The best teams need tension to excel – just ask Steve Redgrave
Unwavering respect and our coach knowing when to step in helped us through the most difficult moments
Our disagreements never got physical but there were some long, teenage sulky silences
It was Steve Archibald, the former Tottenham footballer, who came up with the adage about team spirit “being an illusion glimpsed in the aftermath of victory”. I am not sure I totally buy that, but here is a twist on that which applies to my own career: any successful team need a bit of tension and confrontation to fuel them.
Our boat in the 2000 Sydney Olympics was a case in point. To say we were a mix of characters is the height of understatement: Matthew Pinsent was calm and did not waste words; Tim Foster was very technically minded and always pushing us to elevate boat speed through finesse rather than brute force – partly because he did not have the same brute force as the two big fellas, but also because the better someone rows, the more hoof and horn they can lay down.
Then there were myself and Steve Redgrave. It is fair to say that Steve did not always find me easy to be around. I admit that I could be demanding and my glass was always half-empty: nothing was ever good enough – our time, focus or rhythm. I was not trying to be awkward: quite the opposite, I just wanted us to be as good as we could be and there was no point in saying it after we raced.
Steve was different. He was an aggressive character at the best of times, and was under phenomenal pressure as he pursued a fifth gold while coming to terms with a diabetes diagnosis – all while being conscious of no longer being the athlete he wanted to be. Sometimes I would get too much for him.
I did the calls in training and more often than both he and I liked, he would pull me aside afterwards and tell me to rein it in.
“We’re fast, and we’re doing well – don’t be so negative,” he would say in exasperation. “Well, if we row better, I won’t have to be,” I would respond. You can imagine how that might get annoying.
Our disagreements never got physical but there were certainly some long, teenage sulky silences where we could not bring ourselves to talk to each other.
What got us through those moments were two things: Jurgen Grobler, our coach and the head of the British programme, knew the right time to intervene and get us to sort it out; and our unwavering respect for each other.
Put it this way, when we lined up in Sydney, there was not a single guy in any other boat I would have swapped for any of my crewmates.
Despite driving him mad in training, Steve knew I had his back – even to the point where I warmed up for the Sydney final with packets of sugar taped to my feet in case he needed to fix a glucose low.
Those bonds of trust ultimately saw us through that day in Sydney, which was stressful from start to finish. The issues started at 4.30am on the morning of the final, when we were having breakfast in the food hall. There was a British guy sitting near us who had clearly just come back from a night on the p---. He yelled: “Good luck tomorrow”, as he still had not gone to bed from the night before. Thanks, mate.
In fact, the whole build-up was excruciating. We trained on the course at 5am and then the four of us lay on some mattresses on the floor of a room at the regatta course set aside for the British team. All you could hear were the other races going on, which would have been fine if the Brits had been cleaning up, but all we seemed to hear were the Australian and German national anthems.
It became a challenge to screen out that stuff and remember, just because others were not winning, it did not mean we were not going to. You saw that in 1996 in Atlanta: the fact that Britain was doing so badly gave too many people an excuse to underperform. Our collective experience in that boat meant that was never going to happen to us.
Not that the final was straightforward. Our strategy in these races was simple: attempt to set the pace in the first 1,000metres and then break our rivals in the third 500m. Halfway through this race we were exactly where we wanted to be and I was thinking, ‘Right, now we’re off ’, and we put our foot down. But the Italians, Slovenians and Australians stayed with us. Now a different thought came into my head: “S---, this wasn’t meant to happen.”
It would have been easy to panic, but we simply had to trust in our experience and each other – and it was that bond that got us through to that gold medal.
We still have that bond: all my team-mates from the 2000 and 2004 Games are coming to my wedding next month, and I still respect their honesty, strength and integrity. We will always be team-mates.