Steve Redgrave

Just for those that wanted to know how to spell Paul.

Steve Redgrave or Stephen Bartlett, which one has a better score on WikiFeet?

Oh.

Oh.

Yeah, you know about the WikiFeet.

Steve Redgrave or Stephen Bartlett.

Yeah.

Now think about what they do as a job.

They said...

It was really interesting, 'cause Steve Redgrave was a, a rugby player.

Um, went into rowing afterwards, and it was really interesting that the way, uh, that my friend tells this story, it was almost at the recruitment, and they had Steve Redgrave, and they went, "Cool, we just wanna see your power.

So this is called a hang clean.

So you're here, and as the bar comes up, speed, disappear under the bar, and then you catch it.

But what we're interested in is what do you do if you are an athlete with diabetes and you're training potentially high volumes.

And I imagine Steve Redgrave training for the Olympics is doing 30 hours plus a week, all told, different training.

Yeah.

Imagine the calorie demand, the carbohydrate demand, and the consequences of not getting that right.

So that would have been a pretty cool university of learning for both Ian and Steve Redgrave to learn that.

Because, yeah, and he says himself in the podcast, I forget his words exactly, but he says we all have to thank Steve Redgrave because he has shown us that it's possible.

And, yeah, it starts maybe with Redgrave and it ends a week or two ago.

What's it now? A couple of weeks in New York where Alexander Zverev thanked his mother in his post-tournament victory speech because he's maybe the most famous current sportsman with type 1 diabetes.

You've got the nation who were used to seeing us as plucky losers, you know, coming fourth, fifth, sixth, or maybe scraping a medal and that would be something to be celebrated today.

But it was rare to see a gold medalist and I think that's what made people like Steve Redgrave so special because even in that environment where they weren't getting the support that athletes nowadays get, he was still winning five consecutive gold medals at the Olympics.

Off the back of that, we went into Athens and did really well relative to the previous two games.

But then it was Beijing that was the game that really took off.

They don't wanna feel the pain.

But actually, I mean, a great rower in this country, a guy called Steve Redgrave, I don't know whether you know, but he, I mean, he won like multiple Olympic medals, and he had this, he gave this, uh, speech where he said, "I love the part of the race where I feel the pain, because I know my opponents are feeling the pain, and I'm better at dealing with it than them." And I do, again, I think that's true.

That's true across-

No, but I think that triggers, for an athlete, that triggers that muscle memory, right? Like when-

Um, so some really great names, uh, coming along.

I'm sure Sir Steve Redgrave.

In fact, I can see here, Sir Steve Redgrave will have played in all 25 Alfred Dunhill Links-

Wow

...

And you're like-

Like Steve Redgrave in that top when he falls off

... yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

And then On one occasion, a group of us did go down to Leander Rowing Club in Henley, which is where is the kind of the club where people go from Leander to the Great Britain squad.

And we rode with Sir Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinson.

There were four of us went down there and that was really amazing.

But it kind of I got the bug then and then tried it when I was at university.

and sort of, I won't say gave it away, but moved away from the sport.

And I was so fortunate that I was encouraged back into it, you know, for all the right reasons and more particularly because I thought it was just such a special opportunity to have a crack at Steve Redgrave, who... you know, has been, I think, broadly considered to be a goat, you know, in our sport for many years.

And I say that endearingly.

I think there are a number of goats, but I think he's probably one of the goats of our sport.