Gruelling training saw Steve Redgrave collapse with exhaustion but gold medal addiction kept him coming back and off the building site

Rowing is renowned as one of the toughest sports both physically and mentally. Their training regimes are notoriously gruelling.

So what made Sir Steve Redgrave push his body to the absolute limits across five Olympic Games that spanned nearly two decades.

“I’d come out of an Olympics with a gold medal around my neck. That was pretty good motivation,” he told talkSPORT.com.

If there was anything to give you motivation, then having a medal is sure to do it. But not everyone has that same experience.

The gruelling nature of elite sport is something that is rarely touched upon.

The highs can be really high and the lows can be really low, as highlighted by a BBC documentary in 2000 called Gold Fever.

It followed Steve Redgrave and his British rowing coxless four teammates as they prepared for the Sydney Games.

It shows Redgrave, training to win a fifth gold medal, pushing his body to the point of exhaustion as he eventually collapses while on a rowing machine before being helped back on by his teammates.

Those tough training sessions ultimately paid off in the end as they won a gold medal. But the cost of success should not be underestimated.

“The winters are always the tough part,” Redgrave said. “On the whole, you make a commitment once every four years.

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“It’s always a situation that you think, why put your neck on the line again to go and do it again? But you make that decision to carry on because it is such a regimented commitment sport. 

“A team sport is that everyone is relying on you and you’re relying on them. And so that you don’t waver so much as some of the individual sports because if you’re rowing in an eight, a four or even a pair, you can’t put that boat out if one person doesn’t turn up.

“We turn up because the other is going to turn up. But they’re all thinking the same thing. So it’s a routine. And I think that one of the key elements of success is getting your routines right.

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“If you had to rely on the motivation to get you there each day, that’s a recipe for disaster. It’s just a job, a job that I didn’t get paid for. But you’re turning up and that grind through the winter and spring and autumn makes the success. I used to love success.

“The harder I trained, the better I prepared, the more success I had. So that was relatively easy. It wasn’t very pleasant at times, but it’s just the way of life. And there’s always a group of people that you’re training with and they’re all going through the same thing.”

Rowing made Redgrave one of the most recognisable Britons, and is still Team GB’s fifth most decorated athlete of all-time.

But if things had not worked out with rowing, his life would have taken a very different route.

He continued: “I came from a working class background, which is unusual within sports, or becoming more acceptable now. 

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Gold standard

Steve Redgrave is rightly regarded as one of Britain’s greatest Olympians and here is where the gold medals were one

1984 (Los Angeles): Coxed four – GOLD

1988 (Seoul): Coxless pair – GOLD

1992 (Barcelona): Coxless pair – GOLD

1996 (Atlanta): Coxless pair – GOLD

2000 (Sydney): Coxless four – GOLD

1988 (Seoul): Coxed pair – BRONZE

“But Olympic teams have always been, especially in the UK, but most of the sports that are involved are sort of middle class or upper class. Maybe some of the fighting disciplines are a little bit different.

“But I came from a comprehensive school background. My grandfather, on my mother’s side, drove buses and trams in Birmingham for 40 years. 

“My father’s father was a cabinetmaker and made propellers for Spitfires during the Second World War. 

“My father went into the Merchant Navy. When he came out of that, he had to do his national service, but he started doing several jobs and he started building his own building business. 

“I think his dream was for me to take over the business. Unfortunately, he retired before I retired from playing a sport.

“So it didn’t quite happen. It’s quite a different sort of structure that I came from. It was very different from that. I would have fallen back into that.”

Since retiring from competing, Redgrave has become one of the best pundits around on all things Olympics.

He will be joining talkSPORT’s coverage of Paris 2024, which begins with the opening ceremony on 26 July.

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