REGARDLESS of the air quality in Beijing next month, Peter Baquie will not breathe easy. As head doctor of the Hawthorn football club, Baquie ministers to a team tipped by many to make this year's grand final. But when the Hawks played their biggest match of the season to date, in front of 90,000 at the MCG last night, the club's top medic was not watching. Instead, he was high in the air, somewhere above China.

As head doctor for the Australian Olympic team, Baquie has also spent the past two years planning for every contingency imaginable in Beijing: heat and smog, exotic diseases and food poisoning, ice vests and bottled water.

It has been quite a juggle.

He works the equivalent of two full-time jobs, both highly stressful. Ask him how many hours he pulls and Baquie blinks, rolls his eyes and says slowly: "I'm working … most of the time."

But that's not what makes it hard.

On a busy afternoon this week at Olympic Park Sports Medicine, a patient waited to see the good doctor. His name was Beau Muston.

Muston is a gifted footballer — just 21 years old and drafted into the AFL two years ago. He is yet to make his debut but is already well into his second rehabilitation. Twice his knee had given out and twice it has been rebuilt. He broke down in March, limping to the boundary in a pre-season match. "He'd done his knee again and I knew it straight away," Baquie says. "He comes off and he's looking at you and he's asking, 'Can I go back on?'

"He wants to go back on! You know what it means to him and you know how hard he's worked. And you have to look into his eyes and tell him, 'No, you aren't going back on.' That's when it's hard."

The 55-year-old is neat, small and quiet. He peers from behind spectacles but he studiously looks you in the eye. When he speaks, his voice is low — almost nervous. His manners are impeccable.

Meet him briefly and you'd get the impression of a cautious man, conservative even. It might be reinforced if you knew he swims regularly at the Hawthorn pool most mornings, part of a small group of old university friends, coached by Liberal leader Ted Baillieu.

The impression is misleading. Peter Baquie is the mildest mannered risk-taker in town. Look at his arms, outstretched towards you, emerging from his Hawthorn T-shirt. Each forearm sports what look like prison tattoos. They aren't, of course. Baquie got his ink in Papua New Guinea as a 21-year-old trainee doctor.

Most of the time he treated villagers for tetanus and snake bite as children died before his eyes from malaria. "It's a different type of medicine," he recalls. "You had so little, not even soap to wash your hands." But Baquie also admired the homemade tattoos worn by some of the native women. Next thing he knew he'd agreed to a tattoo for himself.

The numbers on his left arm — 8549 — spell out the name of the woman who did it, carving the crude design with a sewing needle. On his other arm is a simple cross — not, as people usually imagine, a religious sign. "It was going to be a sun," he smiles. "But it got too painful so I made them stop."

A spirit of adventure took a young doctor who had grown up in Balwyn, the son of an engineer and a librarian, to rugged New Guinea. That same spirit, when he arrived back in Australia, sent Baquie to the Gippsland town of Foster as a country GP.

In Foster, he raised children, played football and mended country bodies, pursuits that were often related. He remembers being whacked by his opponent once during an on-field dust-up and lying groggy on the ground. That evening when he went to work, the man who had hit him was in the surgery with his family, waiting to be treated.

After 10 years in Gippsland, Baquie, wife Helen and their four children returned to the city in 1992. Back in Melbourne, life as a suburban GP was crushingly dull. Instead of delivering babies or treating rare diseases he found himself mired in colds and minor ailments. He missed the challenge and thrill of medicine on the edge.

Not for long. At school and university he had been a keen footballer. "A slow, short guy that couldn't kick but liked to advise the umpire." He'd played alongside another young doctor, his friend Peter Brukner. By 1992 Brukner had founded the Olympic Park Sports Medicine clinic, made a name for himself and was doctor to the Australian athletics team.

Jogging in Malvern's Central Park one day, Baquie ran into Brukner's wife. She wondered whether he would be interested in sports medicine. He was.

"I just immediately loved it," he says. "It was a really exciting place to work. It was challenging … it was a new and developing area of medicine and we were at the forefront."

Through Olympic Park he made contacts. The opportunity came up to tour Europe with an Australian junior basketball team. He remembers playing in Latvia, where there was hardly any equipment. Without ice to treat players' injuries, he would run outside and collect handfuls of snow.

Early patients were basketballer Sam McKinnon and a raw young athlete called Jana Pittman. He found them fascinating.

"There was that intrigue about what makes someone able to excel … I could play a bit of footy, run round the block but never excel. What was the difference in their physiology and psychology to mine? These people did have something special and it intrigued me. Yet, if you scraped it away, their physiology was the same as ours and when their bodies let them down they were just as vulnerable."

Opportunities came. A stint at Carlton as the reserve team doctor whetted his appetite for football again. It was everything he'd missed: improvisational, fast moving and with an unpredictability that brought medicine back to first principles. When Luke O'Sullivan dislocated a shoulder at Princes Park one day and refused to get on the stretcher, Baquie had to put it back in — and quickly — as two teams and thousands of spectators waited for the match to restart.

One day in 1997, the phone rang. The head doctor for the Australian hockey team was ill with cancer — could Baquie step in on Friday night?

Thus began a continuing connection to Olympic sport that has dramatically shaped his life. Baquie served seven years as doctor to the men's hockey team, culminating in a gold medal at Athens. It is an achievement he is proud of, joining a youthful team and seeing those players mature and triumph seven years later.

Twelve months out from the Athens Games, striker Jamie Dwyer tore an anterior cruciate ligament. Again the hard part, the same as with Muston, that moment when Baquie looked into his eyes and told him he wasn't going back on.

Rehabilitation is a joint project between doctor and athlete. One suffers through pain and psychological torment; the other bears witness and offers support. So it is not surprising that the return is a sweet, celebrated moment for both. Dwyer made it back for the opening Olympic game, 12 months to the day after his injury. He scored a hat trick in that clash and 10 goals for the tournament, including the winner in the gold medal match. Remembering it, his doctor beams with pride.

By then, Baquie was also head doctor for rugby league's Melbourne Storm. He left in 2004 to join Hawthorn. The Hawks had a new president and a new coach in Alastair Clarkson; they wanted new medicos as well.

"There were sweeping changes and they were incredibly brave about it." Baquie says Clarkson had a vision that the club would grit its teeth through hard times and rebuild for the long term. It was a challenge he was hungry to be part of, one that is now bearing fruit.

Football clubs are big places, full of people. But few see more clearly into the life of a player than the doctor who treats him for everything from a season-ending hamstring injury to a sexually transmitted infection or a drug problem.

The club doctor walks a double line. As a club employee his duty is to the team and its coach; as a doctor his duty is to the player.

"The single greatest challenge in sports medicine is the issue of information," he says. "In normal medicine you have a normal one-on-one relationship with your patient, and are bound by confidentiality. In sports medicine we always serve two masters: the team and the patient."

Baquie says he is lucky that these issues are kept to a minimum at Hawthorn. He says no pressure has ever been placed on him to put team interests ahead of his duty as a doctor.

"It's no accident we are near the top of the ladder; Alastair Clarkson has set up all these pathways and systems to make sure these things do not become major issues."

In 2006, the Olympic team head doctor position was advertised and Baquie applied — more out of hope than confidence. He won the job, his experience at preparing the hockey team for hot climates such as in Pakistan and Malaysia counting in his favour.

"Once you saw the challenges that Beijing was going to present it started to consume me a bit," he says. "It's been a struggle and a big challenge. Beijing has a lot of challenges that other Olympics haven't … it's not just packing the bandages and getting on the plane."

Olympic sports medicine is the ultimate, he says. Sport's top prize — that gold medal — comes along just once in four years. In football there's usually next week, and always next season. "In Olympics athletes push themselves so far beyond what a normal person might tolerate. There is no tomorrow and you throw everything into getting them right for their event."

HE IS confident that the Australian team is well prepared. The much-discussed air quality will not cause problems, he believes. Baquie is more concerned about the heat and humidity. He says age has tempered the spontaneity that once led to homemade tattoos in the jungle of PNG.

"(Spontaneity) does help in sports medicine though," he says. "You need to think on your feet, act quickly and you very often will do things that as a doctor you wouldn't ordinarily do."

Sometimes it feels like a double life. Triple even. There's football life, family life, and globetrotting Olympic life. Ask him about his hobbies outside work and he nominates "football and the Olympics" with a guilty grin. The Sydney Games were a highlight, he says, because his family was there to see it.

Two of his daughters are phsyiotherapists, one working with her father at Hawthorn's VFL affiliate, Box Hill. It is easy to believe they chose the only occupation that might allow them to spend decent time with their dad.

The morning swimming keeps him fit and relaxed. Training together, chatting with old mates, the usual "bullshit and banter". He can't often best Baillieu in the pool.

Planning for Beijing has taken his mind back to New Guinea. The things he saw, tetanus and malaria, hepatitis and ever-present heat, have been in his thoughts once again.

It's been an exhausting year but one that could yet deliver a premiership and a swag of gold medals — all within a month. It would be a fair achievement for a man who has always loved sport but describes himself as "slow, unskilful and four-foot-nothing".

In four years, Baquie will be almost 60 but he has no plans to slow down. "I would love to continue and go to London, though I'm only appointed through to Beijing at this stage," he says. "We have at least two more years left at Hawthorn before that contract is up for renewal, and I'd like to stay there. Really, I just love it."

Dan Silkstone is a senior writer.