sports
conditioning
conditioning SPORTS SERIES GREG SEARLE
Greg Searle won Olympic Gold in the 1992 Games in Barcelona, in the coxed pair with his brother Jonny, rowing down the favourites and snatching gold on the line. Now aged 38, he’s come out of a 10-year retirement in a bid to win a second gold medal at the 2012 London Olympics, a full 20 years after his first. He talks to Kate Cracknell about the challenges of a sporting comeback
Why did you retire so young – and what made you decide to come back? Rowing’s a wonderful sport that I’d really enjoyed in my teens and my twenties, but by the age of 28 I was married, we were expecting our first child after the Sydney Olympics – we now have two, Josie and Adam – and I wanted to move into having a career and a normal life. I actually became a professional sailor for a couple of years, sailing in the Americas Cup, before starting to work at Lane4 Management Group, a company set up by Adrian Moorhouse [the former Olympic swimming gold medallist] to take concepts from sport – mental toughness, teamwork and so on – into businesses. But I’d stayed close to rowing.
Last year I went to the World Championships as a commentator and I had one of those life-defi ning moments. My fl ight home was delayed by 24 hours, so I had a day’s enforced rest – time purely to myself, to take stock of my life. I realised I was slightly stuck in the rat race and asked myself if I could be doing something different, something better. The inspiration of being at the
world championships, of seeing the competition up close, made me ask myself if I was still capable of it. And on the aeroplane home, I did the sort of exercise that Lane4 would do with an organisation: what’s your vision, where do you want to be three years from now? And I decided where I wanted to be was winning an Olympic gold medal. I realised I needed to start training
immediately and it’s been a story of continual challenge, meeting each
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hurdle as it comes along, right up to today when I’m sitting at the six seat in the middle of the Great Britain eight, preparing for the World Championships in New Zealand in November.
Is the set-up different in rowing nowadays? It used to be that you rowed first and foremost for your local club – in my case, Molesey – rather than for the GB squad, which meant there was a constant power struggle going on that I think was destructive to British rowing. What I’ve come back to is a much more centralised system where we all row as Great Britain all the time, training together at the GB facility in Caversham, and the person I look up to as my main coach is Jurgen Grobler, head coach of British Rowing. We also train full-time now. Before,
the boats I was in tended to peak late in the season, and I think that’s because I was trying to do too much else in my life, juggling rowing with work; it was only later in the year that we went on proper training camps and fully focused on rowing. If I had my time again, I’d probably be more professional throughout the year – then I think the World and Olympic silvers and bronzes we won could have been golds.
How do standards now compare to before? In Lucerne this year, all six of the men’s heavyweight boats – pair, four, eight, single, double, quad – got a medal. That’s a very high standard of team and the best we’ve ever performed across the board. So the bar’s higher than I thought
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it would be. We now want to build on that towards 2012. Why not six golds? So there’s a higher level of challenge
and expectation than there was before, but there’s also more support. That combination – a strong vision and the support to help you achieve it – leads to peak performance.
Do you feel differently this time around? I think in 1996, and maybe even in 2000, I could have worked with the system more, rather than against it at times. Nowadays I’m genuinely totally happy to trust Jurgen’s judgment, whereas 10 years ago I’d have been trying to force his hand and dictate not just what I wanted to do but also how I wanted to do it. The wiser man in me, at 38 not 28, is prepared to say: I will trust the system
november/december 2010 © cybertrek 2010
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