THE GREATEST CHALLENGE OF ALL
Gold-medal crew: Britain's exhausted coxless four - Matthew Pinsent, Tim Foster, Steve Redgrave and James Cracknell - celebrate their victory in Sydney
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Five Olympic golds, nine world championship golds, 20 years at the top of one of the most brutal competitive activities ever devised, but this was Steve Redgrave's finest hour.
"There have been dark times on the way," he said after forcing his body one last time to apply the power from blade to water to propel his racing craft first across the line. "There were times when I went to our coach, Jurgen Grobler, and said, 'I'm not going to make it'. There were times when I was mentally ready and I had done the training, but the power just switched off. That was hard to cope with."
Later, he confirmed that he had rowed his last Olympic race. "That's it for me. It's over. This was my defining moment," Redgrave said. "I don't even think I will go out in a boat much any more. It's time to find something else to do."
Redgrave was delighted that he had proved his doubters wrong: "I know people were saying I was too old, that I was holding everybody back, but if you look at the facts there is no other British Olympian who has won more medals than me. Now everybody knows that I am the best there is."
This time, Redgrave had to battle not merely his opponents, but the debilitating effects of late-onset diabetes and the passing of time. He found strength once again in his mind. "When I came here, I was a better athlete than at any previous Games," he said. "That's because I'm mentally stronger than before, and that's because I've got through so many hard times to win this medal."
How poignant must the final Olympic row have been. After four Olympiads as the unsmiling iron man, Redgrave had loosened up just sufficiently to savour the experience of his last Games. Indeed, he has looked more relaxed and in better health in Sydney than he has in many years. "I will remember it for the rest of my life," he said. "It has echoes of my first Olympics, 16 years ago. I remember everything from waking up to rowing through the finish line
for my first gold medal. Far from being a blur, it has an extra clarity to it."
Redgrave has always been a doer rather than a sayer, and he was lost for words after the line was crossed. "I had worked out a few things to say to Matthew at the finish," he said. "We've been through a lot of races together and there's a very close bond there. But I was knackered and I didn't get the opportunity to say what I wanted to him. It may come out at some point, or it may not." Pinsent made the gesture anyway, clambering back
through the boat to hug his comrade.
And how liberating must have been that final row, knowing it represented a full stop, the end to it all. And how sweet it was - "special" was the word Redgrave repeated time and again - when he was convinced the gold was secure after only 250m had been covered.
A gold medal, of course, is not won in six minutes, but four years and more of toil. But in a sense that six minutes has been Redgrave's only reality for two decades. He learned to focus on the Olympics so exclusively that world championships hardly mattered. Long before he arrived in person on the start-line for the agonising two-minute wait that precedes the race, he was there in mind.
"Those two minutes will be, bar none, the longest two minutes of a lifetime," Redgrave said when he arrived in Sydney. "People think I'll be in a trance and to some extent I will be, but you still know what's going on around you. And in the boat, you're in your element. You're in control. But I know exactly the point where I'll wish somebody had shot me, as I begged after Atlanta - between 500 and 750
metres. The bad news is that it's a 2,000m race."
At the beginning of an Olympic-standard race, a rower's pulse accelerates to almost 200 beats a minute within 20sec.Pain is uppermost but it does not exclude exhilaration. Pinsent remembers their gold-medal row in Barcelona as being almost transcendental. "I spent three minutes from halfway knowing we were going to win," he recalls.
Redgrave has worked for 20 years for five doses of the six-minute fix of ultimate reality. Each time, the peak of experience has inevitably been followed by a void. After the coxless pairs final in Barcelona, Redgrave went to his room in the athletes' village. "I had a shower, sat on the bed and watched TV and thought, 'What now'?" he said. "There was a hole in my life." That hole was temporary. The
present one is permanent.
Yesterday in Sydney, Redgrave made no comment about his plans in the immediate aftermath of the race: "I spent four years regretting what I said after Atlanta and I've learned my lesson. You're not going to get any famous quotes from me today."
Soon after deciding to row in Sydney after all, he said: "I won't compete when I'm in my 40s. No ifs and buts about that: 40 is a big barrier for an athlete.
"It doesn't worry me what happens after 2000," he has insisted. "I could give up now and be very happy with what I've achieved," he said in 1991. "But what would I do? I've never had a proper job."
Teaching others to follow him would be hard. How could he understand the psychological and physical failings of the less gifted? "The problem with coaching at international level is that the coaches put in the same commitment as the athletes, and it's commitment I want to get away from," he said.
With a single GCE in woodwork, Britain's most decorated sportsman is almost unqualified outside the field he must leave. Offers of celebrity appearances will not be in short supply, but he will soon tire of them. At 18, not knowing what you're going to do with the rest of your life is a headache; at 38 with the whole world watching, it's a challenge of Olympian proportions.
NICK PITT
Sunday Times
