5 Time Olympic Gold Winner Sir Steve Redgrave Talks Mindset, Success and Mental Health

Steve, are you the greatest sports person that's ever lived?

I'm probably the greatest sports person to live in Marlow.

It's nice.

Very, very nice town. It's nice for you to come down to it. Yeah. No, I started my rowing career from great Marlowe School, which is just probably about a mile away from here, and we weren't a rowing school. And the head of the English department, a guy called Francis Smith, happened to be the captain at Marlow Rowing Club, and his loves was rugby and rowing. We were a football school, so he didn't really do either of those sports. And he used to look at the intake of students and if they had big hands and feet, he would ask them to row. So I was one of those heavily dyslexic, so didn't enjoy school very much, but loved sports. And one of our teachers is saying, well, why don't you come and. Come and leave school for an afternoon on a Wednesday, go down to the river and try rowing, and fell in love with it within two weeks. And as I say, that's where it all started.

And how old were you then?

13, nearly 14. A couple of weeks before my 14th birthday.

Right. Why is good, big feet good for rowing?

You've got big hands and feet as a youngster, you're likely to grow into a big person.

Right.

And rowing is a leverage sport. So what it looks like and what it feels like in a boat is that you're pulling the oar through the water. That's not what's happening. The blade goes in the water, that's the fixed point, and then you're levering the boat past that position. Yes. So the taller you are, the further you can reach, the more you're moving your boat per stroke. So there's other factors in it of how many strokes per minute you're doing, but when you get to international level, or even of good domestic level, everyone's rating about the same strokes per minute. So if you can row a slightly longer stroke than the person next to you, you're going to be moving your boat that little bit. So if you think along the riverbank of putting lots of pegs and you're reaching out and you're putting your blade onto one of those pegs, then you're levering that boat past. If you can reach to the next one, you're moving your boat that much more right now.

You were very humble and palmed off my question about being the greatest sports person that's ever lived, but I lived through your five gold medals that surely is unprecedented to do it in the consecutive Olympics over such a long period of time.

It's pretty unusual, sort of a muscular endurance sport to be able to compete at five Olympics. I know one or two athletes that have competed at six. They didn't get gold at all. They didn't get gold at all of them. Then you got somebody like Michael Phelps who's got 22 plus gold medals, but he competed at four. It was an interesting story in I think it was Beijing. I love the track cycling so I was commentating on the rowing and I went on to track sighting. Tuck found a little corner. They have corner corners in a velodrome. It's all round but anyway sort of tucked away and watching the cycling. And we won the team pursuits that day and the journalists were just leaving and walked past me and spotted me and one of them came rushing up to me. What do you think about Bradley Wiggins? If they get a medal tomorrow, then he goes past you as the most decorated British Olympian. I didn't know I had that title.

Oh, wow.

So I had that title for eight years. I didn't realize I had it. And I'm thinking, well, I've been told 24 hours before somebody takes it actually they didn't meddle. And so I had it for another four years before he meddled a couple of times in London. But yeah, so I'm fifth, fifth or sixth on the all time medal tally for Great Bruin and all the people above me are cyclists and probably do.

More events than you.

Yeah, that's one of the things with cycling. You can do multiple events. One of those is Chris Hoy. I think he's second on the list. Bradley's third. Laura Kenny is fourth, I'm fifth and it's Jason Kenny at the top. So there's two. Kenny's above me and yeah, so of Jason and Chris have got six, I think Bradley's got five. But other, other medals as well. But Chris won three. Good, good friend of mine, lovely guy. Chris got three golds in London, but he also did four games as well.

Do you ever just sometimes sit and think of the scale of your achievements?

I'm a glass half empty, not glass full.

Right.

So I look back and think of the things that what could have happened, not what happened.

You couldn't have done any more Olympics, could you? I mean you were pretty done on that last one.

I missed out of going to the Moscow Games for political reasons. That's when the Soviet Union went into Afghanistan with their troops and that was looked upon as being the bad thing, even though we did it five years later and that was seen to be the right thing to do. So politics plays a big part within sports. The Americans, the West Germans, New Zealand boycotted those Games. We were given the choice. I was an 18 year old, so I was still a junior at that point. But we'd made selection in a normal Olympic year that we would have gone. And so we missed off of going to those Games because our funding got cut because most of our funding comes from American based companies and they all withdrew. So a lot of disappointment there, but I don't think I would have won. I know I wouldn't have won there. So there is one nicer of going to five games and winning a gold medal at each of them. The director at the Institute of Directors was a rower and he was the chairman of selectors. When I was going to my first games and he got me to speak at the Albert Hall. They have a big conference every two years at the Albert hall and they got me to speak at the end of my career, I stood up and gave a motivational talk to start with. And then he interviewed me again. So he introduced me the first time and introduced me the second time. The second time he introduced me, he said I used to row and I was the chairman of selectors. He said, this is to the whole audience, how do you think I feel? I was the chairman of selectors that didn't select Steve Redgrave to go to the Moscow Games. Every Games he went to, he won a gold medal. He says, how stupid do you think I feel now?

So if you say you're a glass half empty kind of person, do you think that, let's call it a philosophy, was what drove you to be successful? Because you would. You had to keep going because it was never full.

It's not as simple as that. Not as simple as that. Matt Pinson is a glass half full. And we rode with each other for 10 years. Yeah. And the way and you see this through sports people, probably business and other areas as well, is that different things drive the people so that for me it was, this is not good enough. We've got to do this better if we're going to win the next World Championships, Olympics, the next race, we've got to do this, this and this. And when I started rowing with Matthew is that I was the one sitting behind him. So I was doing the one that was doing, doing most, most of the talking. There's not a lot of talking when you're racing because it's pretty strenuous but it's sort of a few grunts and he let me know quite early on he's saying that doesn't work for me. So I had to change the way that I looked at it. What he wanted to know was when things were going well, that's the really good thing. This is what we're going to be looking for instead of mine sort of pushing from the other way. And I think that if you draw a line of positive negative is that I would have been just slightly on the negative side and Matthew was slightly on the positive side side and I think that was a really good balance when we did the four with James Cracknell and Tim Foster is. James Cracknell is probably the most negative athlete you would ever meet in your life. He's just on a, on that scale on a different planet. But then Tim was the complete opposite. He was so laid back, so easy going and every training session we have a briefing before we go out of what we're trying to achieve. So in the days that we're rowing in the forest, you've got a set purpose of what you're trying to achieve out that one session and then we have a debriefing and always James will be the first one to speak. This isn't good enough. How are we going to beat the Australians? How are we going to do this? If we're going to do this, this and this and then Matthew and I may say something and then Tim being so laid back would be the last person he's saying. But yeah, but this bit went really well and that's what we're trying to do. And actually you walked away with a positive feeling on the whole process once I retired. Tim Foster retired at the same time after the Sydney Games in 2000 and Matt and James carried on for another four years and they went into a pair and then you've got one that's slightly on the positive side and one really, really negative. And after a while I think it was the mechanics of that that broke that down. They ended up rolling in a four. They, they were very successful, held the world record in the pair but it just sort of went awry a year before the next games in Athens and they ended up going in a slightly different record. Successful, very successful. But yeah, it's easy to put things what sports people want and I've done a lot of mentoring to other sports is that they want put things in boxes. If I do this, this and this, I'll achieve this.

It's easier to work things out, isn't it?

No, exactly. And there's nothing wrong with that. But of going to five Olympic Games and winning a gold medal, each one of them is that they're all different. They're all different for different reasons. And it's much more complicated than of the simple things. Well, if I do this training, I do these races and I do this and I'm going to get a gold medal. You can do all that and not get the gold medal. You could do half that and get a gold medal. There are so many complications, twists and turns, processes, that you try to be very methodical about your training and preparation and leave no stone unturned. But the reality is you still got to get there. You still got to be able to do it, and. And then you need to produce it on the day. I'm a keen bad golfer, and one of the sayings in golf is beware of the injured golfer, because if they're nursing an injury of some sort, then they're not probably going at harder, as sometimes they might have done, pushing to things extreme, and sometimes they get a better performance out of it because they're being a little bit more cautious than not. But as athletes, I suppose business people would look at it in the same process in some ways is that it's all about the process. It's very boring. It's nothing exciting. Is that people want sort of the magic gold dust to be sprinkled and this is what's going to do it. You have some of this and you can't lose. Yeah, it's not like that, unfortunately.

No. Okay. So I acknowledge some things there because I love to try and distill success. I'm an entrepreneur and always trying to find the shortest route to the best outcome. I acknowledge you. So it's different for different people. So let's just talk about you then. If you could say maybe three things because you said there's not one that you would say were the biggest determinants in your success.

Preparation, as I just said that, leaving no stern unturned. When I went for my fifth Olympics, people were saying, oh, he's got this desire to win five gold medals. It's all about five. Five does play a big role in. In my life now probably because of. Of winning the. The fifth Olympics. But to me, I was going for a gold medal that I didn't have. It was the only one that mattered, as it did four years before in Atlanta. And people say, oh, what happens if you've gone more games too far and you didn't win, could you cope with that? It depends what reasons you lost for. If I lost because I didn't prepare properly and put everything I possibly could into achieving the results that we had and then got beaten somebody you got to put your hands up or ask sport as they get out the boat, shake their hands and congratulate them. And so it's down to your own efforts. If I'd missed some training sessions or not trained as consistently and been as ruthless in the preparation for doing it, and it was in my hands that I didn't do something that could have made the difference is that I'd been mortified if I'd lost in that situation. But if somebody's performed better than you just got to shrug your shoulders, obviously disappointed. But hopefully you got another day to come back and put it right. But that's one of the problems with the Olympics is it's once every four years. Most people only get one chance to go to the Olympic Games. A lot of people do two. It's unusual for people to do three. And then the further you go up, obviously the rarer it is because it's four years. When I won my first Olympic gold medal in la is that the previous gold medal in rowing was a journalist at that time, from 1948. And he came up to me, shook my hand, he said, you're world champion for one year, you're Olympic champion for life. And that really does sum it up is that of because it only happens once every four years, is that the opportunities of getting it right on that one day are so much harder than it is for World championships, which we have a world championships every year apart from Olympic year. So dedication, focus, making sure that of no stones unturned to try and get that success. Is that what happens within sport and probably happens within business as well, is that you learn from your mistakes, you try and put them right, but in four years time the athletes are going to be faster, they're going to be better. We work to what we call gold medal times, or certainly for the second half of my career. The rowers are still doing it now. So we predict in the perfect rowing conditions for each category of boat of what time you need to do to be to break the world record. And your predicted times are normally quicker than the world record. So you're trying to achieve something that nobody else has achieved and that's your goal. And then every time you race, of course you're looking to try and achieve that time. Every training session you're doing is you're working to a percentage of that. So if you're doing low intensity endurance work, you're working to 70 to 75%. Well, those goal times get, get refreshed every four years and they don't get slower, they get faster. And so that in the next Olympiad, when you're doing your 70 to 75% of low rate training, your boat speed has got to be faster because obviously the end goal is, is faster. A story that I've used a great deal and I love it from. It's very, very old. There's a guy called John Naber, he's an American swimmer and he went to the Munich game 72 and he was part of the American relay team and he helped the team qualify for the final. You're allowed six people in, in a squad of a relay, but there's only four that swim in the race. And he helped that team qualify. People like Mark Spitz then came in at those Games. Mark Spitz was my Olympic hero. He won seven gold medals at those games and all of them were in world record times. But John came out of that very proud of what he'd done of getting the team qualified. But he said in Montreal, in four years time, I'm going to win that team gold and I'm going to try and win the individual gold. So he came out and he looked back through the record books and he noticed that all the fastest times were increasing on a year to year basis. So he felt he could predict a time that the gold medal would be won in Montreal, which was 55.5 seconds. He was 100 meters. Backstroke was his main individual discipline. And so he's got a time that he feels that's going to win the gold medal. His problem was his personal best was 59.5 seconds. So he's got four seconds to go faster in four years of swimming on his back. And he thought, I can't do that. That's just ridiculous. I can't go that, that fast. And nearly gave up the sport from it. So by trying to get his motivation, his planning and how he did it, but then he realized, he said, I've got four years to do this. I don't have to do this today. That's the second year that is still a huge ask to do it. He used to train for 10 months. That's 1/10 of a second in a month's training. Roughly 30 days in a month. That's 1, 300 a second. He used to train four hours a day, every day. 11200 of a second. He's looking for an hour of training. Now an eye takes 5, 1200 seconds, 1200th of a second to blink. So he's looking for 1/5 of an eye blink in an hour's training. Of course you can find something that's going to be able to do that. Obviously the difficult side of it, you got to do that of every hour, of every day, of every month, of every year. He got through to the games. He was part of the relay team. He won the gold medal in the relay team. He made the final of the men's 100 meters backstroke, lining up against the two time Olympic champion, world record holder, Olympic record holder. He took the gold medal in a time of 55.49 of a second. So taking the impossible, what seemed to be four years before impossible and the of looking it in a slightly different way and breaking it down into bite sized chunks, that's the way of doing it. When I retired in my press announcement I said that I was going to raise £5 million for children's causes in five years. Sorry I said a bit earlier, the number five seems to have linked around me and it just sort of rolled off my tongue. And then I thought, how the hell am I going to do that? I thought, oh, the John Napper story, let's break it down into chunks. So I started breaking it down and worked out that it's if I had two weeks off a year from not raising any Money that's of £20,000 a week that I've got to try and raise and I can't do that. Every time I saw a clock I saw ticking away of what falling behind the target. So by using the story, but using in a different way is that we decided that we'd do five big events and that's where we were going to try and raise a lot of money. So one year I did the London Marathon three times. But in 2006 I went to attempt to break the world record for the amount of money raised by an individual running a marathon anywhere in the world. I got into the Guinness Book of Records for doing it of 1.8 million that we raised on that one day. And so it's still based on the John Naber story, but almost flipped completely. So you can adjust things to suit what you need to do. So it's about setting targets and trying to get that target. And when you're trying to do something that nobody else has ever done, you're breaking new ground. So you've got to have fresh thinking. You've got to look at things that somehow of Dave Brailsford, who took the cycling team to amazing results here, he always talked about marginal gains. He was always looking at the small increments. You can do that for a period of time and that gets you success. But then sometimes in England, rugby, didn't he? No, totally. Clive's a great thinker out the box and looking at things at different ways. When you're trying to do what hasn't been done, doing what people have been doing to get there. May work, probably won't, but probably won't. You've got to find different ways of doing it. You've got to reinvent yourself. So over my career, I had to reinvent myself probably three times. First of all, we weren't scientific about it. My coach was actually from Marlow, a guy called Mike Spracklin. He was a lightweight rower before there was lightweight rowing. So he. He had to be fitter. He had to be a better technique because he was giving away size and leverage every time he raced. So he had to have every other department better than anybody else to give himself a chance. And so you got a coach like that of looking at very fine details from that. But he never wrote a training program. Not in those days that I was with him. I was with him for a good few years. We won two Olympic gold medals together. He was to come down to the training sessions. Right, okay. I think what we're going to do now is of 16, 500-00, that was one of these training sessions, mad ones that he used to do. No, they might be four thousands or we're going to do some endurance work. It was never written down. He never had a training schedule. Mike went off to coach in Canada. He was a volunteer coach in those days when he was coaching me. And he got offered a paid post in Canada. He helped them go and win Olympic gold medals. And we had a guy called Jurgen Grober that came from former East Germany here. Now. His was all about structure. He had a training program written for four years and I thought it was going to be very regimented. But actually, quite early on he came along to. I was speaking to some of the young rowers and tell them about my career of planning and structure, starting from a dream and how you're going to get that. And Jurgen spoke a bit late and you thought, okay, this is going to be very regimented, very fixed. And one of the things he said, he said, I'm going to learn so much more from Steve than Steve's going to Learn from me. He's got two Olympic gold medals already. His philosophy, the way he goes with things, I'm going to learn from that. And as a coach, instead of saying, you've got to do this, this, and this, and this is what's going to get, he was all about expanding his own mind, how he could be even better than he was when he was in East Germany. He helped the East German women's team win 28 gold medals. There's nobody in any sport that has got a record of Jurgen at Olympic level. And he was still hungry to work out how to get even better than what he was doing.

Do you not think it's completely mad? Cause I do. I watched your last race and, like, the whole of the country went, come on. And how much did you win by? Because it was, like, tiny amount, wasn't it?

0.38 of a second.

So does it not blow your mind that you do four whole years? Especially as you've broken it down for us, you can plan those four whole years and it's that much of a margin?

Yeah, we race over 2000 meters. So the Cox is four. It's just under. Under six minutes. So you're racing for six minutes and.

Training for four years.

Training for four years. Two to four training sessions a day, a day off, once every three weeks, if you're lucky. And so it's a lot of time, a lot of dedication goes into that one moment. And that's tough. And that's what makes sports so special in some ways, is that rowing's relatively a predictable sport. If you win the first international regatta, if nobody's made any major mistakes, the likelihood you're going to win the next and the next. But what you're doing is you're conditioning your opposition that they're going to come second when you get to that big race. Of course they're thinking. They're thinking, okay, if Redgrave gets it slightly wrong and we get it right, we've got a chance. And so, yeah, but the conditioning of when, especially when I was rowing with Matt Pinson, is that we always wanted to try and win a race as anybody's trying to win the race. But we also wanted to do it in a manner that it was conditioning whoever we're racing and people were watching that potentially we could be racing, is that we win races. So when they're racing to us and it gets into that third 500, when you're gasping for breath, your lungs are burning, your legs are throbbing, when you doubt yourself mentally, then you look across and they say, oh, we've got the four times Olympic or three times Olympic. Oh yeah, no, they're gonna win. That's when the race is won or lost.

Wow. And did you ever at any point, especially in that race, feel so done? You didn't even know you were going to get to the line because when like obviously it's big folklore in this country now. When you did that interview, you could hardly stand up. Everyone could see you'd put. That was. Your whole life was put into that.

Steve Ryder was a presenter and there was a hell of a lot of build up to it. My first Olympic gold in La Des Lyneham was at his desk and as the old grandstand would sort of flip from one sport to another. And our build up to that Olympics was that, oh, we've got a chance of a medal at the rowing basin. We're going over to Gerald Stinsat now, Lake Cocitus. And there we were on the start of our race. That was our build up from that race. Yes, we went on and won a gold medal in Sydney. Sixteen years later, when I'm going for my fifth Olympic gold medal is that. It was weeks.

Everyone take the day off.

There was a series of shows that were. We self filmed, three one hour programs leading into it. James nearly flipped out because in our block in the village is that we had a British Olympic office underneath they had a big TV with live streaming from UK and there's a countdown to our race. And this is just crazy. This is rowing. Nobody takes any notice of rowing, but it came to be one of the sort of the biggest things. I think it was the second biggest at that time, the second biggest watched moment in the UK, second to the moon landing in 69. There wasn't that many TVs at that time. And you're just thinking this is just crazy. But that's somebody else doing that. That's not what we're doing. And James came down and said, oh, we've got 36 hours before the four go for gold and Steve Redgrave going for his fifth. The tales that people. Nobody watches rowing. It's a very boring sport. It captures the imagination at the Olympics. 2012 was incredible. Literally just a few miles away from where we're sitting now. And somebody said to me after, he says, that was just fantastic. Why isn't there more rowing on the tv? It's just so exciting. Says the BBC have shown the World Championships live or as live every year since 1981. People don't watch it, but Once it comes to the Olympics, it was. There were 35,000 people watching at the venue.

This is your humility coming out again, though, because we were watching the story of you, not just rowing, but that's.

The whole thing about it. And that's where, that's where our sport, that's where our sport gets it wrong. You probably wouldn't notice this, but it's, it's something that I've noticed is that when you get your medals, what do you stand on?

Podium.

Exactly. Have you noticed the podium at rowing?

No.

No. The sport, many years ago took the decision that everybody's equal. So if everyone's equal, you.

Sounds like the school system.

Sport for all. It's a great system. Doesn't always work. No. So everyone's equal. So you all stand at the same level. But surely if you're giving some people gold medals and some silver and some bronze, isn't that a status? It is absolutely crazy. And I was speaking to the new chief executive of World Rowing literally two weekends ago, and he didn't realize that we don't stand at a podium at rowing. Every other sport does.

Yeah.

Canoeing use the same venue. For us, they have a podium, we don't. It's weird, but. Yeah, but that's the sort of, the principle, and that's where we get it wrong as a sport, is that the promotion of the sport is about the sport, but it's about the individuals. So our sport is going through a little bit of turmoil at the moment. We're always under pressure for our Olympic status. But there's something pure about rowing. It crosses over the boundaries of, of power and endurance. So you've got to have the stamina of a middle distance long distance runner. But you've got to have the spree, the speed of a sprinter and you've got to pull that into the same, into the same race. Yeah, it's equivalent to something like the 1500 meters on the track. But at Olympics you get tactical races. You don't get tactical races in rowing because you're going backwards. It's always a bit odd. Anyway, so where on cycling you're better off being tucked up behind it? Same with on the track. If you're running behind somebody. Yes. You're being sheltered by the wind, it's not a huge difference from that. But then somebody can make a kick and go past the person in front and the time they've realized it, they can't respond to it. So it's a timing element. In rowing, if you're out in front you can see your opposition, you can see everybody from one side to the other. So it's an advantage to be out in front. So we blast off the start as hard as we can. We settle into a pace that we feel that we can maintain through the middle without dying at the end. And if we have anything left, we can then build it to the finish. And so our tactics are slightly different. Nobody thinks, oh, okay, we know that these three are going to go through here, so we'll just take it easy. And yeah, okay, they've got the better sprint, so they'll win, but we'll save our energy to final. You give all every time and that's the crazy thing about it. But in the promotion of it, it's about the crew. So the Germans used to dominate the eights. Great. Britons won the Olympics this year. New Zealand won last time. But if you're in that eight, it was about the German eight, it's about the Kiwi eight, it's about the British eight. You can't name one individual out of those crews. I probably could one or two, but not all of them. So the sport is trying to change its view. So we've lost the lightweight categories at the Olympics. They only came in in Atlanta anyway, so they haven't been in the sport very long. But we were going to lose those places. So they've started what they call beach sprints, which are going to be in la and they call that rowing, which is you start from a beach, you run. Sorry, I'm a diabetic. That's my insulin pump saying I've got to change it in a few hours time. No, no, we don't need to stop at all. But I can explain there. But yeah, I have to change my insulin pump which is on my arm every three days and it's up for change today. So it's just, just reminding me it's very useful for me and I can't turn it off. Everything else is on silent. But of not that, but. So they've introduced these beat sprints and it will be in la. It's good from point of view of a new sport is that because rowing, because of the stammer, because of the length that we race over, it's difficult having international courses where Beach Prince, you can find a beach anywhere. And what they run down to the water, they jump into a boat, they row out 250 meters, they row back, they jump out of the boat, they, they run on the beach and press a buzzer and that's the new rowing that's going to be the savior of our sport. The thing is that they only do it in two categories in singles and in doubles. And so you're promoting the individual. When I rode in the four in LA 40 years ago and we won the gold medal, I stepped into that crew just two months before the games. I've been in the squad the whole time, but I was in a single sculler. And if you're in a single sculler, you're known as Redgrave. That's Steve Redgrave in that boat. If you're in the pair that may be Redgrave in Holmes or Redgrave in Pinston or whoever it may be doing that event. The bigger the boat goes, the more it becomes under the country's flag. So when we rode in the fore in la, it was a cox force. There were five, five of us into it. One of the guys had got a world championship bronze medal. Another one of the guys, Martin Cross, has got an Olympic bronze medal and a couple of world championship medals on the back of that. I stepped into it on day one media wise that became Red Grace four because I was known as my name from single sculling. And this is where we get it wrong. And again talking to the chief executive and saying, well, this is really good. The jeopardy that we don't know because of the waves that are going through, because of the different elements getting into the boat, things could go wrong. That's not the pure sport that rowing is over 2,000 meters. It's more of a.

Doesn't support. Need to evolve.

No.

Yeah, because golf's going through a similar change.

Yes, it is. But the fundamentals. The fundamentals are there.

Yeah.

And it's about the individuals, it's about the name. So that what they're saying is that rowing's boring because we can predict who's going to win the medals before they've raced. And the chances are that.

Yeah, but the public can't.

But it depends how interested in how much you follow.

Yeah, but the British public, if we knew you were going to win, it wouldn't have been as exciting. No one. No one was dead, sir.

No, exactly. But that's the whole thing about sport. And that's where the Olympic sport. Exactly. And that's the whole thing. And I spun it around just like you did there to me. Call me a bit by surprise. I span it around and I'm saying, well, you've got thousands of people that watch tennis. They're watching the same people win each week for the last 20 years, the 17 years, you know that Djokovic is going to be there or thereabouts because it's a name, it's something you can focus on. Oh, it's the German eight, it's the New Zealand eight, it's the British four. It's that you're known as something else. You need what they call personalities. You don't need a personality, but you need a name to pin on it that the public and media can spin to evolve. That it's not just about of having different winners because, oh, you just happened to hit that wave the wrong way or you caught the water because the water was too rough on the lane that you had. To me, sport should be about of who's done it than the luck towards it. Speed skating. Speed skating at the Winter Games long distance, traditional track I think is absolutely fascinating. It's about preparation, it's about the physical demands of being able to do those sports. But then short track skating came in. The Olympic champion could be taken out on the first bend. It's the jeopardy side of it. It's about instant thing it's about, is about social media, it's about, it's all about here and now than actually of the fundamental of principles and processes through that within rowing. Companies like Deloitte's will go to universities and pick, hand pick their staff from people who row. Why do they do that?

Well, it must be the routine, the preparation, the planning beforehand.

Yeah, they've learned not just strength, they have learned life skills because of what they're doing, discipline because it's a very. It's about a training, it's methodical training. You don't always row with your mates, you don't work with your mates either. So you're used to that environment of being of working within a team to get to an end goal. And they're picking out people that not rowing it, that go on to try and row internationally because they're going in a different direction. But people that got the basis of those sports because that's something they don't have to teach them already. That's a natural instinct that they've got through the sport that they've done.

Yeah, interesting. So the whole how much luck is in success has been debated forever. I want to try and get a different Gary Player.

Yeah, you know Gary Player saying, the.

More I practiced, the luckier I got.

Some guy came up to him and he'd won a golf event and he says, oh, you were very lucky, you were very lucky. He said, yeah, yeah. The more I practice, the luckier I seem to be.

So is that your take?

Yeah. And that's what rowing really gives you. It's the camaraderie, it's the discipline, it's the dedication. So it's not just about that moment of you cross the line or even predicting from the final of who are going to be the three medalists. It's the preparation, the work, the ethos that's all gone into it that makes that moment.

And that turned something I mentioned earlier, which is, especially in that last race, was there ever a moment where you're like, I'm fucking done here. I'm just done?

No, no.

You knew it was going to be when you got out of the boat, not while you were in the boat.

Didn't quite get there. Went off a tangent. When Steve Ryder was the presenter. Presenter. And we got off the boat and they were ushering me to go and talk to Steve, you could hardly stand up. Well, the process is. Is that when you cross the line, and if I had to stand up at that point, I wouldn't. It's not just the physical exhaustion, it's the mental exhaustion as well. But then you stay in your boat for a little while and you wind down, you get rid of the lactic acid. So the time you get to that, you've got a little bit of recovery left. But what's the first thing you do as you cross the line in any sport? What's the first thing that you do?

Well, I never did it, but surely you celebrate, don't you?

You celebrate and you congratulate or commiserate with the people around you. You go and shake their hands, you give them a hug. Rowan, you can't. Because you're in the boat, you can't do that. So the first thing that. Oh, you got to go and speak to Steve. Steve Ryder was brilliant about it. Again, sounds like everyone's locally just up the road as well. And of course, he wants to capture the moment of this iconic. But I went straight to the Italians and Australians and shook their hands and gave them hugs. One of the best things. The Italians came in second and they were 0.38 of a second behind it. So what was that? That's the length of a pen lid. No, totally the opposite. They said we had the best row of our lives.

So they credited you? Yes, chasing.

Exactly. They'd done their best. But you still beat us.

And maybe you felt the semi final.

When we got through to the semi final, for some reason, there's a Grandstand where the boat end was, but there was a fence separating out. There was this big older guy and he was waving me across for some reason. I went up to him and he said, I really want you to win on Saturday. It'd be amazing for you, the sport. It'll be incredible. He says, I've just got one problem. I said, what's your problem? He says, you're racing my son. My God. Yeah. My parents followed me around for most of my career and they got very friendly with opposition's parents, but they would never say anything like that. And I just found. But it was. Well, at the time, you're not aware of it, but it's things like that that really sort of resonated of what you were doing at that time is that there were so many. We were 45 minutes outside Sydney and so people had to make a special journey. There were lots of people, there were a lot of British swimmers that came to watch that moment because they wanted to be there at that moment. And that just makes it special. We didn't know that before. You don't know who's there, who's, who's not. You're just getting on with your job, you're just doing your thing. But it certainly did make a moment within our sport and that's where we're going back to. The publicity is that publicity for rowing should be about the personalities of the people. You want your Greg Searles, Matt Pence and Steve Redgraves, because that is of what everyone cares. They want to know the end of that story. I got really upset with the BBC that I did my biography and that that was going to go out on the 23rd of September, the day that we raced the final. So it doesn't have the final chapter in. How can you sell a biography of the biggest moment in the story is about what happens. And they say, okay, we'll delay it a couple of weeks, we'll write the last chapter and we'll get it in. They went ahead and published it on that day. It was the second edition that had the last. The last chapter. And I just thought that was wrong. I just thought that was. That was. That was wrong from, from the whole process. But they knew that they were going to sell more books if they sold it on that. On that day. One, but it's not, it's not complete.

But then that means you've got your part.

Two, but. But then. Yeah, you're then kidding people. Yeah, people want the whole. They're buying the book because they Want the whole story.

Yeah.

Not three quarters of it. Yeah. And not missing out. Not missing out. The most important one of it all.

Yeah. So I'm fascinated by this mindset because you raced possibly the hardest race of your whole life.

Possibly.

And yet you never doubted.

We'll go back. I'll get back to answering that question. Yeah. Is this when I did get. When I did get up to Steve and he said, when did you think you had that one? I said, After 250 meters. He said, what, 250 meters from the end. I said, no, 250 meters from the start.

Oh, wow.

I knew that we were going to win.

How?

Being in the zone, being know what we could do. The rhythm that we got into, the way that we. The boat was moving. One of my jobs within the role was the tactician. We have a set race plan that we want to do, trying to unfold, but sometimes that doesn't work. You've got to be adapted. So I was the person that did that. The reason for that is because I've had more races than anybody else. So you've got more experiences to pull from. When people ask you the question, what you want is to have an answer. The worst thing is not to have an answer. And so we had a really good start. We got into our rhythm and I remember looking around thinking, we're going to win this. I did think we were going to win it by a long way. 0.3 10 of a second is not a big margin within rowing, but the is we 500 meters. We had the lead a thousand meters. We'd extended it 1500 meters. We'd extended it even more still on the sort of smallest margins, but we were moving away all the time. 250 meters to go. We'd probably. They don't take a time at that point, but we was probably still more. But Slovenia, who finished fourth, did the fastest last 500 of anybody. They were pushing very hard. The Australians. The Australians had won the previous two Olympics. Not the same crew. They were known as the awesome foursome. So they had quite a lot of pressure on their shoulders of our home games. But it was a completely different crew. They were very happy with a bronze medal, but they nearly lost it because Slovenia was pushing them right. The Italians then were being pressured by the Australians and that they'd won one race earlier in the season. The Kiwis had won the major race. They finished sixth in the final. And so everyone was pushing. So it all concertina'd up. And I remember watching the video and Watching very close, the Italian crew and the guy that's doing their tacticians looked round and everybody said, oh, he was looking at you. I think he was looking away at the finishing line because he was more worried about the Australians closing them down than he was about of catching us. And so all Constantine up. If we'd had that race 10 times, I think that would have been the smallest verdict of the race. But that's where it was. But we were so much in the zone and calling the tactics is that we went through every process. We lift it when we get to 500 meters to go, we hold it that it's about 30 strokes and then we get to 250 meters and again 30 strokes. It's slightly less. It could be slightly more, but it's normally slightly less. Is it's 10, 10 and 10. You lift the 10, you lift again. Lift is you're lifting the rate of striking and more strokes per minute, but you've got to keep the power as well.

So essentially you're trying to go up faster, faster.

It's pushing for the line. And you do you go 10 strokes, 10 strokes, 10 strokes. And. And hopefully that's to the line. If it's not, it will be certainly one or two more strokes from there. So it's near enough there as dam it. And for some reason, I don't know why I didn't put the second lift we just maintained and then went again to there. Even though it was such a tight margin in my mind and the way that our boat was moving, it didn't matter if it was another 2,000 meters like that. Nobody was going to come past us, even they were closing us pretty quick. And so Steve was really shocked when I gave that answer because it was so close and visually so close. But sports people will talk about being in the zone. And that was the most I've ever been in the zone in a race of knowing what everyone else was doing as well as what we're doing. And. And that there was one push that I didn't put in that I didn't think we needed to win the race.

Did you mean to not put that push in? Yeah, yeah.

No, it was.

It was just unnecessary.

It was unnecessary. Yeah. Oh, wow.

What if you'd have lost the race with that decision?

It'd go back to what we were talking about earlier. If you lose, you'd be mortified if there was something you could have done and you didn't. Why did I not call that? I don't know.

I don't know because that, what is it, 3/10 of a second?

Was it 3.8? 3.8. Nearly 4/10 of a second.

I mean that finishing of that race and the finishing of the chapter of your book, I mean that is everything. That last little bit is your whole career.

Yeah.

And that could have easily gone slightly different.

And that's the difference between sport and business.

Because business you get another go, another guy, another guy, another guy, another guy.

Potentially.

Yeah.

But what happens on your retirement day?

Well, I'll never, I'll never retire so.

But if you work for the same company for you might get a Rolex. I rode international. Exactly. It's a celebration. Yeah. It's a payoff. It's a mark of you say a Rolex, it'd be lovely to get Rolex. But so what's the difference between a businessman retiring and a sports person retiring?

Well, I mean I guess the biggest.

Day of your life is your last day. So in business you're having a celebration, you're having a party.

It's the start of your new life.

In sports, your biggest day of your life if you've got through all the injuries in the process of getting there is the biggest race of your life.

And the last race of your life.

Exactly.

And is that why a lot of sports people really suffer after their career? Because it's coming off the top of a mountain?

Yeah. Your whole life is focused towards one thing, nothing else matters. Of selfishness, of everything in your life. Waking moments are working towards that goal. I could have been pushing a trolley around the supermarket. I'm thinking about racing, I'm thinking about training, I'm thinking about preparation. I'm thinking about being the tactician in the race especially. Okay, what happens if the Germans do this? How are we going to respond to that? Yes, it's about what you do is the most important thing if your favourites to win a race is that if you row from the way that you think you've got the right tactics to win that race and you've won most of your races on the build up to do that. What's your opposition trying to do? How are you going to be. I, I tried to put myself into their situation. How am I going to beat Steve Redgrave? Matt and I when we rode in the pair especially is that world championships, Olympic Games, we'd get the entries out before racing started and we would mark everybody of up to five stars and so we could work out and say, well they're pretty good, they've got four. They said we never used to rank ourselves. We sort of block ourselves out from that. And once we've done that, so you've got everybody of form, wise of what they're doing, what you think, then we'll say somebody's going to. There's going to be a surprise here who's capable of doing that. Surprise. And so you're looking behind even more than the people within that boat are looking forward to that. To be that one step ahead, as I said before, is that when somebody asks you that question, normally in the third 500 of a race where it's not far enough away from the finish that it's hurting too much to be able to respond because you know you got a long way to go. Is that who's going to do that? And it doesn't matter how many times you go through it. Is that if you're the favourites, you're in your rhythm, you're out in front of. Is that we trained so hard that we knew that we had more stamina than anybody else. So if we're leading by halfway, that's great. We know we can go faster than anybody else. Second half, we didn't need to on that day, but we were pushing ourselves almost to our limits. But the only thing that comes out is trying to. To push off and make those favorites doubt themselves. And the only way you can do that is really to get out in front. Right. If we've got our pacing right and somebody's out in front of us, they're going to pay for it at some point, or if they don't go and shake their hand afterwards. Because we can't beat you. You've done everything that we can't do. And so that's where I said very much earlier in the conversations, if somebody beats you, they deserve it.

Yeah.

And all you can do, obviously be bitterly upset it wasn't you. But they've earned it. They deserve that medal. And that process of doing that, and that's the uniqueness of our sport, is every race is a proper race. There's no tactical races. There's nothing out there. It's the real McCoy. And that's where I think that our sports in the Olympic Games is one of the ultimate sports of asking those questions.

So I'm hearing a lot that the main factor towards confidence and a strong mindset is preparation and knowing where you're at when you get in the boat. Is there anything else that trumps self doubt or gives you the strength and resilience of mind other than your preparation?

The Unity of the crew. There are times that you will ask questions within a race. It's amazing how much your mind thinks through the whole process and you wish you could just switch it off at some time where it starts to try.

And doubt everything around.

I'm giving everything I've got here and we should be in the lead more this or more to the point, we're not in the lead yet. How are we going to be able to do that? You've got to dig deeper than you've ever done before and you're asking those questions, can I do that? And your body's saying, no, don't fancy this, this hurts too much. And your mind is saying, yeah, so let's not do it. How do you get over that? And then the team element of it is that you've done so much training together against each other in the build up, in the gym, racing each other, that I can't stop even though my head's telling me to stop because I'm doing it for the guy in front of me and the guy behind me.

I can't stop because of that accountability we rode in.

Obviously that Olympics in A four.

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Why did we turn up for training every day? Middle of winter, freezing cold, ice forming the back of your hair, you're sort of plodding up and down the river, boring training sessions, freezing cold. I can remember being out in hailstones and through a long sleeve top and having the prints of the hailstones of hitting you. Why'd you do that? Yeah, why, why don't we pick up the phone and saying, oh, it's horrible day to day. Should we give it a miss? No, you don't do that one because we're stupid. Never even thought about it. And the other one is that I've got to turn up because the four can't go out if it's a three.

Yeah, right. That and even if someone isn't in like a team sport, that accountability of not wanting to let others down, it's very powerful. I have a business partner and at times when I'm like, really don't want to do this.

Well, I've got.

I'm accountable to him.

Totally, totally. And that's what it's all about. And then in those races where you're asking every question under the sun, can I do this? Is that. That camaraderie, that team spirit, that's why we train as hard as we do in some ways. So that bond, it's not about an individual, it's not about of having a superstar saying, in rowing you only go as fast as the slowest person in your crew.

It's the same in the business, I guess, with your staff.

That's why of sport can learn so much from business and business can learn so much from the sport.

Yeah. Wow. So obviously you wouldn't know this. You will now, though. But in my first year of business, one of my favorite books I read was yours, Enduring Success. Because when I started one of the better ones, well, I found it very relevant, the sport. Business crossover wasn't the first one I.

Did on those themes. The first one is you can win at life.

Right.

I've got some very cheap copies of that.

That's a paradox, isn't it?

Yeah.

But you know, I wanted to be successful for a long time and so I got lots of. I found that book really good because it wasn't just the usual stuff you'd read in success books. So what is the difference between being successful for a short time and successful for a long time?

I suppose you have windows of opportunity and it's harder to do that at something like the Olympics because there's four years from one to the other that people are improving all the time. Physique, training, marginal gains, all the things that we've been talking about. And how can sports people stay at the top for as long as they do? They've probably still got a peak within them. They've just been fortunate that the. The tools that they've been given are able. So quite often, Matthew and I, when we were in the pair especially, is that we. In our debriefing, even if we won the race, we weren't happy with the way it had gone. If the race was closer, we possibly could have lost. And so we used to talk to each other about, okay, we've got a medal round our neck from that international regatta, but we didn't perform the way that we should do. We're going to go into the next period of training with the attitude that we'd lost that race just to give us that little edge. When you do lose a race is. It does inspire you so much more to get things right. You learn so much more from losing than you do winning. So if you keep winning, it's difficult to keep that edge. So we used to play these sort of games in some ways with us, and it was always hard to do, but that's the type of things that we did. So when you're at the top, I suppose when I won my first Olympic gold medal at the age of 22, relatively young within the sport, it's not unusual, but I knew as an athlete I could go faster and better. The time I got to Atlanta, I didn't think I could go that much quicker. I did improve physically. I did come down with diabetes, other complications around there as well. One of the things I sort of jokingly say now is when people ask me of enduring success, what was the one thing I said? I was the youngster in the crew that won in 84, and then I rode with one of those guys who was a couple of years older than me for my second gold medal. And then I started rowing with people younger than me. My job every four years was trying to find younger people that were going to pull me along to win Olympic gold medal. It's a bit of a joke, but there's something in it.

Yeah.

On my own in Sydney, was I good enough to. Was I the best in the crew? I was probably the weakest link, really, in that crew. Yeah. Yeah.

But do you mean physically? Because you were the technical.

Physically, mentally, I probably was the strongest.

Right. And that obviously counts. Otherwise they Wouldn't have put you in the boat, would they?

Yeah, there's a couple of times where I wasn't performing. I've got ulcerative colitis, which I suffered with very badly in the Barcelona Games under control. And then three years before Sydney, I came down as a diabetic. So that flew up the colitis as well. I've got two conditions going on. World champion, Olympic record holder in the pair with Matthew. Quite a lot of our training is in the pair. Tim and James, we've beaten us quite a lot.

Right.

And the. Were they the best pair in the world? No. Could they be close to it? But there was probably other people. But Matthew and I proved that we've done that many, many times. And so you ask questions from that. And I went to Jurgen, our coach, and said, matthew's performing every form of testing at the highest level and we're not winning races or training races. This is. And I'm holding the team back. You've got to drop me. I always felt that if I got to the final race, I would be able to produce the goods but my own. Again, it's about the team. I would say I was the weakest link in. I was probably the strongest link in other areas as well. That brought a lot to it. And it's the balance between every aspect. Not one athlete can have the whole range of everything that's needed. Okay, I'm going to go off another tangent is that the first year that we did the four was the World Championships the week that Princess Anna died. The car crash was just before our first race and the funeral was on the day of our last race. There were people saying that you shouldn't race. They're not going to cancel the World Championships, which are in France. The race is going to go, somebody's going to be World Champion. Why shouldn't it be us? That was the focus from that. We played our respects within that. But coming out of that is that I came down with diabetes within a few weeks. We had three weeks off. I came back as a diabetic and my grandfather had diabetes. I think I knew a tiny bit about it, but you couldn't be a top speaker sports person with the condition. And Jurgen was brilliant. We got a whole lot of experts together and we just went through the whole process. But while I was at that World Championships, I did an article for the Keep and the journalist, I know him, been around the scene for a very long time and we sat down and talked about all sorts of different things. And when he wrote the article, it came out in almost a grid format and he'd sort of put. I think it was about seven different categories in and marked them out of 10. I didn't get a 10 in any of the categories. I was recognized as being the best rower at that time and I didn't get a 10 in any of the categories. This is disrespectful. This is disrespectful. Thought you were humble, Steve, at times and actually analyzing it. He was probably right. Was either mentally the strongest athlete. Probably not physically, technically, definitely not. Endurance wise. No, there's better people endurance than. Than myself. But as I say, but what I got was seven eights and nines across the board. So the final score of everything up was bigger than anybody else's because some people might have had a 10 in one area, but they had fours and fives in another. I don't think I dropped below 6 and had a few nines in there. And so actually learned quite a lot because he was probably right. I know that I'm not the best rower in the world.

Yeah.

Even though I won a lot of races. Because you can see things in other people that. Oh, God. Yeah. He's got much more endurance than I have. He's got much more power than I have. But combined into our sport, that level of high scores across the board have got me to that sort of the biggest score that was recognized as the best rower at the time. He actually wrote a very good article.

Oh, wow. So we like doing the odd Quick Fire round on the show.

Okay.

So this is the first one because I also want to.

From so far, you know that I'm not very good at Quick fire. I can. I can drag a question out. I think we're still on the first.

Question, which I don't.

I don't think I've answered yet. We'll try Quick Fire. Even though I've given that two minutes lead up already and we haven't got one Quick Fire question yet.

I've done 1100 of these. I'm kind of used to it. Okay. What's the hardest thing about being great?

I don't know. I wish I was great.

What's the hardest thing about being as great as you are?

I've had a lot of fun. I've heavily dyslexic at school. You're put down all the time. Being a big person, I never got bullied. But of having the satisfaction, as I said to you as we walked in, my best friend is buried on the other side of the river, at the church. He died when he was 17. On my gravestone of having something along the lines, he got the best out of what he had. To me, I've got the best out of what I've had.

How do you deal with negative thoughts?

I only have negative thoughts. I'm a glass half empty.

So how do you deal with that?

I've got to 62 dealing with it. I don't know. You just deal with it. I suppose you can put athletes or people in two categories. Some that. And everyone's again looking for that formula. What's that missing element that's going to be that gold dust. And people are quite complicated, so it's not as simple as that. But I drive myself forward on the failures, not on the success.

Okay, so this quickfire question's got three quickfire parts. Out of everything you've achieved, what's been the hardest?

Probably dealing with my own insecurities.

What's been the best?

Standing on that podium or not on the podium and that of job well done. The satisfaction is that four years of your life won Commonwealth Games in there, which I'm still Commonwealth champion because rowing hasn't been in there since of doing that. I always wanted to be a single sculler and the closest I got to it was at the Commonwealth Games and I'm still reigning Commonwealth champion, which I find quite amusing. But yeah, no, that, that element, you know, through the history of training, people are going to be better. The athletes now that are racing of 20 years on from 24 years on from when I stopped, they're better specimens, they go faster than we did. But at that time we pushed the boundaries back that nobody else had done at that point. And that's pretty satisfying.

And out of everything you've achieved, what's the weirdest thing that's happened?

I suppose the recognitions. The recognitions you get of being knighted. How weird. Is that Sabian as well. An MBE before that having the Redgrave name. That famous actor, Sir Michael. We are related to the family. My parents talked about Sir Michael all the time. For me being knighted, it was just a wonderful ultimate achievement that your country can bestow upon you. To my parents, that's just unbelievable.

So you said out of everything you have achieved, the hardest is dealing with your insecurities. What's your biggest one?

I suppose self confidence.

You're five time Olympic champions.

All the things that. Yeah, but you. You've done hundreds if not thousands of interviews along with these lines. A lot of people achieve things because they're trying to prove something just to themselves. For a kid that's grown up in Marlow, born and bred, struggled throughout his schooling life, not quite sure of what directions to go in. I stumbled across a sport that I was able to do to a pretty good level for a good number of years. And to be then recognised as one of the best athletes within the sport or within sports and to carry on that of recognition at the age of 62, I think that's, that's pretty remarkable. In some ways, 2012 was brilliant. I would always have loved to be able to compete at home games, the home crowd. To be able to have that atmosphere as those British athletes had in London, that would have been amazing. I don't know if I had second best or even if it was better because I was treated like I'd won an Olympic gold medal in London. But I didn't have to do the hard work and more to the point, I didn't have to do the racing. Doors opened. Seb gave me the honour of being the last Olympian carrying the torch into the stadium, passed it on to seven youngsters in the rehearsal that we did the Monday before. They sent me. Seb sent me a car to bring me down for the rehearsal at 1:00 clock in the morning. I was there with David Beckham, sporting icon, practicing for carrying this torch to say, we can't give you a proper torch because it'll give it away. What you're in. It's one o' clock in the morning, who's going to be watching it? They give you a piece of wood that's a meter long and you're, oh, if anyone sees this, are they going to guess what we're doing? Yeah. But anyway. But the car that sent me down is, I had the accreditation. I was an ambassador for the team, I was working for the BBC. I had all sorts of different accreditations and that you have to get them activated. And I said to the driver who's taking me back home, getting on to half past two in the morning by that time, said, There's a 24 hour area where we can get this. Okay, we'll, we'll find it. And we were driving around and we went through a few checkpoints and we were in the village. We were in the accommodation area of the Olympic Games with no accredited. Well, I had accreditation but it hadn't been endorsed at that point. And the driver just going up to the screen saying, we've got Steve Redgrave in here, we need to get his accreditation. This is his accreditation. Oh, yeah, come on through. I'm saying it can't be in here because you can't get in here without it being. And that was crazy. I shouldn't admit this one. With the Games four years before that in Beijing, my daughter was 17 and went out to the Games of working. Worked for a company called Sports World and commentated with the BBC on the rowing. And I stayed out the second week. My rest of the family was there. They all went back home and I used to then go off to other sports. But then Natalie was on because you were 17, couldn't work a full day. So she used to buy a ticket for hockey because it's the cheapest ticket that would get you into the Olympic park. And then would meet up with me and we'd go into athletics and watch athletics for the evening. I had a green armband which gets you onto the field of play. You're supposed to hand this back every day. And mine's got rowing. I've got four of them from the Olympics that I was broadcasting at. I've kept them as mementos. And so I was supposed to hand it back each day from rowing, rowing to this bike this time. But I could put this armband on, go up to security. Not telling any lies, saying, this girl's father is an Olympic gold medalist. I need to get her to the media centre. Not telling any lies. No. Oh, yeah. Come on through, straight through. Go and find a seat, watch Dan, unwatch athletics for the evening.

And you still find all those things weird. Yeah, they still don't sink in properly.

Well, it's somebody else. It's not me, it's somebody else. It's not the insecure child that grew up here in Marlow and wouldn't say boo to a goose. I literally wouldn't say boo to a goose. Wow. 22. The first time I spoke in public. We had an open top bus from Marlowe Bottom, where I live, through Marlow. The mayor walked, the mayor walked in front of him. The whole of the four Cox four came with us, stopped literally on the other side of the bridge from where we are and we walked through the park. Things like that just don't happen. It did happen again 16 years later with the Sydney 4 in LA coming back from LA84. There were people doing their shopping, coming out of the shops. What's this bus doing here? What those people on the top bus doing on getting on with their normal life in Sydney? Marlow was packed, absolutely packed from right away from the top of the high street. Right. The Way down into Higginson's Park. The celebrations and amount of people that came, there was all sorts of speeches going on, but Tim and I especially, we were trying to write autographs for everybody who was there and we got us away because of. Well, I had to speak as well. That's probably why I wasn't in a rush to get in. But Tim and I came back out afterwards and people, 25, 30,000 in this little town where you went and got your sandwich just a few minutes ago.

So brave shout out.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Packed in honour of me.

Yeah.

Wow. Three years later. Three years later, it might have been only two later. It must have been two years because it was a golden, Golden Jubilee for the Queen. There's a statue in the park, literally 400 meters from where we're sitting now, of me unveiled by the Queen. There's hardly a day that goes on. People don't mention to me of, oh, we've seen your statue in the park. That's not me, this is somebody else. Wow. Wow.

A statue in the park.

Yeah, because you've got BBC TV really upset. Unfortunately, my father's no longer with us, but I upset it because he got back a week before I did from. From. From Sydney and he said, they want to do a statue in the park with you. I said, I want that one. Why don't you want a statue of dead people? I've still got a few years of kicking left on me. I don't want a statue in the park. Then somebody else said to me, says, yeah, there are a few people that have statues of the master, but the statue's going to last a lot longer than you. I'm thinking, well, thanks. No, but they're right in some ways. It was a few years ago, they tried to pinch it. Somebody tried to pinch it, put a chain around it and put it, pulled it down. They didn't actually get away with it and it's a little bit more secure than it was, but, yeah, no, it's. It's there. It's there in the park and I've got one brilliant photograph of it. Where it was. It was a frosty morning, so covered in frost, and the sun's come up and it's melted the frost, so it looks like it's sweating down one side of my face. It's just an amazing photograph. And we have the first Sunday in December. We have a Santa Claus race, 5k around Marlow. You've got two and a half thousand Santa Claus running up the high street and round and back into Higginson Park. One thing that we always did for the last couple of years, I've started the race most of the time, but I stepped down from doing that role now. But we always put a Santa hat on my statue and there's a lady that's done a Christmas card of all the sort of iconic areas and my statues on there. And it's a Christmas card. And I said, it doesn't have a hat on it. It always has a hat on Christmas. So next edition, it's got a hat on.

Great. And what was the hardest thing about retirement? We're still in the quickfire.

Depression.

Oh, wow.

Sports people retire relatively early. I'm involved in sport. There's still no money, there's no prize money, no appearance money. So you do it for the love and it's a lot of hard graft and that's not bitterness and it's just a reality. I was lucky when I retired, within two months, I was asked to get involved in London 2012. I was the fourth person to be involved in 2012. You had the chief executive and the chairman of the British Olympic association and there was somebody out in Sydney, a hockey player, that was looking around to see if potentially we could match and put on Games in 2012. And they asked me to come in. My roles was to. To convince the government to come on board and Ken Livingstone. Ken was known as not being a sports lover and quite daunting. Going to his office. I remember going to his office, sitting down in front of me, signing some papers and going on. He looked up and he said, morning, Steve, really good to see you. He said, you think this is going to be hard work, don't you? Yes. And he said, what the Games did for Barcelona could do the same for us. I mean. Oh, wow, okay. Tick that box. It took us two and a half years to Tony Blair in the government. It was all about of the general public, and rightly so in some ways, is that he didn't want to tarnish his chairmanship of the country of doing something as radical as London bidding for the Games and not getting it. He was brilliant. He was fantastic. He really was.

And so you saying that, does that mean that stayed the.

So my sporting career went into a delivery career. So the Olympic dream carried on for another 12 years. Olympics was amazing. We talked a little bit about it, went into the Paralympics. That's put another sort of iconic big step forward for the Paris. I watched the closing ceremony at home and as that cauldron went out, I started asking my question. What am I going to do now? I was 50. Most athletes are in their 20s, 30s, some in their 40s. I was 50. I'm thinking what I'm going to do next. And had a depression and true bloke. You respond to it as soon as possible. I think I went and saw my GP nine years later and probably didn't.

Talk to anyone about it. And we're not very good at that as men, are we?

No, we're not. Terrible. And it wasn't until I came across a company called Ted's Health and a friend, actually one of those four people that was at the British Olympic association that asked me to get involved in that. Quite a good friend of mine now and he started working for this company and he says, you're showing all the signs of midlife crisis. I was midlife now. I've passed midlife now. I'm just having crisis. Old age crisis is now. And did a simple blood test and it showed that my testosterone levels were really low. And so I've been on test on injections for the last 18 months. Yeah. TRT.

Has that been good?

It's interesting you asked that question because the. Could I say that it's changed? No, you can't, because it's so small in the whole process. The only way I can answer it is last week it was announced that I'm doing dancing on ice 18 months ago. 18 months ago. There is no way that I would have done something like that. And so you can. You can have a gel and rub on your skin every day or have an injection every six months. I go for the injection because I'm too lazy to do the job. And, yeah, I think it's made a huge difference. I feel much more confident. I'm much more comfortable in my own skin. Testosterone is a very weird one because as a sports person, if you've got too much testerone, you get banned from competing. Something that I've never considered. I've had thousands and thousands of anti doping tests and I don't know what my levels were. I don't know if I was high or low. I would imagine that I had to be in the range or else I would have been picked up from it. But it feels weird now. The older that we get as men, our testosterone levels go down, but mine have gone down lower than they should have done. So having a replacement therapy there, I think is making a quite big difference in my life.

Wow. And the company, Ted Health, you work with them now, do you?

Yeah, I'm an ambassador to To Ted's health. It's still a startup company in some ways, but us as men, we don't like talking about things that a group of females will all get around and have a chat and encourage them to do whatever they want to do with whatever potential condition they may have. Blokes, we just take the mickey out of each other so we don't say anything. And we should be more encouraging of our friends, especially the older we get. And you two are still very young. You've got a lot of long life. You got a lot of life left to live. And that's where I was making that joke about dancing on ice. Some of my friends have said it's a midlife crisis. It can't be a midlife crisis. The average age of living is below 90. So if you split into thirds, you've got 30 years of youth, you've got 30 years of midlife. And I'm in the last 30.

You've just gone into that.

I've only just gone into it. I class myself as being in the old age of things, so it's something else that's gonna screw loose while we're gonna do that program. But yeah, training starts tomorrow.

Right. And secretly you looking forward to it then?

I am, I am. For some strange reason people are looking at me and thinking, why do you know I had to have a physio check.

But you were a professional sportsman, like it makes sense.

No, professionals got paid.

Okay, True professionals got paid.

Never got paid for rowing. So yeah, people think you're a multimillionaire. And with five gold medals I've coached out in China. I was hyperfilm performance director for five years. And the questions that they asked you is that how much money do you make from. From rowing? And I said it's the same amount in every currency. So the sharp ones worked out very quickly, the other ones just did it still. Exactly, exactly. Because they're on huge bonuses if they win Olympic gold medals. They get life changing money out in China from it. And so they're saying five times Olympic gold medal. Why are you working for. Yeah, I'm working because I don't have any.

But you must still now be able to get paid keynote speaking and other things.

No. Yeah, I built up quite a good portfolio before I went off to China. Spent most of the winters out in China. Had an 8 year contract to Paris 2012, but broke the contract after Tokyo because when Covid hit, you got locked in or locked out the country and it wasn't a lot of fun of Having a family. My wife and family were still back here. Yeah and that was, that was pretty lonely. So the years that I was still struggling with the depression, you're isolated in a foreign country, can't speak to the language in the middle of nowhere. It's not the most stable situation to be in.

So final quick fire round, we call this the Disruptors round to keep it on theme. So what's the biggest disruption that's ever happened to you in your life?

Disruption is I suppose in a racing format is that you plan for every process and something goes wrong. Being a diabetic in that situation. So being a non diabetic you've got your blood sugar levels, you've got everything in order. The race gets cancelled because the bad weather are not cancelled. Delays for bad weather or technical problem or whatever and then you've got to deal with that. It's all about controlling the controllables. One of the things that Matthew and I used to say to each other, people didn't like racing us into a headwind because we were two strong, powerful guys and they felt they had a chance if it was a tailwind. So we had some very easy races when it was the slowest conditions and then when it was fast conditions they used to get spring in their step and row better for it and we used to have this attitude whatever the conditions is perfect for us.

What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

I'm not really a big risk taker in anything so what's the biggest I've done? I don't think I could answer that question because I tend to be quite calculated about everything I do.

What's the most brutal life lesson you've ever had?

Losing at Henley Roh Regatta in a single scales event in 86 where I was racing in the final with the diamond sculls would have been my third win in that particular event. I always wanted to be a single sculler and I got beaten by a lightweight rower of not knowing the way that he raced. Close friend of mine now that was. I used to race again. He was coming to the end of his career as I was coming into the spring and afterwards he said to me, oh, he's not the fastest starter in the world but he never gives up. Well, if he told me that before I might have raced a bit different. I went off the start, I was always a fast starter. Took an early lead at Henley because there's only two lanes, you're racing the distance but quite often you're racing the person and you can break them because once sport that goes backwards, if you're out in front, it's hard to keep going. There's nothing else helping you along. In a six lane race, there are other boats around you can help you through that process. So I pushed on by two minutes in the race. I was leading my three lengths three quarters of the way up the course. I had nothing else to give and he plodded past me and three weeks later I became Commonwealth champion. So from my biggest disappointment, disappointment it was to one of the biggest races that I ever won. Wow.

What's the most disruptive thing you must say?

He was reigning world champion at that time, right? Yeah.

It's important to get that.

So he was no mug. Yeah.

Yeah.

But I treat him like a mug and that's the last time I ever treated anybody in a race situation as a mug.

Yeah.

Respect everybody. We'll let that land.

What's the most disruptive thing anyone's ever said or done to you?

Coming through the door, interrupting, when I'm doing a podcast. Yeah. For some reason I'm not going to answer that question.

Is that because you don't know or something is in your head and you don't want to say it?

Not going to go there.

Okay. What's the best advice you ever remember receiving?

These should just roll off your tongue, really. Best advice is from my first international coach of miles. Make champions. The more you put into something, the more you get out of it. That we touched on. Am I the best rower in the world? No. Not even when I was at the top. I always thought there was people in different categories better than I was, but that you make your own luck and it's down to what you do and how you go about it if you get the best out of yourself. And that came from Mike Sprackland.

And what's the worst advice you ever remember receiving the worst advice?

I suppose literally I've just come back from the Alfred Dunhill Lynx competition, a top European event where the pros have amateurs alongside them actually in their competition. We had two good days only. Top 20 teams out of 138 teams there. And everyone's saying, you've made the cut, you're going to be in the final. There was still one day of competition. We missed out on getting into the team top 20 by one shot. We were in the top 20 for three days. Apart from one hole. It was the last hole that we were in and we dropped a shot.

So for 53 holes out of 54, you were in and then you weren't.

It's never over until it's over.

What would you say?

I've been lucky enough to play in every format and we get a tie each year and on the short bit of the tie it has white bands on it. For each year that you've done it, if you make the cut, you get a gold one. And I've been lucky enough to make the cut three times more down to the pros than myself. You have to do a little bit to get there. And I've almost colored it in myself of gold. And now I'm gonna go back, hopefully go back next year and get another white stripe on my tie.

What would you say you regard as your biggest failure?

I think I take things very seriously, very intense. I would like to be a little bit more light hearted. Mention it again. Of doing dancing on ice. Three months of training. I'm going into it, of enjoying it. I'm going to try and put smiles on people's faces because I'm not going to impress them with my ice skating. I deliberately don't dance. It's a conscious decision that I do not dance. There's only one thing that I don't do above that and is single and for some reason I can't dance, can't skate. Doing both and doing that live on national TV in January. February. Well, hopefully February.

Well, you know, my next question is your greatest regret it might end up.

Being that, yeah, it's three months of training, two hours a day on ice. It's almost like going back being an Olympic athlete again. For some reason I'm looking forward to a challenge at the age I am a grandfather now. Winter sports I've always loved. I've competed at bobsleigh, won the British championships in the four man, couple of silver medals in the two man, done a World cup race. I've got a silver medal at curling. Even though I've watched hours and hours and hours of curling at the Olympics I did the first series of the jump. So I've done a ski jump, I've done ski cross, I've done downhill, I've gone round gates. I've raced in the longest downhill race in the world in Murran on downhill skis. The only thing that I haven't done probably at the Olympics is skating. I've done a little bit of short track was rubbish at that. So perhaps ice dancing is my one. Forty years ago, Torville and Dean won their Olympic gold medal. Celebrated in March this year while the show was going on. I did a little segment to it. Jokingly, I said, you're going to try and get me on the show now. And now they've got me. And one of the lines I'm going to use at some point is that because they've now formally 40 years from when they won their Olympic gold medal, they're retiring from performing. So there's an opportunity, a window open for me. Perhaps I can take that role from them.

All right, and one final question, maybe the most important, which is, as someone who's struggled with depression, what's a 30 second or less tip for dealing with.

Negative thoughts as blokes? Firstly, going to speak to your gp. Don't bottle it up. I think I responded pretty quickly to mine of doing something after nine years. We've got a very, very short life, relatively to the way where the world is and society around. Hopefully there's a whole lot of world left to live. We're only here for a short period of time. Don't waste it.

Great way to finish, Steve. Thank you so much.

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