[ Applause ] >>Clare Balding: I'm slightly worried about
you because having watched Sir Ranulph Fiennes's presentation I think you are sitting there
with ideas, aren't you?
>>Steve Redgrave: No, not me.
That's more James Cracknell.
Just looking at Ranulph's hands is that I always thought a few short tendons and a few
blisters, but they're in very good condition compared to his.
>>Clare Balding: They've done all right.
You clearly haven't tried hard enough.
[ Laughter ] >>Clare Balding: There is a shot there of
your family, and actually I was quite pleased watching.
A lot of shots in that film I was with the cameraman who took them and we got into the
family enclosure when we weren't meant to and certainly had a camera running when we
weren't meant to but it meant we could see your family's reaction to your achievements.
How much did you actually spend time with your family and, indeed, think about them
during your sporting career?
>>Steve Redgrave: Surprisingly a lot, really.
In the sort of 12 months leading up to games, we had been away on training camps a lot.
So you would be at home for two or three weeks, you'd be away for two or three weeks.
And that was sort of the routine.
And having young children by the end of it, my eldest was nine, my youngest was two at
the time, is that routine is a great thing for family life.
And so when you're at home, you train very early in the morning, finish by about 1:00
on the shortest days and 3:00 on the longer days.
So I could actually pick up the children from school.
That's great for the two or three weeks that you're at home but then you're away and that's
all left to your partner who has got to sort of run family life from that point of view.
And I think that made it difficult from that point of view.
My wife was an Olympic athlete in her own right so she knew what she was marrying into
at that time, but a big change in my life was when children came along because what
I used to do for fun, messing about in boats on the river and lakes around the world, is
I had to change from that point of view.
I had to try to become a little bit more financially solvent from that point of view, which wasn't
the case beforehand.
>>Clare Balding: It is worth making the point that throughout your Olympic career, U.K.
lottery funding came in and at least you were able to finance your sport, but you were never
making fortunes, were you?
It's not a sport you go into to make money.
>>Steve Redgrave: Lottery grants came for British athletes after the Atlanta games,
and Matthew and I picked up our first sponsorship just before that that put us out of the regime
of getting that sponsorship.
So that we weren't really that closely affected with the lottery money.
It helped for the team on training camps and from that point of view, but we didn't get
a direct grant from that, unfortunately.
>>Clare Balding: Do you think were you born slightly different and special or did you
become that way?
Did you know that you had the ability to push your body beyond the limits of the rest of
us, if I can say that?
>>Steve Redgrave: No.
Definitely not.
I was heavily dyslexic, I still am, and school life was pretty tough from that point of view,
struggling to read and write, of being put into the sort of lower sets of all the classes
apart from sport, which I was reasonable at.
But I went to a small comprehensive school, and the head of the English department had
two loves.
One was rugby and the other was rowing, and he asked me if I would like to try the sport
of rowing at the age of 13, nearly 14.
And to me, great, once a week, games lessons, I could leave school, go out on the river.
Unfortunately, after two or three weeks I started going down every day after school,
and it sort of became my life in some ways.
And at a very young age is that, from rowing at Marlow Rowing Club, it's not that far away
from here, about a half an hour's drive from where we are now, where I live, is that there
were people that were on the national team.
We had three coaches at Marlow Rowing Club that were part of national team, and they
were saying you could be world champion.
You are capable of one day being a world champion.
And I said that sounds great.
Yeah, that gives me a little focus.
It was one of the best things that happened to me but also one of the worst things that
happened because I believed one day I was going to be world champion.
And I thought, well, why not world champion, why not Olympic champion.
So I started setting my goals from that point of view.
But I honestly believed that one day it was going to happen.
All I didn't know is which year it was going to be.
I felt my name was engraved on the trophy.
It was just going to decide what year it was going to be.
So you sort of bide your time, you follow the coaching process of what you are asked
to do.
We didn't have any history, recent history of performance at that time, so you are following
a path of a team that hasn't been succeeding.
And I went to one world championships and performed really badly and that was the best
thing that ever happened to me because I felt, well, other people think I am capable of doing
this, I think I am capable of doing this, why isn't it happening?
And we reevaluated the whole process and looked at it and decided that we weren't really trying
hard enough, we weren't taking it professionally enough.
And so sort of changed the attitude.
And within nine months became Olympic champion.
>>Clare Balding: Can you remember in terms of breaking down what it was that you did
differently?
You clearly had the confidence and self-belief, and you've talked about that.
You go there.
You fail.
What do you -- do you rip up the whole book, or do you just take certain things and say,
"Right, I need to change this approach?"
>>Steve Redgrave: When you're trying to get to the top, it's easier to follow a path of
people who have been successful.
So there are books out there.
There are stories of how to be able to get there.
So actually getting there is relatively easy, even though it is still extremely hard.
Once you get there to try and get to a new level that no one's ever performed at before,
that's where the book has to be ripped up and start again.
I suppose the process that I started to develop was we all know about personal bests and you
set yourself targets to get to.
Not everyone can be Olympic champion.
Not everyone can be the best in their field.
But we can all be better than we are.
We can all improve and look for our own personal bests.
I think what really sums this up to me -- it is a very old story, but a guy called John
Naber, who is an American swimmer.
He competed at the Munich Games 1972.
He was part of the American relay team in the swimming competition and helped that team
qualify for the final but didn't swim in the final himself.
He came out of those games, he thought, "How can I get to the next level?
I want to win that gold medal.
I want to be part of that relay team in '76 in Montreal."
So what he did is he actually looked back through the history books and saw a steady
improvement and almost could predict a time that he felt he had to do to win that gold
medal in four years' time in the individual event, not just the team event.
He predicted a time of 55.5 seconds.
That's what he had to do.
His discipline was the 100 meters backstroke.
The problem was his personal best at that time was 59.5 seconds.
He had to go four seconds quicker over 100 meters swimming on his back.
He thought, "I can't do that, it is impossible."
By setting himself these targets sort of blew himself away that he couldn't achieve it.
But then he started thinking a little bit more laterally about it, thinking, I don't
have to swim that time today, tomorrow, this year.
I have got four years to do it.
That's a second improvement in every year.
He trained for ten months every year.
1/10th of a second improvement in a month's training.
30 days roughly in a month.
That's 1/300th improvement in a day's training.
He used to train for four hours a day every day during that training period.
So that's 1/1200th second of an improvement.
It takes an eye to blink 5/1200ths of a second.
He is looking for 1/5 of a eye blink improvement in an hour's training.
That's simple.
There is something about defining that will make you go a little bit quicker.
The difficult thing is you go do that every hour of every day of every month of every
year.
Obviously, the moral of the story is he did get to the games.
He was part of the relay team that took the gold medal and swum in that final.
And he made the final of the individual event where he was racing two-time Olympic champion,
world record holder and that sort of process and took the gold medal in a time of 59.49
seconds.
So what seemed to be impossible, he broke it down, looked at it very laterally in a
different way from more ways of looking at it.
In some ways, that's what you have got to do.
Those targets are great to be able to do that.
When I retired, I then started raising money for charity.
And I set up my own charitable trust to try to raise 5 million pounds in five years.
I thought -- I remember that story.
I'm going to break it all down.
Breaking it down to 20,000 pounds a week every week for five years having two weeks off each
year, it is not going to happen.
We actually looked at it from a different point of view, focused on big occasions to
try to raise a lot of money.
Really what you have to do is to look at the tasks you have, look at the way your process
of doing it, and then maybe turn it on its head and look at it in different ways.
To get to the next level, you just go look at all the tools you can offer in that direction
to get to.
>>Clare Balding: Your body was very much your friend and certainly through the early part
of your career until you got diabetes.
What happened then and how did you have to change your nutritional plan?
And, actually, did you have to reassess whether you were still capable of doing what you wanted
to do?
>>Steve Redgrave: Once I was diagnosed, I thought it was my international career over.
That was three years before my last Olympics.
I had a grandfather that had diabetes in his late 60s, early 70s and didn't survive much
longer than that.
I knew it was a pretty serious condition.
So I knew that had to be monitored and being an Olympic top athlete is not going to happen.
So I went to the consultation stage, that I was expecting my consultant is now going
to tell me I can't do what I was doing.
I was with him for three hours.
At the end of it, he said, Well, I don't see any reason why you can't achieve your dreams
in three years' time.
I thought, if he thinks I can do it, I would give it my best shot.
He did say it was going to be hard.
He didn't tell me that he didn't have a clue of how we were going to go about it and what
we were going to do.
He scoured the Internet in a few hours before I came and saw him.
So his vision, it wasn't until after we achieved what we did he told me the reality that he
didn't have a clue of how we were going to do it.
I suppose it was his attitude that I felt that diabetes had to live with me, not me
live with diabetes.
That was a quite good way of taking on the challenge in some ways.