For all Storey’s feats, she has vaulted huge obstacles to become the grande dame of British Paralympic sport. Born without a functioning left hand after her arm was ensnared in the umbilical cord, she found that her victimising by school bullies left her with an eating disorder. There was further trauma when Louisa had to be delivered by emergency Caesarean in 2013, although she still managed an attempt at breaking the women’s hour record while breastfeeding.

Despite all these hardships, Storey claims that her greatest battle – and the one most formative in her development as an athlete – lay in overcoming the chronic fatigue that plagued four years of her swimming career. “In that time, I was virtually labelled a failure by the people in charge of swimming,” she says. “I didn’t successfully defend my world titles in 1998. I had not warmed up, I had not swum down, I literally raced and fell asleep on the physio’s bed because I was so exhausted. That was me with post-viral fatigue. I had to rebuild gradually from spending just five minutes a day in the water. So when I won three world titles in 2002, it felt like a major triumph.

“I guess, in able-bodied sport, it would have been covered, the downs I had gone through and how far I climbed back up. It showed there was still a lot I could give, physically and mentally. It gave me a platform, too, to support athletes who have had Covid-19 over the last 18 months. With some of those I’ve been mentoring, I have tried to stop post-viral fatigue becoming chronic fatigue syndrome, as it did for me.”

Tokyo represented Storey’s eighth Paralympics but offered no suggestion of a drop-off in performance. Nowhere was she so dominant as in the road race, helping British team-mate Crystal Lane-Wright negotiate the final climb before streaking away at a sodden Fuji Speedway to seize her record gold. The absence of her husband Barney, a tandem pilot and coach, whom she describes as the “stalwart” in all she has accomplished, proved immaterial to the result. Storey showed she could prevail under any conditions, under even the harshest restrictions.

“I knew how dreadful it would be without fans,” she says. “Looking back at that road ceremony, everyone was positioned in such a way that it didn’t look so empty. It was a unique experience, where I had to dig far deeper than perhaps I gave myself credit for. It was only when I came home that I realised how much it had affected my son, Charlie. He thought I was leaving for three weeks whenever I went out of the door. Every time I would get on my bike, he wanted to come with me.”