An Amazing Career

Article reprinted with kind permision of Henley River and Rowing Museum.

Five gold legend Steve Redgrave first crossed an Olympic line first on Lake Casitas in Los Angeles. He did it again at Seoul's Han River basin, again on Lake Banyoles near Barcelona, and again on Lake Lanier in Atlanta.

His first international medal was a junior silver in 1980, and to date he has also won nine world titles, three world cups, three Commonwealth titles, and a staggering 19 Henley medals. Just as his mum Sheila has seen them all as chief cheerleader on the finish line, I have watched them all for the Guardian from the press stand. What is impressive about this dyslexic giant first put into a boat by Francis Smith, his English master at Great Marlow school, is his single-minded intelligent approach to achieve the ambition he set himself as soon as he took his first tentative strokes in a sculling boat on the Thames: to become an Olympic champion. He achieved it first when he was 22 in a coxed four, after several attempts under the Marlow coach Mike Spracklen to get to the top in sculling.

Injury and failure in 1983 was a turning point. He recognised that in rowing you do not start the season where you left off in the last. There is no escape from the grind and the work load, however much talent you may have as an all-rounder or however much ability as an oarsman.

Since that magic moment when the 1984 coxed four came out of the mist on Casitas and drove past the Americans with Redgrave in the stroke seat, he has determined with whom he rows and by whom he is coached. In the winter of 1987 Andy Holmes and he met in a greasy spoon in Putney and agreed to row a pair to Seoul, with Spracklen coaching. After Holmes, Redgrave found Simon Berrisford, a partnership which ended in 1989 in Berrisford's back injury.

The Pinsent era began with bronze in Tasmania in 1990, followed by gold in Vienna in 1991. Since then the two of them have won a world or Olympic title every year.

Sydney's final was the four's fourteenth race this year, bringing the total distance raced to approximately 300 kilometres (the Henley course is longer than the standard 2000 metres). Redgrave has raced that distance or more every year since 1980, and the training workload on and off the water far exceeds it. That is the measure of the man, his love affair with the river, his commitment to two or three sessions a day from October to September, his focus for the last four years on September 23 in Sydney.

That is what he expects those who row with him to share. That is what has produced an unprecedented record and awe-inspiring performances in Henley and Lucerne as well as at world and Olympic venues. The signature tune of everything he and Pinsent have shared has been economy - do just enough to win, with consequent thrills and a notable spill. Redgrave crews are not always a pretty sight, but when it comes to moving boats, he is a prime mover, at one time the prime mover.