Olympic champion, Ohuruogu accepted with a shrug that she will probably never live down the stigma of those missed drugs tests which cost her a year of her career but she vowed she was not going to let it spoil her finest hour.

"I think realistically that it's always going to be something I have to put up with regardless of whether I like it or not," she said. "But it's not really something I let get to me too much because my job as an athlete is to keep on performing and that's what I'm going to keep on doing. It doesn't bother me too much any more."

And anyway, she said, she was going to keep racing because that is what she loves doing. "Yes, I'm going to be in London in 2012," she laughed. "Whether you like it or not!"