Surrounded by the snow and ice at Vancouver's Winter Olympics, veteran beach volleyballer Natalie Cook decided she wasn't quite finished with the sun and sand.

The Vancouver setting couldn't be further removed from Bondi Beach, where she and then-partner Kerri Pottharst famously won beach volleyball gold during the 2000 Sydney games.

Cook, 35, had been weighing her options since the 2008 Beijing Olympics but says a trip to the Winter Games, where she watched Lydia Lassila and Torah Bright win gold for Australia, helped make up her mind to press on to the London Olympics in 2012.

"I spent two weeks watching on the sidelines and thought `I should get back into this'," Cook told AAP from the Gold Coast.

"I can't stay away.

"It was 50-50 there for a while. I was enjoying not having to train, but I missed the competition."

Cook said London would definitely be her last Games.

"I'd love to play in Brazil (in 2016). Obviously Rio is where the sport really happens.

"But London will be the last and I'll give everything I've got into this campaign."

She and her Beijing Games partner Tamsin Barnett are reuniting as a team, with Barnett returning to competition after having a baby in September.

Cook and Pottharst won a bronze medal in her Olympic debut at Atlanta in 1996. If she qualifies for the London 2012 team, she will join an elite club in Australian sport.

Thirteen Australian men have competed at five or more summer Olympics but no women, while aerial skier Jacqui Cooper competed in her fifth Winter Olympics at the Vancouver Games last month.

Cook said Cooper had set an inspiring example to follow.

"She does a dangerous sport where you could at any time hurt yourself, and she has," she said. "I thought if she could do it, I could."

Patrick Caruana
AAP