Beatrice, the dancing queen

Beatrice Faumuina can do imperious very well indeed which should come in handy for the tango. Picture / Martin Sykes

One of the reasons Beatrice Faumuina says she likes the idea of Dancing with the Stars is that "they were taking eight people from public view and taking them into an arena that was probably going to be the most foreign to them. And for the public they were, like, seeing them in a different light: like, yes, we are human."

Faumuina doesn't do jokes - she has that highly serious single-mindedness peculiar to top athletes - but that really is funny.

When you meet her you feel you are in the presence of no mere mortal. This is partly her height, she is 1.79m or so I read. I just knew she made me feel like Gulliver in that land of giants, Brobdingnag. She is not just tall, though, but toned and gorgeous with perfect skin. In other words, she makes you feel puny and blobby, and all too human. There is something - in keeping with her nickname Queen Bea - regal about her. And she can do imperious very well indeed which should come in handy for the tango.

As it is completely beyond my comprehension why anyone would want to go on Dancing with the Stars, and beyond Faumuina's why anyone wouldn't, we got on like two perfectly polite beings from different planets.

People go on it, it seems to me, to reinvent their image in some way. It seems a tough way to do it. All that hard work and having to enter a very public popularity contest. And when she's always been such a good girl anyway, it's hard to see what another side of her might be.

She says: "I think that some people, with being an athlete, they probably would just see one side of us. So with this show you'll probably see a bit more of what our personalities are like ... and what we're like really."

This talking in the plural is a bit odd. We are supposed to be talking about her. She will also, disconcertingly, refer to herself in the third person. As in: "So I guess what people will see is it's not just Beatrice the athlete now. There's a different side to Beatrice."

She is 31 now and has lived her life in the public eye since her late teens - although women's field events weren't exactly glam when she, as a 19-year-old, started to be talked about as being on the brink of becoming a world class athlete.

She's been looked at and judged for a long time now. Getting into a frock and dancing in high heels holds no real horrors. "I've performed in front of 100,000 people."

I wonder what she thinks people do think of her and she says "a lot of people, obviously, when they've seen me compete, all they see is me walking into a circle, throwing out [the discus.]"

The last time people formed an opinion of her in a sporting context was at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games. She came home without a medal which must have been disappointing for her. I wonder how she coped with the disappointment and also with the weight of expectation. She talks about how she was injured and shows me a still-swollen finger "I've actually ruptured ligaments" and, "you know, I finished fourth. There's a lot of athletes who finished well past what I've done." Probably, she says "the best way I deal with it is I know what's happened. There's a big difference between being out there and being judged on what they've seen." This is Beatrice at her queenly best.

One of the reasons for going to see people at home is that you can, hopefully, see a different side of them. In the living room in the house she shares with her lovely, bubbly mum, Roini, you see many different sides of Beatrice and they are all beautiful and glamorous. You are surrounded by many large portraits of her. This adds to the strangeness of talking to someone who talks about herself in the third person. Possibly, those third person references are the result of being surrounded by images of yourself every day.

She says she's enjoying interviews that are not about sport. "It's very different. All of a sudden there's not this performance criteria that I have to fill in. For example: 'The qualifying standard for the Commonwealth games, Beatrice, is 54 metres, you've thrown 63. So, how's that relative to the rest of the world?' "

I think she puts up a good pretence of not minding interviews that aren't about sport but that she'd really rather tear another ligament. She likes things to be just so and in interviews about the discus she knows just what she's likely to be asked. She gave me a look on the doorstep, as we were leaving and she thought I wasn't looking, that suggested she would like to throw me off the premises like a discus.

This was possibly just because she was so shy as a girl that she's had to battle to overcome it - and hasn't quite. She says she can now, almost happily, stand up in front of 400 people and give a speech.

She is warier of the closer gaze. She lives a very orderly life, with the lists of goals she's kept for years, and the hard training. She has only ever had one sip of alcohol in her life and it gave her a headache. She has her Christian faith, which is strong. She has always lived with her mum. She says her mother is her best friend and "ever since I grew up I wanted to do well and obviously do well for mum. Because I think it would be rude not to, in respect of the love I have for her." Before her grandmother died in 1996, the three women lived together.

This experience of an all female environment shaped her in "absolutely positive" ways. Her father has never been a part of her life. "Correct. It's over. I don't need to even question it."

At the door you are asked to take off your shoes. You soon see why. This is an immaculate house: the floor boards are so highly polished you can see your reflection in them, the cushions are plumped, the carpets freshly vacuumed. Roini brings out a plate of mint chocolatey things that I know from experience leave a trail of crumbs no matter how careful you are. Later, Roini will tick me off for not eating anything and I say I was too scared I might make a mess. She tsks at this in her charming mum's way. Her daughter says she adopts all of her friends. I say, "I wouldn't want Beatrice to have to vacuum again". This is one of Faumuina's chores: she does all the cleaning. I say something about what a beautifully clean house this is, the cleanest I've ever seen - because, really, it is spotless. I was admiring it. And she says something like, "What? You think we don't clean our house?" I have been puzzling over this inexplicable touchiness ever since. She obviously completely mis-read me, or thought this was too personal a comment or ... perhaps she was regretting letting strangers into her home. No, I don't know, beyond thinking she is still shy and that the veneer is pretty thin.

She says on the show we will see a different side of Beatrice the athlete.

"I think from, yeah, next week onwards it's going to be interesting because then everybody's going to have seen what we're like." I think that what we'll see will be more of Beatrice the athlete who has - except for that glance at the door - perfected her public profile to the point where she comes across as impassive as those many portraits.