Hall of Fame... Sir Steve Redgrave: The British Bulldog who refused to lose and who set the gold standard for our Olympians
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Long before Sir Steve Redgrave sucked in his belly and tucked his portly frame into high-vis lycra for a celebrity ski-jump, the sight of him in high-vis lycra was altogether more terrifying.
For more than 20 years he dominated his sport of rowing – winning an unprecedented five successive gold medals in five successive Olympic Games – in a way that will never be superseded.
Rowing demands a furious combination of stamina, strength and speed and Redgrave, more than anyone else in our sporting history, was the British bulldog who simply refused to lose. In his final race in the coxless four at the Sydney Olympics it was as if his will alone picked the British boat up out the water in the final 250 metres and placed the bow ball ahead of the Australian crew.
VIDEO: Scroll down to watch Redgrave's famous 'if you see me in a boat again' quote
First of many: Gold medallist Steve Redgrave (second right) with (from left) Martin Cross, Richard Budgett, Andrew Holmes, and Adrian Ellison in Los Angeles in 1984
Seoul man: Redgrave (centre), with fellow gold medallists Malcolm Cooper (left, small bore rifle) and Paul Barber with their gold medals at Heathrow after the 1988 Olympics
Hat-trick: Redgrave (right) celebrates winning his third Olympic gold with Matthew Pinsent in the coxless pairs in Barcelona in 1992
On the crest of a wave: Redgrave (left) celebrates gold medal No 4 with Pinsent in Atlanta in 1996
High five: Redgrave (left) celebrates his fifth and last gold medal in Sydney in 2000 and (right) with all five
SPORTSMAIL'S HALL OF FAME
The BBC's commentator appeared to swallow his Adam's apple in the excitement and the Queen duly knighted the champion oarsman.
And yet his entry in to any sporting Hall of Fame is so often meant with contempt and derision from cynics and philistines.
The
first charge: rowing is a sitting-down sport and therefore doesn’t
really qualify. A pathetic, playground accusation.
You try covering 2km on the ergo in six minutes the next time you’re in the gym; you try training every day until your brain is so starved of oxygen that your eyes start tunnelling and you lose all peripheral vision (and your next hour is spent navigating through red spots in your skull); you try pushing your body so hard on a daily basis that your lips turn a shade of blue for hours after each session and your fluctuating sugar levels makes your diabetes life-threatening; you try spending the winter on ice-cold lakes with your boat on the water before sun-rise and the mercury deep in the negative.
The
second charge: nobody normal rows, he was only competing against a
couple of Lords from Eton with double-barrelled surnames.
Of course, rowing will never have the participation figures of football in this country (and remind me, how do we fare in that?) but the top athletes around the world (America, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and more recently, China and Russia) are selected for size and put on specialised programmes from a young age. The field may not be global, and it may consist of only those countries who can afford the best facilities, but it is skilled and highly competitive.
The
third charge: you don’t need any talent, you just have to work hard.
Well, perhaps that’s true to an extent but perhaps that is something to
cherish. Rowing, in many ways, is one of the purest sports of all in
that there is no lottery involved, no bounce of the ball. It is a
scientific test of strength, speed, stamina and technique with minimal
variants – almost inevitably the fastest crew wins.
Lie of the land: Redgrave is shattered after a tough workout during the 200 Games
stroke of genius: Redgrave puts in the effort on the oars during the 2000 Olympics
Putting it in: Redgrave and Pinsent give it their all in 2000
Emotionally drained: Redgrave (second right) shows his relief after winning gold in Sydney
It looks very simple but requires an extraordinary amount of technical detail, co-ordination and muscle memory. Redgrave remains one of the few oarsmen in Olympic history to have won gold rowing both bowside and strokeside, so he was not just a big lump who trained hard.
Many British sporting heroes have been willing to push themselves for the cause, to dedicate their lives to excellence, to train harder than any rival was willing to train – but nobody ever did it for as long as Redgrave, and nobody else has a such a polished record of Olympic perfection.
Swimmers can rack up the medals by entering multiple events – if you can swim freestyle and butterfly quicker than anyone then you can win plenty of medals in both individual and relay events – but rowers spend the best part of four years training in a single crew.
Now
imagine the pressure in that Olympic final. Four years of training
condensed into a six-minute final - that's approximately four days of
agony condensed into every second of the race.
TV personality: Sir Steve Redgrave with the Sports Personality of the Year trophy in 2000
Driver: Redgrave on the golf course (left) and (right) at the wheel of a taxi in 2005 promoting London 2012's bid
Ready for action: Launching Red Nose Day in 2001 with Lenny Henry
Is it going downhill? Redgrave as a contestant on Channel 4's reality series 'The Jump'
Redgrave did that five times and produced five golds – LA, Seoul, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney. Add to that three Commonwealth golds and nine World Championship golds and that isn’t a bad collection. Redgrave made himself unbeatable at all times, not just for the Olympics, and that meant when the Olympics came around no rival really had a taste of beating him.
And if we’re judging the measure of the man, since his retirement from rowing (the actual retirement, not the ‘if you see me in a boat again, shoot me’ retirement) he has campaigned tirelessly for diabetes and dyslexia – two ailments that have significantly affected his life – opened a rowing academy in India and raised more than £2million for charity running the London Marathon.
Admittedly he was last seen ski-jumping on TV, but we can surely forgive him that.
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jackie the joke man, sierra leone, United States, 3 weeks ago
as a four sport varsity letterman in high school (i chose to stick wth soccer in college), the only sport that made me vomit from the workouts was crew.