Once she was a ballerina. Then she threw the hammer. Now she is Battleaxe the Gladiator, aka Shirley Webb. The former UK champion and three-times Scottish title-winner is on the invitation list for this weekend's Olympic trials, but the 26-year-old Webb confirmed yesterday that it's a misunderstanding. Indeed, there is a question mark over whether she will throw again.

"My entry is an administrative mix-up," she said yesterday. "I'll not be in Birmingham. I was invited, but did not accept. I've just not been able to get enough throwing training in. Gladiators take priority for now."

That and public appearances. The former ballerina swapped a tutu for the hammer circle, throwing for Scotland at two Commonwealth Games, and for Britain at the Athens Olympics. Now she is into spin-off benefits from her latest incarnation.

She is a gladiator in the Sky production which features the one-time Scotland national athletics coach JohnAnderson as martinet referee.

Webb's career path has taken several turns. She is professionally qualified in ballet, having obtained a distinction to become a member of the Royal Academy. When she passed the exam, 10 professional ballerinas failed.

She has an honours degree in mathematics, and worked with the sports management agency run by Rowan Shepherd, the former Melrose and Scotland rugby full-back.

The daughter of Scotland's 1970 Commonwealth Games hurdler Andy Webb, she was a county schools' butterfly champion. She also represented her county at hammer, discus, long jump, high jump, shot, triple jump, and heptathlon.

She represented her university at hockey, and is qualified as a coach in trampolining, diving, gymnastics, and rugby. She was British under-24 Masters diving champion in 2000.

She is Scottish record-holder in the hammer, won the British title in 2005 and was AAA runner-up four times. That includes last year, despite having been on morphine and in intensive care at Easter.

Herformer coach, Chris Black, believed she could become world record-holder, but she struggled when throwing to eliminate the head-spotting technique used by spinning ballerinas.

Yesterday, Webb was making a celebrity appearance at a call centre. "I have been doing quite a few various sorts of public appearances," she said, but remained non-comittal about further ones as a thrower.

If she did retire to focus onher new career, it would not be surprising.

Training at home and abroad has been fraught. She had to tie supermarket bags to the hammer handle so that she could find it in the uncut hayfield that was Meadowbank.

At Britain's pre-Olympic training camp in Cyprus four years ago she found trees growing in the practice area sanctioned by GB coaches. She had to throw from a public road into a field of corn stubble.

She was publicly humiliated by a new points system introduced (but now kept confidential) by the eliteperformance director Dave Collins, and then was ditched from funding despite having spent part of the season trying to recover her balance having been hospitalised with meningitis.

While she was still Scottish No.1 she received the news that support had been cut last November as she was helping Glasgow win the 2014 Commonwealth vote in SriLanka.