GREAT BRITISH OLYMPIANS

STEVE REDGRAVE

Sheer determination enabled Steve Redgrave to overcome illness and propel himself to an historic fifth gold. By Nick Pitt, Sunday Times

First, the monument. He has won a gold medal at each of the five past Olympic Games: in the coxed four in 1984, the coxless pair with Andy Holmes in 1988 and the coxless pair with Matthew Pinsent in 1992 and 1996, and finally in the coxless four at Sydney, where his fifth gold fulfilled his ambition of being able to "make the Olympic rings in gold medals". He has also, almost as an afterthought, won nine gold medals in world championships and three in Commonwealth Games.

Next, the context. Rowing is a particularly torturous sport. One might imagine that superfit athletes feel on top of the world, but here is Redgrave describing the effects of the training regime he has followed for 49 weeks a year over the past 19 years: "I go round feeling knackered all the time. I have no energy and I’m fighting the margins of being ill and not being ill. I go to dinners and fall asleep. I’m pushing back the boundaries all the time, and training so hard takes a toll on the body. If you feel fit and strong then there’s something wrong. You’re not training hard enough."

And if training is pain upon pain, as dull and deadening as a long prison sentence, racing is a concentrated, exquisite form of self-punishment. Long before halfway on a 2,000m course, lungs and legs scream for mercy; but the brain must deny and ignore them, for each stroke, although wrenched with furious effort, has to be sweet and in harmony.

To win one Olympic gold medal in rowing, therefore, is to have broken the accepted bounds of nature, mental and physical. By winning five, Redgrave has stretched achievement into the realms of obsession, separating himself even from the company of champions. Holmes, who was a fellow member of the coxed four in Los Angeles, and also partnered Redgrave in the Seoul Games, appreciates better than most the gulf that separates the gold medallist and the gold medallist among gold medallists. "After Seoul, I just got out of the boat and walked away from it," he said in 1992, shortly before Redgrave won his third Olympic gold. "Steve just cannot do that. He’ll go on rowing competitively until he drops. He’ll carry on even when he starts to lose regularly. You’ve seen it happen with guys in other sports. They just can’t leave it alone even if they want to."

Holmes, it seemed was right that the obsession could never be sated. For even after his vow in Atlanta never to go near a boat again, Redgrave recanted and aimed for Sydney. Now, after five golds, Redgrave has conceded that his Olympic campaigns are over. But why did he row on after Atlanta? It has been suggested that Redgrave made his decision to row on because he had almost no qualification save as a rower; that he feared getting a job, and feared even more not being able to get a job. Possibly; but much more relevant were the two central pillars of his personality - competitiveness to the point of derangement and monumental stubborness.

Intelligence and charm figure as well, but are irrelevant in his rowing life. Holmes and Redgrave didn’t get on. They spent the best part of eight years in boats together but have hardly spoken since.

Indeed, when they prepared for the Seoul Olympics, they used to arrive separately, train in silence and leave without a word. But it didn’t matter, because sentiment, for Redgrave, is always subordinate to the objective.

It remained so in his partnership with Matthew Pinsent, with whom he happened to get on well, on and off the water. When Redgrave and Pinsent crossed the winning line for their second Olympic gold medal on 27 July 1996, their 59th consecutive race unbeaten, Pinsent took his right hand off his oar and stretched it behind him.

It would have been easier for Redgrave to lean forward to embrace Pinsent, but, still slumped forward after desperately holding on to beat the Australian pair, he at least managed to clasp Pinsent’s hand in his own. That action may have been an acknowledgment of the power Pinsent had produced in extremis, but it also seemed to demonstrate an emotional bond.

Yet four months later, when Redgrave made it known that he was not retiring after all, despite his "anyone who sees me in a boat has my permission to shoot me" speech, he did not tell Pinsent. He told their coach, Jurgen Grobler, and left Grobler to pass on the news. Pinsent, who even after all their years together, admires Redgrave better than he knows him, was close to being flabbergasted. "He had my number," he said.

Redgrave was quite unabashed. "It had nothing to do with Matthew," he said at the time. "It has nothing to do with him what I want to try and do. I want to win a gold medal at the Sydney Olympics. If I’m good enough and he’s good enough, we’ll try to get into a boat, but the key for me is that I have to show that I’m the best or one of the best in the country so that other people want to row with me. It’s not Matthew’s decision, and nor is his involvement part of my decision. It’s just what I want to do."

At Sydney, Pinsent went further in his expression of emotion. After the hard and thrilling race to the line in the final, where the late challenge of Italy’s coxless four was beaten off, Pinsent recovered from the immediate physical trauma and then climbed back through the boat to embrace Redgrave. It was Pinsent’s way of congratulating Redgrave on his unique achievement and of sharing the culmination of everything they had endured and achieved.

Redgrave responded in kind before Pinsent toppled into the water. But while the bond between the men is obvious and mutual, Redgrave remained enigmatic, a man apart, even in the hour of his crowning glory.

"Beforehand, there were things I thought about that I wanted to say to Matthew after the race," he said. "I was pretty knackered and I didn’t really get the opportunity. Those words may come out at a certain time, in time to come, or they may not."

REDGRAVE was born in March 1962, the son of a builder. He attended Great Marlow Comprehensive school, leaving when he was 16 with one CSE, in woodwork. He has since been diagnosed dyslexic. He has always been resolutely unembarrassed about being monosyllabic or even silent when choosing not to engage in conversation or interview. And since his obstinacy can be terrific and his mood occasionally surly, he is sometimes assumed to be thick. But although he rarely bothers to display it, he is sharply intelligent.

It was not his brains, however, but his physiology that marked him from boyhood as a potential champion. His physique, which grew to 6ft 4in and 16st 7lb, and exceptional heart and lung capacity, were made for rowing. Long levers and a big engine.

Curiously, given his anti-social inclinations, extreme competitiveness and supreme blend of power and technique, he never made it as a single sculler. Redgrave made his international debut in the single sculls at the 1979 junior world championships. In 1983, as a senior, he competed in the world championships but performed miserably.

Failure spurs many champions. Redgrave radically changed his training regime, working much harder on endurance, gave up serious sculling and agreed to stroke Britain’s coxed four at the Los Angeles Olympics. He won his first gold medal and started the sequence that has made him the most successful oarsman of any nationality and the most decorated British Olympian in any discipline.

For half his adult life, he has been governed by the four-year cycle of the Olympic calendar. After Los Angeles, Redgrave teamed up with Holmes to attempt the near impossible - winning gold medals in two events, the coxless and coxed pairs. This involved rowing eight races in seven days, including both semi-finals on the same day. In the 1987 world championships, they won gold in the coxless pair and silver in the coxed pair. The following year, in the Seoul Olympics, they doubled up again, winning gold and bronze. Typically, Redgrave remembers Seoul for the bronze rather than the gold.

In 1990, Redgrave found his perfect partner, Pinsent. Since Redgrave’s pre-eminence was already established, it was widely assumed that Pinsent, who joined Redgrave as a 19-year-old, was lucky because the best pair in the world was Redgrave and anybody. That was deeply unfair to Pinsent, especially later in the partnership, by which time Pinsent had become the most formidable oarsman in Britain. Pinsent’s progression coincided with Redgrave’s physical decline, but both processes were relative. Together, at their peak, they were virtually invincible.

There was an aura of invincibility about them that Pinsent and Redgrave worked hard to create and sustain. At regattas, they strode around grim-faced, gunslingers on assignment; on the water, they destroyed their rivals, beating them so often and by such margins that when they lined up for the finals of championships and Olympics, the mental job was done: one pair was rowing for gold; the rest had been conditioned to accept that they were scrapping for silver.

For two decades, Redgrave’s existence was defined and measured by the Olympic cycle. All that ultimately mattered in his sporting and working life was the six minutes and a bit of each Olympic final. So exclusive and precise was his focus on the summit that all that preceded it, though necessary, was somehow unreal. When he at last lined up for the final, the projection and the reality merged and he was never more alive or ready. Afterwards, he was lost.

"By the time we’d had the medal ceremony, the drug tests and the interviews it was well into the afternoon," he said, describing the aftermath of triumph in the Barcelona Games. "The heat was intense. My family had gone back to the house where they were staying and I went to my room in the athletes’ village, had a shower, sat on the bed, watched a bit of TV and thought...what now? There was a hole in my life after three years of effort."

After Sydney, Redgrave had a similar experience. "It’s very difficult to comprehend what you have done," he said, trying to describe his reaction as he crossed the final line. "It all seems so unreal, but real. A strange feeling."

AFTER his fourth Olympic gold, at the Atlanta Games, Redgrave famously announced his retirement. He soon knew he would carry on, but kept it to himself. "I knew that if I stopped, I would have to keep some sort of fitness going, but because I was carrying on I deliberately did nothing," he said. "I did nothing at all for four months. No running.

Nothing. Because I knew that when I started again it would be hard and I wanted a break. When I did start again, I was halfway through my first endurance weights session, which was really hard, and I thought what the hell am I doing this for, this is stupid. But I was also pleased it was so hard, because it proved that my philosophy for the past 20 years was right - that you can’t afford to have any time off.

"Carrying on was the right thing to do, and the easy thing to do. After a while, it was the routine that I missed, and I realised that I liked going down to Henley and doing the training sessions. I liked knowing where I was on a day-to-day basis and that had gone." Redgrave had chosen to compete in his fifth Olympics. But although he remained the main man in public perception, the balance of influence had shifted. Pinsent was keen for another Olympic campaign, though "not in a pair". Thus, with the addition of Tim Foster and James Cracknell, was the coxed four formed.

But as if training and Olympic competition as a 38-year-old was not sufficiently Herculean a trial, Redgrave was given a further handicap, the onset of diabetes. Health problems were not new to him, for he had suffered from ulcerative colitis shortly before the Barcelona Games.

On that occasion, he recovered his form with astonishing speed once he had been diagnosed and treated. At first, he seemed to be able to cope with diabetes as well, by changing his diet and taking relatively small doses of insulin, but gradually his performances in training deteriorated until he was brought to despair.

"At Christmas in 1997, I was in a very bad way," Redgrave said. "In fact I was pretty close to jacking it all in. I was training hard but not performing. I know how hard it is to be at the top and I didn’t know if I could get back to it. The other guys in the four were way ahead of me and by Christmas I had to train alone and felt very isolated. I went awol for two weeks, which is something I’ve never done before. I just went off skiing, going pretty mad down the black runs. I expected a bollocking from Jurgen when I got back."

He didn’t get one. Redgrave went back to his pre-diabetes diet and took larger doses of insulin. It worked, and he was soon up with the pace set by his three partners. At Lucerne, in the last international regatta before the Sydney Games, the four were narrowly beaten in their semi-final and humiliatingly left trailing in fourth place in the final, six seconds off the pace.

There were two possible explanations for such shocking failure. One, advanced by Grobler, was that the four had over-trained.

The other, which was heretical but widely held, was that Redgrave had become a weak link. In the final trials for Olympic selection, in which Britain’s men’s squad raced in pairs, Redgrave and Pinsent, who had previously won 61 consecutive races together, were easily beaten by Cracknell and Foster. Since Pinsent was undoubtedly the most powerful of the four, it seemed that Redgrave was struggling to cope with the ever-increasing standard.

Later, he admitted there had been hard times. "There have been times when I thought I wouldn’t be here," he said. "I prided myself on consistency over the years and what worried me over the past three years was that the consistency wasn’t there. That has been very difficult to cope with mentally. At times I’ve gone and had meetings with Jurgen, shaken my head and said, ’I’m giving this up, I’m not going to make it,’ but he would always come up with some words that would keep me going for another few days, another week."

Typically, Redgrave turned the struggle to advantage. "I’m a better athlete than I was at any other Olympics," Redgrave said defiantly at Sydney, "because I’m mentally stronger. And that’s because of the hard times."

Even if Redgrave found the rigours of a hard season of racing and training more taxing than before, he still believed he could summon one last glorious effort. Lucerne had been a bitter experience, but by the time he reached Sydney, nearly two months later, he was physically and mentally refreshed. His mood, so grim in Atlanta, was rather light, as if he was determined to enjoy his final Olympic experience to the full. At the British rowing team’s training camp on Australia’s Gold Coast, Redgrave gave a talk to the whole team, urging them not just to compete, but to enjoy every aspect of the Games.

Redgrave’s historic quest had captured not just the imagination of the British public - 7.5m people watched the coxless fours final after midnight - but the good wishes of the world. "Earlier in the week, a New Zealander, an old boy, came up to me and said you’re rowing against my son but I still want you to win," Redgrave said after the final.

The race itself, which produced such tension among onlookers and viewers, who imagined the coxless four from Italy were gaining stroke by stroke to the line, was for Redgrave little more than a satisfactory piece of work.

"We moved into a comfortable lead after 200m, and at that point I knew we would win," he said. The gold medal was presented by the Princess Royal. A special Olympic pin commemorating Redgrave’s achievement in becoming the first athlete of the modern era to win gold medals at five successive Olympic Games was presented by the International Olympic Committee president, Juan Antonio Samaranch. But, fittingly, it was Pinsent who provided the unanswerable verdict: "Steve’s the ultimate Olympian."