“I think that it has worked
reasonably well,” he says. “It’s something that on a daily basis gets talked about. There wasn’t really enough funding to be able to put out a first-class athletes’ legacy programme.” The reasons for this are clear: “We could have done better in the legacy, but with the financial climate that we came through, there weren’t the finances around to really get good programmes involved.” Redgrave is not content merely
The attitude has changed. It’s not just about football, rugby, cricket. People will now try lots of different sports, because of what London did.
to lend his name to the legacy pro- gramme, or to let his image be used to portray an unequivocally successful leg- acy: “Governments – whichever govern- ment – will always say, ‘Oh yeah, we’re doing more, we’re doing so many hours per week more than the last govern- ment.’ The reality is that, whatever it is, it’s not enough. It needs to be pushed up. Obesity rates are going up.” Whether or not the Olympic legacy
for London has delivered what was promised before the Games in terms of a rise in activity levels – an issue likely to be contested for a long time – Redgrave is confident that it has had a major impact in one important way: a change in attitude towards minor sports, a cat- egory into which rowing most definitely still falls in national terms. “There has been an influx of people
wanting to try the sports that they saw at the Olympic Games, and that has worked incredibly well,” says Redgrave. “The attitude has changed. It’s not just about football, rugby, cricket. People will now try lots of different sports, because of what London did.”
Fulfilling sporting promise Of course, most children feel they have little hope of being serious competitors. But Redgrave fells strongly that even less gifted kids must be encouraged to have a go. That is the idea behind Sporting Promise, a project for which he became ambassador in 2010. The project’s funder is Matalan, the retail giant, which clearly expects some commercial gain – including the launch of an affiliated sporting goods shop, albeit one that reinvests 1% of funding in the charitable activities – but it also has the laudable goal of increasing
physical activity amongst children. The scheme aims to nip obesity in the bud by getting children involved in activity of all sorts, whatever their skill level, rather than alienating them early on with overly competitive traditional team games. “Not every child is going to be good
at English,” says Redgrave, who has in the past campaigned for increased support for children growing up with dyslexia, as he himself did, “not every child is going to be good on the sports field, and you need to adapt in certain ways” in choosing what activities to offer. Sporting Promise’s explicit goal is to provide the means for children to try other kinds of physical activity. “I believe there is a sport out there that will suit every child’s physical make-up, but we can’t offer all those sports,” says Redgrave. The scheme, in which over 2 million
children have participated to date in one way or another, targets its efforts at increasing the capability of primary school teachers, who are often faced with teaching 30 children sport at once with very little training. Currently only two days of teacher training are dedi- cated to sport. Sporting Promise aims to fill that gap. Redgrave’s role as the face of the scheme is important because it re- moves what he calls the “stigma” of participation in physical activity. While you wouldn’t know it from the example of Redgrave’s eldest daughter, Natalie, who won the women’s Boat Race with Oxford, there is typically a large drop- off in participation in sport amongst teenaged girls. Redgrave himself goes out to schools and shows them how it’s done – or at least shows them how to get involved; he confides that jump rope is not his speciality.
Believing in sport Key to Redgrave’s involvement in the scheme is his belief in the power of sport: “I think sport gives you a well-rounded bal- ance within life, society,” he says, “of learning how to conduct yourself in a competitive envi- ronment, or in an active environ- ment.” The Steve Redgrave Fund also uses sport for charitable causes. Since 2008 it has come under the wider umbrella of
Sport Relief, after raising £5 million from its inception in 2001. Part of that involvement with Sport
Relief has involved visiting developing countries with shocking levels of pover- ty, an experience which clearly affected Redgrave. “I knew what I was going to see before I went out there,” he says, “but it’s the magnitude of it. You just come out of one of these houses and it’s just block walls with a tin roof, and it’s just mile after mile after mile, and there are seven of these compounds around the city.” Yet even in this situ- ation, Redgrave is still positive about the benefits that sport can bring, telling of the joy of a group of children who were given their first proper football to replace their makeshift one: “It turned into anarchy in some ways, but nice anarchy. And the smiles on people’s faces...”
A lot of Redgrave’s work has moved
away from rowing itself. Rowing is an expensive sport. It is obviously not suit- ed to some countries. Indeed, Redgrave has encountered some cultural confu- sion amongst people abroad, for whom the concept of using water for leisure rather than as a valuable resource is alien. Nevertheless, he is still actively in- volved in rowing projects, including one ongoing in Lavasa, India, which promis- es to take up a fair amount of his time. Lavasa is, in Redgrave’s words, “a
stunning place”, with a beautiful lake to rival those in Italy. Indeed, the de- sign for the new city (the first totally planned city in India) explicitly models itself on Portofino, Italy, so rowing on the lake fits well with the desired image. Added to that, as Redgrave explains, is the fact that rowing can take place while the city is still being built. When Redgrave visited last year, he found the locals very enthusiastic and the Indian
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