Imagine Thierry Henry deciding to leave Arsenal to join Eastbourne Borough.

Sounds like a ridiculous scenario but Sean Baldock has made a similar choice with his athletics career.

Baldock has quit Belgrave Harriers - who won the British Athletics League title for the eighth year in a row last season - to go back to his roots with Hasting AC of the Southern Men's League division two.

It is a drop of five divisions for the 27-year-old who ran in front of 75,000 spectators when the Great Britiain 4x400m relay quartet finished fifth in the magnificent Olympic Stadium in Athens this summer.

Next season Baldock will be lucky if there is more than a handful of hardy souls who turn up to see him compete at a series of windswept local tracks.

The switch is sure to send a shudder down the spines of athletes from Brighton and Hove City AC and Worthing and District Harriers who face the terrifying prospect of lining up against Baldock.

The last time he competed for his home-town club in 1998 he blew the competition away as Hastings clinched promotion to division one of the Southern Men's League.

In the final race of the season Baldock produced a legendary peformance to win the 100m, 200m, 400m and 400m hurdles and was the main reason for victory in the 4x100m and 4x400m relays.

Since then he has gone on to compete against the world's best and boasts gold medals from the Commonwealth Games and European Championships but is looking forward to getting back to more humble surroundings.

Baldock said: "It is something I've been thinking about for the last three years but I've not been able to because I needed to be in European competition.

"I lost a bit of the enjoyment running for Belgrave that I had when I was at Hastings and I think it is vital that I get that back so I have just decided to do it this time, although I am going to find another national league club as well.

"It was great fun when I was last at Hastings because we had such a close team and the camaraderie was a big factor in the success we achieved. I still look back on that last match I competed in for them with fond memories.

"Unfortunately they seem to have lost that a bit in the last few years but hopefully me going back might provide the inspiration to lift the club out of the doldrums."

The move signals a crossroads in a career which has faltered over the past few seasons.

When Baldock became a full-time athlete two years ago he hoped it would lift him to a higher level after going out in the 400m heats at the Sydney Olympics.

It did not go exactly to plan though and after failing to qualify for the individual 400m in Athens he has now decided to get a job to supplement his meagre Lottery funding.

Three days after returning from Greece, Baldock was at the Ridge Fire Station in Hastings to undergo a fitness test and hopes to complete his training in the new year while also starting his own sports massage service.

He has also ditched his coach Mark Gregory, who he has worked with at Eastbourne for the past nine years, to switch to the man who helped Roger Black win Olympic silver, Tony Lester.

It has prompted some to suggest that Baldock is happy to wind down after seven years at the top but he insists nothing could be further from his thoughts.

He said: "There is no question I am still going to be taking athletics seriously and if anything I will be taking it even more seriously than before.

"I had got to the stage where I was making international teams all the time but not reaching my potential so I decided it was time to make some changes.

"I'd been under Mark's wing for a long time and things had started to go a bit stale so I wanted a fresh challenge. Tony is a great coach who rarely takes new athletes on so it shows he has got faith in me.

"I don't see it as a sideways step but as a step forward and if Tony can have the same effect on me as he had on Roger Black then it will have been the right move."