So it hopefully hasn't escaped your notice that How To Be An Olympian is now very much A Thing. I do hope you're enjoying it.

And if you are, it would be just the loveliest thing if you could pop yourselves over to Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59001715-how-to-be-an-olympian) or Amazon (https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/1789651018/) and give it a rating and / or a review.

After all, the more reviews, the more chance people get to see it, and the more people start to realise that you know what, maybe it's not just about the medals...

Reviewers: Assemble!

Five years.

Five. Years.

Five - and those of you who have been paying attention up until now will need to bear with me for a moment, because I'm going to reiterate this, seeing as I wouldn't want anyone to have skimmed the first couple of lines and missed it - years.

Five years of grind, and exhilaration, and the emptiest grief, and persistence, and joy, and laughter, and frustration, and resilience and anger and resolution and doubt and darkness and setback and light and that's before we even *start* to touch on all the shit that Jess and Hannah have gone through.

But it's coming, now.

It's on, it is happening.

It's coming, and it's coming to you, yes you, you glorious few (well, not so few now - each extraordinary one of the 116 of you), you keepers of dreams, you who made it so - and it's coming, specifically, on September 16th, 2021.

And, thanks to the incredible designers at Unbound, it looks like this:


 <img alt class="doksoft_image_img" src="https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0728/3615/3620/files/HTBAO1b_copy.jpg?v=1690913242" width="326" height="500">


And it's ours, and we are making it happen, Jess and Hannah and you and me, together.

Tell your friends. Tell your enemies. Tell the new starters at work that you're not 100% have torsos, because you've only ever seen them on Zoom.

This shit's gettin' real.

One Dream

Sorry I haven't been around here much, folks.

You know how it is.

Covid. Kids. The day job.

Do it tomorrow.

Still, there it is, and here, as my son would say, I are.

First, a bit of housekeeping. We're still very much Full Steam Ahead. Thanks to all of you impossibly amazing people, we're on our way, but they're aiming for 2021 now, and so, so are we.

But yesterday should have been the heats of the Tokyo 2020 women's quadruple sculls. I think we could all do, for all sorts of reasons, with a bit of cheering up around now, so I'm going to take you back to August last year, and the reason that Jess - or her boat, at least - would have been right there on the start line.

It's the repêchage of the World Championships. Great Britain have been blown out of the water in their heat, China disappearing off to claim the win and the Olympic qualification spot that comes with it, and so here they are in the rep, where if they can finish in the top two, they'll be joining the Chinese in Tokyo.

--

Off go Poland. Not a big surprise, given how consistent they’ve been over the past few years. They’re in the repêchage because they got pipped by the Dutch in their heat, but like it’s been since the start of the Olympiad, it’s Kobus-Zawojska at bow, Wieliczko at 2, Springwald at 3, Zillmann at stroke, and like they have done since the start of the Olympiad, they’re looking strong. The British crew have tried not to spend much time wondering about what to expect from other boats – keep it internal, just work on getting from A to B as fast as we can – and so while they’ve been talking for a while about trying to get into the race a bit more off the start, they’re no suggestion that they’re going to change their race plans because of any boat in particular.

So off go Poland. Out they step in front of the field, and they’re looking comfortable enough. 500 metres in, and Great Britain are in third, which is fine, and they’re more than in touch with the Americans, but it’s still third, and a B final where only the top two will be going to the Olympics, and where the pressure is going to be immense.

It’s Jess’s job to make the in-race calls, and it can be tricky in a position like this – push now, and will you have something left at the end? Push later, and risk giving yourself too much to do? The 500 into the 1k, and she’s holding her nerve.

Into the 1k, half the race gone, and Jess looks over, and whoa, hang on, they’ve got half a length on us now.

She’s been to that wash-up regatta they have in Olympic year. She was there in 2016, when she, and Ro, and Tina, and Holly missed out on Rio.

She’s come last in the rain in Belgrade, and she’s seen two of the crew that sat in that boat lose some of their best years to injury.

She’s seen an Olympic medallist come in to the project, give it a year and then head straight back out again, and [REDACTED - sorry y'all, you'll have to be patient].

She’s been through [REDACTED - yep, wait for the book], and rib injuries, and she’s catapulted herself over her handlebars.

But in front of her are Charlotte, and Mathilda, and Melissa, and they don’t know what’s going on around them, but they’re listening, and waiting, and she knows that they’re going to do what they tell her.

She’s not panicking. Or, at least, she’s doing her level best not to sound panicked, which is tricky given how she knows that this, right now, is the moment. This is the moment when they have to attack, when they have to go, because otherwise this is the moment when it could all just slip away.

And she calls for an attack. And they go.

 

And it’s not enough.

Not yet.

They’ve edged into second with 500 metres to go, but it’s impossibly close, and so they’re going to have to attack again. Oh fuck, here come the Americans. Here they come.

And there’s only one call.

Every bit of energy that Jess can spare.

“OUR OLYMPICS!”

400 metres. 300 metres. 200, and with every stroke, the American boat is closing.

“OUR OLYMPICS!”

To the line.

B-beep.

Two boats, eight women. One place on the plane.

Jess is vaguely aware that Jane, the coach, is screaming. Is this a good scream? Is it a bad scream? Does she even know yet?

And in the end, it’s [REDACTED - sorry again folks, this'll have to wait too].

“We’ve qualified.”

No, no, no. No we haven’t.

“It’s on the board.”

They’ve done it. By 0.2 seconds, they’ve done it. And right now, Jess is probably swearing a lot, and crying a lot, and thanking everyone in sight, and hugging them. But she can’t, in all honesty, remember a moment of it.

One more year

Anyone fancy an exclusive extract to get you through a Monday morning? Cool, thought you might. Here’s the final of the 2017 Rowing World Championships.

—

At 500, they were gone. Poland, of course Poland, jump out almost from the first dip of blade into water. The Dutch, brave but outgunned again, Australia and Germany having a go from the outside lanes, and it's Britain against the United States for the honour of not coming last. You can't afford to let the field get away in a world championships final, but with 600 metres down the GB boat is already 12 metres back from the Poles, and if it's not quite getting worse, it's certainly not getting better. Out front, meanwhile, it's settling into a procession to the line. Poland have pulled out to seven, eight metres in front of the Dutch – a good half a boat length – and that gap is going nowhere as they reach halfway. They're in control.

              One kilometre down, one to go, and maybe there's been a little something from Britain. Poland are still in command, and Jess and the crew aren't laying an oar on them, but the Australians and the Germans are sliding back into the pack; and suddenly, with 1150 gone, there are four boats fighting for bronze. 1250, 1300, and while the US aren't making any inroads, there's now nothing, literally nothing, between Australia, Germany and Britain.

              And Mathilda gives the call and they go, blades in and through and out and back, and it's not perfect and seamless and smooth and effortless – it never is – but a stroke rate of 35 becomes 36, and then 37. The other crews are winding it up too, and they're hitting higher stroke rates, but nobody's going faster than the British, and Poland are rocking. Katarzyna Zillmann looks cool enough in the stroke seat, but the pain is coursing through Maria Springwald and Marta Wieliczko behind her, and there's fear in the face of Agnieszka Kobus at bow.

              The Netherlands haven't managed to close the gap as they come into the last 500, but they've hung on, and unlike the crew to which they've been losing all season, they look smooth. And there's Great Britain! They've come through the Australians, they're pulling away from Germany, and with three hundred to go, they couldn't, could they? It's part of Beth's job to keep an eye on where they are in the field, and she's told the crew a couple of hundred back that they were in bronze; and while as far as Jess knows, that could be bollocks, she trusts Beth in what she's really saying, and that is: just f**king keep going, you lot, keep going, and you're going to win a world medal.

              My god, what power! They're eating up the lake, metre by metre by metre, and they're doing it at the lowest stroke rate of anyone. Mathilda's chipped in again too – “we're in third, the Germans are attacking, we need to go”, but she's undersold it, because the British are, right this second, the best, the smoothest, the strongest boat on the water.

              But then the Netherlands respond to this monster hunting them down from the lane inside, and they up the stroke rate to 40, 41, and Poland are shot, and within 100 metres the Dutch have gone from a third of a length back on the triple World Cup winners to poking a bow ball ahead, and the line just a few more strokes away.

              And if this race were 2,500m rather than 2k, you'd have had the Brits nailed on to row straight through both of them. But the finish line comes too soon, and it's the Netherlands who sink to their knees in the boat in exhaustion and disbelief, and broken Polish bodies that simply collapse in despair, and Jess and Holly and Mathilda and Beth will have to settle for bronze; but if Belgrade was depressing and Račice was a lonely light in the gloom, then this bronze medal is one to savour.

Just keep going!

Out on the water, you’ll often find yourself counting in  tens. The big first ten strokes. Up the rate for ten more in the middle after you’ve settled into your rhythm, just to show the rest of the field who’s in control. Then when you’re trying to ramp it up towards the finish line, ten on a call to give it everything you’ve got left.

The first ten? It’s all about power off the line, setting down a marker to the others, getting right into the race.

10% funded. James, Robert, Stephanie, Clare, Annette, Gregory, Laura, Madeleine, Phil, Rob, Jonathan, Mike, Diane, Sarah, Nick, Tim, Edward, Guy, Shani. We couldn’t have done those first ten strokes without you. You’ve set down the marker, we’re in the race, and I couldn’t be more grateful.

Here’s the call for the next ten.

Ten strokes towards Tokyo

Hannah Dines and Jess Leyden are two perfectly normal, brilliant women. One, a world record-holding athlete and a Paralympian on the trike. The other, a multiple age-group world champion and one of the most promising rowers Great Britain has to offer. In the five years (yes, that’s right) between Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020, they will face cancer scares, crushing defeats, and the biggest global health crisis in a century. They will get dropped, they will get injured, and they will win medals. They will spend the best years of their lives knowing that at any moment, it could all come crashing down. That all the training, all the sacrifice could be in vain, wasted effort as a pandemic raged. That maybe these could be the years that will shape their finest hour – or that maybe, after everything that they’ve been through, it could all still be snatched away at the last…

If you ever find yourself booking a room at the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Reading – and the Rough Guide to Berkshire this isn't, but one never knows when the urge may take hold – make sure you ask for one round the back.
This is important. Otherwise, when your alarm goes off too early of a morning, and you lever yourself out of bed, grumble your way to the kettle and then potter across to the window to open the curtains and take in the day, if you're lucky there's going to be a tree in your face. If not, reading from right to left, it's petrol station, greasy spoon, redbrick office, roundabout. A greasy spoon with a solid set of TripAdvisor reviews it may be, and doubtless plenty of the employees of the Reading branch of Peter Brett Associates are more than content with their life choices, but none of that changes the fact that this is not the view they advertise on the hotel website.
So drink your tea. Head downstairs, pick your way past the spreadsheet printouts and meal time notices pinned to the whiteboard in the foyer, and press on through the café, because once you make it out of the glass doors at the back and onto the terrace, suddenly there is late summer sunlight twinkling off the Thames. The birds are singing, the sky is an impudent blue, and it's a different world.
It's all so serene, so far removed from the hammering heart of built-up Britain that's beating no more than a hundred yards away, so gently perfect, that if this weren't August 2016, you'd expect Jess Leyden to be feeling pretty well-disposed towards it. But it is, and so she isn't.
She perches uncomfortably on a rickety metal chair, her knees hunched up to her chest. “You look at some of them,” she says. “And you say, well, why can't I do that?”
 
Jess has been watching a lot of telly recently. Team mates, room mates, former crew mates, friends and rivals have been out in Rio de Janeiro over the last couple of weeks, competing at an Olympic Games. They’ve been breaking records and they’ve been winning medals, and she could have been there too.
She's got the talent. Everyone at British Rowing knows that, and has done for a few years now, since she won the country's first ever international gold medal in the women's single scull<a href="#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1">[1]</a>, at the 2013 World Junior Championships out in Lithuania. But the quadruple scull she's been in for her two seasons in the senior squad missed out on Olympic qualification, and so here she is. Everyone else, it seems, is over in Brazil, and she's sitting outside a hotel in the Home Counties and reliving the moment, three months earlier at the final qualification regatta, when a crew made up of her, Holly Nixon, Ro Bradbury and Tina Stiller finished behind China, Ukraine and New Zealand and fell five seconds short of Rio.
“After we missed out, I didn't know what to do,” she says. “I knew we would have to do something quite special at that regatta, but in that moment I really believed we could. We had a good platform, we knew the way we were going to get faster, and it was slowly getting there. But if you're a crew like we were, who were really fighting for the places, you're affected more. You change your tactics more than an established crew would. Maybe that's wrong.”
There was one thing for certain – she wasn't going to leave the sport. She might still be so new to the national team set-up that she doesn't even think of herself as a rower – “I don't really feel like I've grown up. I feel like I'm still doing my hobby” – and she might only have turned down a place at Newcastle University two years ago because she'd just made it into the Great Britain senior squad, and it's easier for an international rower to become an engineer than it is for an engineer to become a rower. But unlike in 2012, when Jess was still splashing about in the junior ranks and the team that dominated at Dorney was becoming the stuff of legend – now, she knows she's good enough. She's got the numbers on the rowing machines, and she's proving herself on the water. Now, she needs to keep sharpening up her technique, she needs to stay fit, and she needs to find the boat that will take her to Tokyo, because she's not going to miss out again.
 
First up, a hop over the North Sea to Rotterdam, and the under-23 World Championships. Since the quad missed out on Rio, the coaches have been lining Jess up for a double with the other stand-out sculling prospect in the British women's squad, Mathilda Hodgkins-Byrne. It's a boat, though, that has no history and very possibly no future, however well they perform. It's not nothing, of course – it'll keep them in shape, it might well earn them a medal. But it's been cobbled together at short notice essentially to give them both something to do, and age-group racing in the September of an Olympic year is not why either of them got into the sport.
For Jess and Mathilda, what the next few months are really about is getting in the best possible shape for trials – the series of head-to-head races, time trials and rowing machine tests which runs between November and April each year, punctuating the punishing winter-to-spring training programme. It's a gruelling experience, which will officially form the basis for crew selections for next season and in practice quite probably beyond; in fact, it's fair to say that what happens at the upcoming final assessment, in April next year, could end up defining the whole Olympic cycle. Which makes it important, obviously, even if you can't think of it like that.
“Sometimes people –” begins Jess, and she names no names, but that's not the point, this could be anyone, any sport, any cycle, any country – “sometimes people get really caught up in trials, and trying to be the best person in the country. Whereas actually, day-to-day training as a team, you should be thinking about beating the world. That's the team I want to be part of, a strong team that wants to beat the world and not just each other, that shouts to each other to get better, but that supports each other, and doesn't tear each other down. Because you'd rather miss out on a team that's winning a gold medal than be in a team that comes last.”
Team dynamics. At the very top level, a huge amount of sport is about how to get people working together, and it's a tricky business. For one thing, assuming Jess makes it into a boat this time around, it's going to be completely different to the one that missed out on Rio, not least because over the next few weeks, half of the old crew will quit the squad – Ro to try her hand at cycling, Tina to turn her back on professional sport entirely and join Deloitte. So if there is going to be a return to the quad, and Jess admits to a feeling of unfinished business, there will need to be new team mates, new relationships. The only one left from the Rio cycle that she could be racing alongside is Holly Nixon, and the two of them haven't always seen eye-to-eye.
“When we first came onto the team together, we didn't really trust each other,” says Jess. “I think Holly had a few issues outside of training that she was trying to work through, but she was quite closed about those, and so came across to me as weak-minded. And with my personality, I'm a bit of a bull in a china shop.” But then British Rowing brought in someone from one of those companies that do team insight profiles, the upshot of which was everyone on the squad being assigned colours to represent their personalities. Holly came out as Earth Green, Jess was a Fiery Red, and just like that, it started to make a bit more sense. So now when Jess blurts out something critical, Holly knows that she's not doing it to upset her, and when Holly is acting all sensitive and over-thinking things, it's not because she wants to piss Jess off. It's anyone's guess how that will play out in the long term if they end up back in a boat together, but for now it's great, it's lovely, it's the end of Cool Runnings and it's Junior and Yul and 'This doesn't mean that I like you.' Holly helps Jess rein herself in, and if Jess really believes in what she's saying, she'll explain why and they'll talk it through, and now Holly's one of the closest friends Jess has got.
 
The double with Mathilda takes the gold medal with something to spare, which if practically inconsequential is still pretty sweet. It comes at the cost of injuries to Jess's rib and back, though, so when the squad's annual three-week break comes around in October, she decides that she really needs to make the most of it. She had planned to go on a walking holiday, but the injuries put paid to that, so it becomes a chance to go home, see her mother and catch up with friends for a bit. Then it's straight back to the team's base in Caversham, just upriver from the Crowne Plaza, and back into the grind.
It starts as a six day week. From Monday to Wednesday, the team gets switched around between crew boats, eights and quads mainly, and then from Thursday to Saturday, they're in their singles. Jess, who's been spending a lot of time in the quad, has been going out for Sunday morning bike rides as well, which she shouldn't really be doing – but then it would be rude not to, she says, the weather's been so pleasant. Then, as the weeks go on and trials get closer, there'll be more and more singles work, and the mileage will start to ratchet up.
She'll also be competing in a four-way invitational exhibition race on the Thames called the Wingfield Sculls. In itself, it's meaningless. It's not part of the training programme, and times posted and victories achieved will count for nothing four years down the line. But since the women's version of the race was revived in 2007 following a 30-odd year hiatus, London 2012 gold medallists Anna Watkins and Sophie Hosking have both won it; so has double Olympian Beth Rodford, and so too Rio silver medallist Melanie Wilson and double Olympic bronze medallist Elise Laverick. Barcelona gold medallist Greg Searle has won the men's race, and so has London bronze medallist Alan Campbell, so too double Olympic gold medallist Mahe Drysdale, and back in the 1980s, there were five wins in a row for that fella who paddled with Pinsent. The bottom line is that it's a serious honour even to be asked to compete, and when Jess wins, against GB team mate Georgia Francis and former squad members Amelia Carlton and Pippa Whittaker, she's suddenly got a lot to live up to.
And so she keeps on pushing, in the gym and on the water. She's pushing so hard, in fact, that she makes herself ill, and misses the first round of trials in November. She's ill in December too, when the next round comes along, but she won't admit it to the team doctor, and so she drags herself up the course a couple of times and somehow finishes second, behind Mathilda.
And autumn gives way to winter.
<a href="#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1">[1]</a>There are two types of rowing, sculling and sweep, with the difference being, in essence, that scullers get two oars each. Jess has always been a sculler, mainly because when she first took up the sport, at Hollingworth Lake Rowing Club on the outskirts of Rochdale, no-one ever stuck around long enough for her to row with them. Given that you only have one oar if you're doing sweep, if it's just you in the boat then either you're going to end up going round in circles, or it's going to be a canoe.

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