Imagine going through your post to discover a letter from a wealthy stranger offering you thousands of pounds, for no return, to help your career.
No catches, he writes. Just be a good role model and don't take anything illegal. Let him know what you want and, if he thinks it's a reasonable demand, it's yours.
You would need time to digest this, and you would certainly have questions. Who is he? Why choose me? What does he want back from me?
Those were the questions 15 top British athletes posed themselves when insurance entrepreneur Barrie Wells got in touch. One said it felt like "a fairytale-type scam" as her eyes glanced down the letter.
But now, her doubts brushed aside, she is "his" athlete, topping up her standard funding with up to £8,000 from his wallet each year.
Who has Wells chosen, why did he choose them, and how has one man become an Olympic cash machine for our stars?
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Apologies for my absence from this blog for the last couple of months. I took a long holiday after the World Championships and travelled around Turkey and the Caucasus mountains, finishing with a week in St Petersburg, where one of my brothers lives.
It's a crazy city and I was quite relieved to leave relatively unscathed, with merely a collection of Russian words and a deep appreciation for vodka!
Since then, it's been pretty hectic with a trip over the pond to Massachusetts for the world's biggest regatta, the Head of the Charles.
A group of fellow internationals got together and organised an eight, so Anna Bebington (now Watkins after her recent wedding) and myself ended up joining forces with two Dutch girls, three Yanks, a Kiwi and a Canadian to take the title in Championships Women's Eights event.
It was a fantastic event and a very memorable experience. That is one of the best things about sport - being able to keep the competition and the hate out on the water, and occasionally come together to just enjoy racing and celebrate rowing.
I will attempt to blog a bit more regularly from now on, but in my first one back I don't have anything earth-shattering to report so I thought I'd talk a bit about the books that have kept me going through training and racing.
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I've never been a particular fan of mission statements because the worst of them have you grinding your teeth at their banality - and there are more bad ones than good ones in the world. But I do believe in being clear about what you're trying to do with a particular enterprise - and being able to define success.
So in the BBC project team we've been kicking around the big things we want to achieve in 2012 - partly to be open with our staff and outside partners about what we're doing, but also to share our aims with audiences. It's particularly important to get across that this is about the story of a year and its aftermath, rather than just 17 days of sporting action - massive though those are.
In time these should become measurable commitments so while they're still provisional we'd be interested to know whether they're what you'd expect us to offer and whether there's anything missing.
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