Feel No Pain

Rowing’s unlikely hero has dedicated his life to the most gruelling sport.

From The New Yorker
July 22, 1996

Early one morning in June, I rode a bike along the towpath next to the Thames, watching the three-time gold-medallist Steven Redgrave and his partner, Matthew Pinsent, row up and down the Henley Reach, the most famous stretch of water in the rowing world. They won the gold medal in the coxless-pair event in Barcelona, in 1992; they have won the last three world championships; and they hope to add the coxless-pair final in Atlanta, on July 27th, to their string of victories. They looked smooth and powerful as they glided past the other, slower crews, and although they have somewhat different rowing styles–Pinsent, in the stroke seat, was stiff and upright, while Redgrave looked more relaxed, his shoulders rounded over the oar–the boat moved as if it had entered the quasi-mystical state of oneness that rowers call “swing.” Redgrave, who is the “toe” in the boat–the steersman, so called because you steer with your foot–was hugging the riverbank, where there was flat water and shade.

Redgrave has won thirteen events at Henley since 1981, and last year, after he and Pinsent won the Silver Goblets race, they did a ceremonial paddle past the Stewards’ Enclosure and the cheering grandstands, because Redgrave, who is thirty-four, had announced that this was going to be his last Henley. Sixty years ago, Redgrave, a workingman’s son, would probably not have been allowed to row at Henley at all, because of the Amateur Rowing Association’s rule excluding anyone “who is or has been by trade or employment for wages, a mechanic, artisan, or labourer, or engaged in any menial duty.” This is the famous rule that is said to have kept Jack Kelly, Grace’s father, who won three gold medals in sculling in the twenties, from competing in the Diamond Challenge Sculls race, because he had once worked as a bricklayer.

Among Olympic oarsmen, virtually all of whom are university graduates with their careers on hold while they do the training necessary to row at the Olympic level, Redgrave is the exception. He has a wife and two kids, and is for all practical purposes a professional oarsman–probably the only rower in the world who earns enough from sponsorship deals, product endorsements, and motivational-speaking fees to support himself above the poverty line. Unlike the twenty-five-year-old Pinsent, whose father is a country vicar, and who is an Old Etonian and an Oxford Blue–a classic representative of the upper-crust side of the sport, which I encountered when I spent a year at Radley, an English public school–Redgrave was a poor student, because of a learning disability, and left school at sixteen. (Sometimes, when he is giving autographs and a fan asks for a special inscription, he gets flustered, and worries about reversing the letters or misspelling the words; Pinsent helps him out with inscriptions when he can.) Redgrave is not going to be a doctor, a lawyer, or an investment banker, like most of the other athletes you see rowing in the Olympics: young men and women from good schools who are enjoying one of the last refuges of amateurism–the chance to play in their own versions of “Chariots of Fire”–before getting on with their real lives. For Redgrave, rowing in the Olympics is real life.

As I cycled along beside the pair, I was also thinking about my own rowing career. I was good enough to make the Princeton heavyweight varsity as a sophomore, and I like to think I might have made a good bowman in a national boat if I had reordered my priorities. I was remembering in particular a timed piece I rowed on this course with a guy from Radley, who was trying out for the British Junior Olympic team. He was the dominant personality in our boat, just as Redgrave is in his, although I secretly thought I was the better oarsman; Pinsent no doubt thinks he’s better than Redgrave, too. This is how rowers are. In a pair, the central dynamic of rowing with other people, which is that you need each other absolutely but you compete with each other relentlessly, is boiled down to its essence. If one oar is pulling harder than the other, the toe will have to use the rudder to keep the boat straight, and this will slow the boat down. It’s not unusual to hear pairs oarsmen screaming at each other as they go down the race course, and this is not necessarily a bad thing: if you have two oarsmen thinking, You bastard, I’m going to pull you around, you can have a very fast pair.

After their row, Redgrave and Pinsent showered in the Leander Club and went upstairs to the Members Bar to have breakfast. Each of them drank a pitcher of squash and ate a bacon sandwich. The plan was to rest for an hour before starting the second workout of the morning, a session of heavy weights. Both men are six feet five and weigh about two hundred and twenty-five pounds, which is large for pairs oarsmen. Heavyweight oarsmen have the approximate strength of weight lifters and the metabolic capacity of cross-country skiers, a combination that gives them their unique balloon-chested physique. The pectorals are pushed high and squashed nearly flat by the amazing oxygen-into-energy processing machines underneath. The back is more muscular than the chest: it looks like a second chest, facing the other way. The thighs are the most “cut”-looking parts of the body, but the calves are oddly slender; rowing is not a “weight-bearing” sport.

Redgrave, who is handsome in a slightly haunted way, was chewing his sandwich slowly, as though to conserve as much energy as possible, even in his jaws. Exhaustion was written in his face; he looked older than thirty-four, like someone who’d been breaking rocks every day for twenty years. Pinsent looked fresh and healthy, sitting in his characteristic correct posture, with his head thrown back–a schoolboy god. Watching them interact, I was thinking that rowing with an oarsman as famous as Redgrave, who ranks with Nick Faldo and Torvill and Dean in terms of name recognition in England, cannot be easy. Redgrave’s first partner, Andrew Holmes, with whom he won a gold medal at Seoul, became so fed up with his fame that they split up after the Olympics, and Holmes dropped out of rowing. Redgrave’s second partner, Simon Berrisford, was injured in 1989 and dropped out of rowing, too. It says something about Pinsent’s resilience that he has kept up with Redgrave for six years.

The sport of rowing actually has a bias against superstars, which is one reason that it seems somewhat out of place in modern sports culture. In both boarding school and college, we were taught that rowing wasn’t about personal glory but about doing what’s best for the crew. The very best rower on the crew was the same as the worst in the boat, and believing this was the only way to achieve swing. Of course, there were silent stars–standout athletes who were three or four levels above the rest of us–but generally only the other oarsmen knew who they were.

To a certain extent, Redgrave’s success has meant flying in the face of the crew ethic. Redgrave was once quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying, “My biggest failing is that I have to rely on other people if I’m to win”–a statement that is the very antithesis of the team ideal I learned as a rower. He demonstrated early in his career that he was not particularly interested in rowing with men who did not have the same commitment to the sport that he had–which was virtually everyone else on the national squad. Why should he, who was giving his whole life to rowing, haul along a boatload of student amateurs (like me), who were dividing their loyalties between rowing, school, and their careers? It is not surprising that Redgrave’s first ambition was to be a single sculler. “The eight is a country’s blue-ribbon event,” he told me in Leander, “but can you name the people who were in the gold-medal-winning eight in the last Olympics? Whereas you would at least stand a chance of naming the winning single sculler.” But Redgrave wasn’t good enough to beat Kolbe and Karppinen, of West Germany and Finland, respectively, who dominated that event throughout the eighties. In the 1985 world championship, Redgrave, trailing in a semifinal, stopped sculling in the middle of the race. This is a famous event in international rowing circles, because it is, as one oarsman put it to me, “the only proof we have that Redgrave is mortal.” (Redgrave maintains that he injured his back during the race, and points out that he had to be carried from the boat.) After that, he gave up his dream of single sculling and focussed on the pair.

Pinsent got up and said he was going downstairs to start on the weights. I tried to get Redgrave, slumped in an ergonomically incorrect position in a chair against the wall, to talk about the small pleasures of rowing, or to wax poetic on the mystical pursuit of the perfect stroke (Steve Fairbairn, the longtime coach of Jesus College, Cambridge, used to say that you could never really row; you can only imitate the act of rowing in a boat), but Redgrave didn’t seem interested in my collegiate enthusiasm. He said, “I don’t row for pleasure, I row to win gold medals.” He doesn’t pay much attention to his diet, or take vitamins, or stretch before workouts. He hates to train. Nevertheless, he works out six hours a day, seven days a week–all this for perhaps ten six-and-a-half-minute races a year.

The paradox of rowing is that this most physically demanding of sports is about eighty per cent mental, and the higher you rise in the sport the more important mental toughness becomes. Rowers have to face the grim consequences of starting a two-thousand-metre race with a sprint–a strategy no runner, swimmer, cyclist, or cross-country skier would consider using in a middle-distance event. Since rowers race with their backs to the finish line, the psychological advantage of being ahead in the race–where you can see your opponents but they can’t see you–is greater than the physiological disadvantage of stressing the body severely so early in the race. If you get behind, something like “unswing” can happen: the cumulative effect of the group’s discouragement can make the individuals less inspired. Therefore, virtually every crew rows the first twenty or thirty strokes at around forty-four strokes a minute (which is pretty much flat out) before settling down to around thirty-seven for the body of the race.

As a result of this shock to the system, the rower’s metabolism begins to function anaerobically within the first few seconds of the race. This means that the mitochondria in the muscle cells do not have enough oxygen to produce ATP, which is the source of energy, and start to use glycogen and other compounds stored in the muscle cells instead: they begin, as it were, to feed on themselves. These compounds produce lactic acid, which is a major source of pain. In this toxic environment, capillaries in the hardest-working muscles begin to dilate, while muscles that aren’t working as hard go into a state of ischemia–the blood flow to them partially shuts down. Meanwhile, the level of acid in the blood continues to rise. Mike Shannon, a sports physiologist who works at the new Olympic training center, outside San Diego, told me that the highest levels of lactic acid ever found in athletes–as measured in parts per million in the bloodstream–were found in the blood of oarsmen, about thirty parts per million. “That’s a tremendous amount of pain,” he said.

Marathon runners talk about hitting “the wall” at the twenty-third mile of the race. What rowers confront isn’t a wall; it’s a hole–an abyss of pain, which opens up in the second minute of the race. Large needles are being driven into your thigh muscles, while your forearms seem to be splitting. Then the pain becomes confused and disorganized, not like the windedness of the runner or the leg burn of the biker but an all-over, savage unpleasantness. As you pass the five-hundred-metre mark, with three-quarters of the race still to row, you realize with dread that you are not going to make it to the finish, but at the same time the idea of letting your teammates down by not rowing your hardest is unthinkable. Therefore, you are going to die.

In a sense, all the training you do as an oarsman is to prepare you for this critical moment in the race, which is extremely dramatic, though it doesn’t show up on television. But heavyweight oarsmen are famously laconic by nature, and they almost never talk about pain; it’s a taboo subject. The feeling is that if you talk about pain you might begin to fear it, and the fear will get into your head in funny ways, both in the specific dread of racing and the long-term dread of training, like a psychic version of repetitive-stress injury. When I asked Redgrave about the pain, he said, “What pain? There’s no pain,” as though he didn’t even know what I was talking about.

If Redgrave and Pinsent win the final in Atlanta, as they almost surely will, Redgrave will become the first athlete in an endurance event ever to win gold medals in four consecutive Olympics. After that, he says, he is going to retire. He sees no point in coaching rowing, either, since if he’s coaching he may as well be on the water. For the last eighteen years, his life has been devoted to one thing–winning gold medals–and now, more than most athletes, he is facing an affliction that might be called post-gold-medal-trauma syndrome.

“I’ve got no plans,” Redgrave said when I asked him what he saw himself doing when he retires. “I’m taking the kids to Disney World. That’s the only plan I have.”

“No more rowing?”

“That’s it. Finished. I have no plans to row after this race,” he said. He added that his wife, Ann, wants him to retire, so that he can be more available to do things with their two young daughters. “She would like to lead a more normal life, whatever that is. Not having weekends is tough. That’s the big family time.”

“But what are you going to do?” I asked. “You have no idea?” It seemed strange that someone who would prepare so fanatically for one six-and-a-half-minute race would not be the least bit prepared for life after that race.

“No idea,” Redgrave said. The subject of life after rowing, it seemed, was like the subject of pain–untouchable. “Whatever I do, it won’t be a nine-to-five job. I’ve been my own boss for twenty years and I’m not going to work for someone else.”

I asked Redgrave what his gold medals meant to him.

“Once you’ve won them, they don’t mean much,” he said. “You look to the next one. I suppose knowing what you’ve achieved is a way of enjoying them.”

When I asked Ann, who is the doctor for the British rowing squad, whether she thought Steve really was going to retire, she said, “I doubt it. He has lived with the job so long now he doesn’t know any other way. My training as a doctor tells me people just can’t switch off like that.”

I said, “Maybe he could just row at Henley.”

“That wouldn’t be enough for Steve. It’s the Olympics or nothing for him. The rest doesn’t matter. The thing that has driven Steve all along is the desire to be the best–and that’s what the Olympics means. So he wins four gold medals, and that makes him one of the very best, but if he won five that would make him the best.”

I asked Ann what motivates Steve to win.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I suppose it comes from his dyslexia, his learning disability. That made it very difficult for him in school–until he found rowing, which was something he could do well. The others he went to school with who had that problem had to face it earlier, but because of Steve’s rowing he never had to, and now it’s a bigger problem, because he’s put it off that long. Rowing’s given him an avenue away from facing it.”

Steve disagreed with this. “If I don’t stop rowing, it’s because I love to row. My dyslexia is not a factor.”

The central tenet in the amateur ideal of rowing, as I received it, is that the principles you learn in rowing will be valuable to you when your athletic career is over. According to this philosophy, Redgrave’s incredible mental tenacity, discipline, and commitment will be invaluable to him in anything he wants to do. While I was in England, I tested this ideal on Richard Budgett, whom I rowed with at Radley, and who was the two man in the coxed four that Redgrave stroked in the Los Angeles games for his first gold medal. (The boat was a decent one until Redgrave got into it; then it flew.) “Success helps breed confidence,” Budgett, who is now a doctor, told me, sitting in his garden in London. “I’m a lot more confident now for having won a gold medal.” He added that his gold medal had definitely helped him in his career. “I could get into whatever hospital I wanted to,” he said, “just by putting the gold medal on my C.V.– because people were interested to meet me. And I’m not a complete idiot. Two years ago, when the job of chief medical officer of the British Olympic Association became available, I applied for it, and I’m sure my medal helped me get it.”

Budgett talked about his life as an Olympic athlete as though he were talking about living in an ashram in India or sailing around the world–as a higher life, totally outside his daily existence. “Until about three years ago,” he said, “I was telling myself that I could drop everything, train full time, and have another go at the Olympics. But of course I couldn’t. I have my practice and Sue and the children. It’s over.”

I also ran this credo past Michael Evans, the god who stroked the boat that I rowed in at Princeton; he won a gold medal in 1984, in the Canadian eight, and is now an investment banker at Goldman, Sachs, in Fleet Street.

“You mean do I think, Last five hundred! when I’m in a tough situation? No,” Michael said. The phone rang, and he said into the receiver, “What do you mean it hasn’t been priced yet? . . . O.K., but I need you at this meeting.” He hung up. “Let me tell you something,” he said to me. “Nobody in the business world gives a rat’s ass if you win a gold medal in the Olympics.” (A classic Evans line, which took me right back to that boat.) “They say, ‘Oh really? That’s very interesting! Now let’s get to work.’ They have no idea what it takes, of the dedication and the time and the training. Most of them are weekend warriors who play tennis or do a little running–and they think they can understand. And they have no clue!”

He added that he thought Redgrave was probably the greatest oarsman ever, and that even if his gold medals don’t count for much in life outside the Olympics they have great meaning to the few people who understand what it took to win them.

“Last month, we were doing an offering for an athletic-footwear company,” Michael said, “and a colleague introduces me to one of the guys from the company and says, ‘Oh, you two have something in common,’ and I go ‘What’s that?’ and he says, ‘You both won gold medals in the Olympics.’ And I just looked at the guy, and he was the softest-spoken, humblest guy you can imagine, and he didn’t have to say anything. I knew what that meant to him in his life. What an enormous event that must have been for that guy, back in 1960. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. We both just knew what it meant.”

Copyright © John Seabrook 2003. All rights reserved