Steve Redgrave celebrates with his son Zac after winning the gold medal in the men's coxless four final. Picture: Toby Melville/PA
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Anyone who sees Steve Redgrave in a boat again has my full permission
to knight him. He won his fifth gold medal in five Olympic Games in
the greatest six-and-a-bit minutes of sport any of us will ever
see.
The British coxless four came home in a finish that stretched the
nerves of the spectators to breaking point: God knows what it did to
the poor fellows in the boat: Redgrave, his faithful Indian companion
Matthew Pinsent, partner in two of the previous golds, and the other
two members of the crew, James Cracknell and Tim Foster: names that
deserve to be remembered along with the names of the Boys of 66.
Matthew Pinsent (out of picture), Tim Foster, Steven Redgrave and James Cracknell, in blue, powering their way to victory. Britain won the gold medal ahead of silver medallists Italy and bronze medallists Australia, pictured
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The crew came here after being trounced by three of their Olympic
rival in Lucerne, and rowing is a sport that tends to run to form.
Italy were first that day: and the British crew have been burning for
revenge.
With 1500 metres to go it seemed that the deed was done, but this is a
cruel and killing sport. The lead, all but a second, was slowly
eroding before our eyes: an immaculately timed finishing flourish
from the Italians, and terrible feeling that age had finally withered
the ageless Redgrave.
But the stalkers never quite got there. In a finish of quite appalling
tension, the British crew made it home by 0.38 seconds. It was an
unbelievable performance -- literally impossible to believe that it
was happening before your eyes -- by a a superb crew -- and by man
who must new be considered, without any argument, as the greatest
Olympian there has ever been.
There has always been an epic quality about Redgrave: a man of stern
deeds and mythic silences, and with the gift of a single expression,
enigmatic and heroic. He is the Clint Eastwood of sport: the more
admirable because he is essentially unreadable and unknowable.
The slow unfolding of his story over the past 16 years has been one of
the greatest fascinations in sport. This is not because each Olympic
Games shows different facets of the man: neither he nor his sport are
terribly long on infinite variety.
Redgrave himself once said that things got robotic: “Passion and flair
get drained out of you with training”. And he has been in training
for a long time: since he was 16, and he is now 38.
He has not revealed different qualities, like the colourful-character
types in high profile sports, the sports we watch between Olympics,
the sports that bring us our regular dramatic and televisible
confrontations. Rather, he has revealed the same trait of character
again and again. The amazing thing is not the character trait itself,
but the quantity of it.
It really all comes down to the most commonplace character trait in
professional sport: call it determination, intensity, will to win.
Every athlete at the Olympic Games has got it, all 10,000 and more.
Every person mentioned on the sports pages every day of the year has
got it.
But no one has got quite as much of it as Redgrave, that is the point,
that is the the truly remarkable thing. A few have the same ability
to summon it up for a single occasion, a focusing on the moment as a
burning-glass focuses the sun’s rays. But no one has the same ability
to sustain this will-to-win intensity stuff over years and years and
years.
Hating training. Hating racing. He has confessed that he feels such
terror going into a big race that he asks himself again and again
what the bloody hell is doing it for. Every big race fills him with
the urgent need to do a Marie-Jose Perec flight: every big race ends
up with him doing a Steve Redgrave fight.
Most people will think he was here for the history-making, or the
myth-making of it all: but no. That is the job of those who watch. He
was here for precisely the same reason that he was here the first
time: that desperate, wearisome, incontinent need for victory. It is
almost an affliction.
He as been a full-time oarsman for for 22 years. He has had a thousand
reasons for giving up, including a place in history, and falling ill
with diabetes. But the trouble with Redgrave is that every time he
has a reason, he sees it as an excuse, along the lines of the
dog-ate-my-homework. And people like Redgrave -- insofar as there are
people like Redgrave -- are not big on excuses.
And so he moves off into the sunset, with his CBE and his CSE in
woodwork, off to find his place in the grown-up world at last. It is
probably the hardest thing he has ever done.
SIMON BARNES
The Times
