P ARE OVER
Pete Reed is a very confident man, and rightly so. The rower has been a constant in the British rowing squad since 2005, earning a considerable haul of medals in the process. A win in the coxless four at the 2008 Beijing Olympics was followed by the peak of his career so far, gold in the same event in front of an adoring home crowd at London 2012. Add three World Championship golds and three silvers and it makes for an impressive list. The last of those golds was won only in September last year, where Reed was part of Britain’s first ever World Championship-winning men’s eight, beating Germany by less than a second in Chungju, South Korea. On paper, then, he could be expected to be at the top of his game. Yet the last year has undoubtedly been one of the toughest in the professional career of Pete Reed for a surprising reason: a late-developing allergy to the family dogs. The result in Chungju, lettered in gold in the foyer of Reed’s club, the renowned Leander on the banks of the Thames in Henley, had been a big high- light in his career. “That was amazing,” he says, sitting upstairs in the club’s comfortable library after a day of training, “the first time Britain had ever done that, so something to be very proud of, something I think we didn’t expect, so soon after the Olympics, after that break.” Britain had come fourth in Lucerne,
the last event before the Worlds, and were not tipped to go on to greater things, but Reed and the team were confident. “I think a lot of people had written us off, and that maybe that was a project too far for Jürgen [Grobler, Team GB chief coach], but I always had confidence after that, and I knew where we were, what we had done and what we had to do, so Chungju was great, and I’m very proud of that.”
ROW360 // Issue 001 13
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