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Saturday, September 16

IS REDGRAVE BRITAIN'S FINEST SPORTING HERO?

Other great Olympians

THE man is dyslexic and a diabetic, but personifies Olympic determination. The question of valuing the achievement of Steven Geoffrey Redgrave was answered simply by the man who was first to embrace him after the race. "The ultimate Olympian," said Matthew Pinsent. And since this was Pinsent's third Olympic gold with Redgrave, who would argue?

"Every day is history, isn't it," shrugged Redgrave when, at 38, his body had finally recovered from the pain, spent the last ounce surely of his Olympic perseverance. "Once it's past, it's past."

He can't expect to get away with that. In the end - if this is the end - Redgrave is a monument to his own obsession. But when we as a nation recover our equilibrium, when our pulses stop racing, how will we judge him?

In terms of going back again and again to the pool of pain, of working 20 years, 364 days a year, combating illness, doubt and putting everything, even family, second, Redgrave stands alone. I had considered Al Oerter, the American who won four consecutive discus golds between 1956 and 1968, as the greatest competitor I had seen. "These are the Olympic Games, and you die for them," Oerter so memorably said at Tokyo in 1964. He won gold just days after tearing a rib muscle. "No amount of money, no amount of power, no position in life can equal the Olympic experience," he declared.

If Redgrave were so eloquent, so thoughtful, so deep, he might echo those words. But whereas Oerter was at his prime also a career man, Redgrave has done nothing since he left school, with a solitary GCE in woodwork, other than pull an oar better than any other human being.

He now eclipses, from his own sport, Jack "Jumbo" Beresford's achievement of three gold and two silver, his last gold also coming at the age of 38, in Berlin in 1936. We have had Paul Elvstrom, a Danish yachtsman, and Aladar Gerevich, a Hungarian sabre fencer, also on four successive golden Olympics.

But I have shared a dreadful winter's morning, from seven o'clock until well after lunch, observing the extreme ferocity with which Redgrave has pushed his somewhat contradictory body, every day bar Christmas Day for every year he has been an adult. I heard, as doubtless the world did, the eldest of his three children, nine-year-old Natalie, assert on Friday: "This is daddy's last race. He means it this time." Does he? His doctor wife Ann dare not contemplate the truth of it.

Yet in our country we have seen, I submit, a more complete athlete: Daley Thompson, the 1980 and 1984 decathlon victor. Then there was Seb Coe. Coe "failed" at his choice event, the 800m. He "only" took the silver behind Steve Ovett in Moscow. Yet a couple of days later there, and in Los Angeles, Coe, who had himself overcome debilitating and frightening illness, won the Olympic 1,500m.

Redgrave's life has been remorseless; the agony of withdrawal will test him possibly more than any other competitor. And when the pages of history equate his worth, he is in the company of Mark Spitz, Bob Beaman, Carl Lewis, Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens and - for he, too, was an Olympian - Cassius Clay, alias Muhammad Ali.

Coe said Redgrave "has transformed rowing and taken it into people's homes. But Martin Cross, a partner in Redgrave's first winning Olympic boat, the coxed fours in 1984, found the ultimate accolade: "Steve has had the strength of Geoff Capes, the athletic ability of Michael Johnson, and the racing brain of Michael Schumacher."

If that is true, then unequivocally, Steve Redgrave is the greatest.

ROB HUGHES
Sunday Times