Katherine THE GREAT
The Scots Olympic hero and head of UK Sport is now joining another elite all-female team... with the Princess Royal and Annie Lennox
I’M IN very good company,’ laughs Dame Katherine Grainger, one of the UK’s most decorated Olympians and the newly appointed Chancellor of the University of Glasgow. Proudly reeling off a list of esteemed female figures who are the ceremonial heads of a number of Scotland’s leading higher education establishments, she says: ‘There’s Camilla, Duchess of Rothesay, the Princess Royal and Annie Lennox. What can I say? We’d make a pretty great chancellors’ group together.’
It is nearly four years since Grainger, who has five medals from five consecutive Olympic Games, called time on her glittering rowing career to look towards new horizons.
The Scot’s initial fear that she would not find ‘something else she was good at’ proved unfounded as, within months, she had landed the top job at UK Sport, the body whose main aim is to help Team GB win medals.
It is a position that should have seen her flying out to Tokyo next month ahead of this summer’s Olympic and Paralympic Games, but both have now been postponed until 2021 because of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Instead, Grainger, 44, finds herself unexpectedly spending the ‘longest time she’s ever spent in her own home’ for years.
‘Everyone’s dealing with a very new situation that we’ve never experienced before,’ she says. ‘All of us who work in sport had our 2020 diaries planned out and packed.
‘Between my role as chair of UK Sport and bits and pieces I do with the BBC, I would’ve been in Japan for six weeks. Suddenly, it changed entirely in a very different way to what we expected.
‘Now there’s a big planning piece to be carried out and an impatience to get back to some sort of normality. We don’t know when international travel will start again and we’re not sure who will be hosting the final events leading into the Games next year.
‘Closer to home, some athletes I know were about to retire, some had weddings planned in the autumn of this year, some had holidays planned, some had jobs lined up.
‘Suddenly you have to decide what it means and can you put everything on hold for another year.
‘Other people might have been injured and actually a year out is seen as a positive thing, a bit more time to get themselves ready.
‘But everyone appreciates there’s a lot worse things happening around us. Tragedies have happened in people’s lives and not being able to train for a few months is manageable.’
The rower knows more than most how a period away from training – even a voluntary one, as it was in her case – can affect an athlete mentally and physically, having taken a two-year break from the sport following London 2012, where she won gold after silvers in
Sydney, Athens and Beijing.
AFTER much soulsearching, she decided to team up with Vicky Thornley, from Wales, for Rio 2016 – but the pair’s Olympic dream almost ended before it had even begun.
With her previous partner, Anna Watkins, she could do no wrong, beating every opponent in their path. But her pairing with Thornley in the sculls doubles, could not have been more different as Grainger, who returned to full-time rowing in September 2014, struggled to get back to her previous form.
Many sceptics thought she would crash and burn spectacularly – instead she won a silver medal, narrowly missing out on gold by only 0.95 seconds. Her outstanding success led to her receiving a Damehood in the New Year Honours, as well as the moniker ‘Katherine the Great’. But there was also the more pressing matter of what to do next.
She says: ‘I’d been an athlete for 20 years and I loved it.
‘It was hard, it was tough and it broke my heart time and time again, but I absolutely adored it. How do you replace that?
‘Where do you go next? It wasn’t just about what I was good at but what did I get excited about – that was my big question after Rio.’
With the help of a grandly titled ‘performance lifestyle adviser’, assigned by the English Institute of Sport, at Bisham Abbey, she worked through her ‘retirement’ options.
She adds: ‘You’re not sure what you want to do, you almost don’t want to do anything because you don’t want to do the wrong thing.
‘It was easier to rule out what I didn’t want to do, but I couldn’t alight on what I did want to do and then, quite out of the blue, this role as UK Sport chair was advertised.
‘I had to apply for it and I wasn’t an obvious choice because it’s a chair of a multi-million-pound organisation.
‘If I’m honest, when I started the process I didn’t think I would be successful in getting the role, but I
thought by starting to apply for it I’d finally get the message in my head that I had moved into a different world post-athletics.
‘I also wasn’t sure it was the sort of thing I wanted to do. Didn’t it mean I’d be in an office, what if it felt too bureaucratic?
‘I still loved the freedom of not being pinned down by anything. But one of the attractive things is it’s a part-time role.
‘So I did the application and it was the first time in a long time I’d written a CV. All I’d done was sit in a boat for 20 years, so it took someone to sit down with me and say, “Hang on a minute, you’ve also done this…”. A lot of skills you pick up through sport are transferrable and valuable in other areas, but I needed someone to help me pull that out.’
SHE adds: ‘When I finally got asked for interview, I thought, “Oh blimey, I haven’t done an interview since I applied for a cinema job back in Glasgow”, and I couldn’t remember how to do it. Again, I worked with the same person, who was brilliant at drawing out my experience.’
To her surprise, she received a call from Karen Bradley, the then
Minister for Sport, to say she had been selected for the job.
‘They had never had a former athlete in the post,’ she says, ‘but there were a lot of things coming out about athlete support and welfare and it was actually a good time for them to have someone who had lived that experience.
‘In the beginning, I did worry if I’d be good at it but, for me, it’s been the perfect blend.
‘It’s a very dynamic role and I feel a huge responsibility that I’ve got an opportunity to make a difference in this world I’ve loved for so long.
‘We’re talking about 40 sports and there’s always something to get involved with. Although I knew the organisation, I had no idea of the scale, depth and the range of it.
‘What would’ve been disastrous for me would have been to go into something I didn’t feel challenged or tested by.’
In lockdown, however, it is the garden at her home near the National Rowing Centre in Berkshire that has her energised.
She says: ‘It’s weird, it hasn’t been retirement from rowing that’s changed my life, it’s definitely been lockdown that has slowed down things a bit.
‘My fingernails are covered in dirt because I’ve been gardening probably for the first time in about eight years. I don’t have a big garden, so it generally just looks after itself.
‘I’ve just bought some new outdoor pots and was planting them up this morning. I also dug up a lot of bulbs and replanted them, but I don’t know what they are, so that will be a surprise when the time comes.
‘I’m really quite enjoying it. In my normal life, there’s no way I would’ve found time to do this. ‘I even found an Olympic bag I hadn’t really gone through since 2016, and I didn’t know I still had. ‘Inside was a range of the beachy things from Copacabana, such as flip flops and sunglasses, as well as stuff that had been in my room after the closing ceremony.’
GRAINGER adds: ‘I’ve had quite a nice time reminiscing and I’m really lucky where I live, I’ve got great neighbours. All through lockdown we’ve shared coffees across the fence or an occasional wine in the garden, and I’ve got a lot of good friends who are within walking distance, so even when we could only get out for exercise, I could see them. It’s not been lonely.’
The hardest part, she admits, has been not seeing her parents, both retired teachers who live in Edinburgh, the city where her love of rowing first took off as an undergraduate at university.
She adds: ‘We’re doing Zoom calls but it’s not the same. It’s my mum’s birthday soon and I don’t know when I’ll get to hug her and my dad again.’
Last month, her family should have been helping her celebrate her installation as the University of Glasgow’s new Chancellor, but the official ceremony has been postponed for the time being.
‘I’ll be Chancellor from afar until then,’ says the Scot, who has just completed a fiveyear term in the same honorary role at Oxford Brookes University.
‘I was very flattered to be asked. Glasgow is the city where I grew up, where I did my Masters. I’m very fond of it.’
Her unanimous appointment means she takes her place among a select group of women at the helm of four other Scottish universities – the Duchess of Rothesay (University of Aberdeen); the Princess Royal (University of Edinburgh); Annie Lennox (Glasgow Caledonian University) and Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the renowned astrophysicist (University of Dundee).
With a smile, she adds: ‘It feels like a wonderful responsibility to have, one you want to get right.
‘You want to make a positive impact for a period of time. It’s almost a role you borrow for a number of years and you want to make sure those years you’ve got it, that you do the best you can with it and somehow leave it in a better place.’
There seems little doubt, given the impressive track record so far of ‘Katherine the Great’, about the outcome.