Olympic gold medallist Natalie Cook has declared she wants to play beach volleyball as a 37-year-old at her fifth Games at London 2012 - and also follow in James Tomkins' footsteps by carrying the Australian flag.

Cook, who won gold with Kerri Pottharst at the 2000 Sydney Olympics - as well as bronze at Atlanta in 1996 - is taking her first extended break in 16 years.

But the 33-year-old Queenslander today revealed was determined to extend her career to two full decades.

"I consider myself a professional Olympian and I would be absolutely putting myself up for London," Cook told AAP.

"I do need a break so I've decided I'm going to take a rest period. They call it active rest, and so international competition for me over the next 12 months won't happen.

"But after my year off, I guess I'll be back trying to decide whether the bikinis fit.

"I've been doing it 16 years now, I haven't had a break and I don't think I could go 20 in a row."

After partnering Tamsin Barnett to a quarter-final exit at this year's Beijing Games, a devastated Cook said she would take stock and announce her future plans after Christmas.

Now Cook has decided to take "active rest", meaning she will train but not compete on the international beach volleyball circuit as she nurtures her beach sports business and sits on the Australian Olympic Committee's big-name Athletes' Commission.

Cook joined Tomkins and fellow Olympic gold medallists Libby Trickett, Clint Robinson and Chantelle Newbery in Sydney today as new members of the 10-person athletes' body, which also includes swimming champion Grant Hackett.

Cook said emulating Tomkins and walking into the Olympic Stadium with the Australian flag was another ambition.

"James Tomkins carried the flag so beautifully in Beijing. I'd love to do that," she said.

Former Oarsome Foursome member Tomkins, 43, notched up Games number six in Beijing and isn't ruling out a seventh Olympics at the age of 46.

"If I'm still able to compete well at the level that I want to," he said today when asked about the prospect. "I won't decide until probably the selections for 2012.

"It's interesting. There's a whole lot of stuff, (cyclist) Lance Armstrong coming back, (Hawthorn AFL player) Shane Crawford, whether he goes on or not.

"There's editorials in the papers about all that sort of stuff and it's like, what right does someone have to say when someone should or shouldn't continue on?"

The commission will deliver athletes' input on issues such as government funding, athletes' welfare and team selection, the prickly problem which threatened to rip apart Robinson's kayaking team pre-Beijing.

"It's because sport is big business and when you get a lot of money and a lot of generated energy and people sacrificing everything in their lives," Robinson said today.

"When they don't (make the team), it's a very hard thing to go, `I've tried for this for 12 years now, I've just got to turn off and walk away'.

"What we need to have a look at, I suppose, is how quick we can make the process.

"So when a sport wants to select their team it happens over a very short window and then the team is selected, the issues are brought up quickly, one panel addresses them and they're gone.

"That's (more) easily said than done and there's a whole lot of legal ramifications of fairness of opportunity etc that go on in this modern Americanised world we live in. "I think it has to be the main aim."

David Beniuk
AAP