Gold and silver for Team GB rowers as women hold off Romanian pair

It started by falling short by the most narrow of margins, continued with a photograph and concluded with floods of tears at a medal ceremony. For Emily Craig and Imogen Grant, this was the ultimate redemption story. The last ever staging of the women’s lightweight double sculls saw Team GB win gold, leaving them as champions in perpetuity. Not bad for a claim to fame.

A mere 0.01 seconds denied Craig and Grant a medal in Tokyo three years ago. Craig mounted an image of that cruel near-miss on her living room wall, in what sounds like a form of sporting sadism. In France, Team GB dominated their race throughout. Time for some redecorating. “I’ll maybe just put this in a frame,” said Craig, clutching her gold medal. She had been overcome by emotion on the podium. “Every time I thought about that moment, it brought me to tears,” said Craig. “I had to try and not think about it for a very long time.”

The response of Craig and Grant to events in Japan should serve as a lesson in bouncebackability. They were 23 races unbeaten before this, the one they wanted the most. “That brought pressure but also confidence,” Craig explained. “We knew we could go out there and do something we had done multiple times before. It wasn’t about pulling something out of thin air.”

Grant will start work as a foundation level doctor in Slough two days after the closing ceremony. The future in rowing is unclear for the duo, partly because of the removal of this discipline from the Olympic programme and partly because they want time to look at a bigger picture. Craig spoke of “finding value in ourselves beyond rowing” between Tokyo and Paris.

“Not every Olympian gets it right on their first try,” said Grant. “We have put in so much work and we are such different, better people this time around. I think there was a certain inevitability about today, we knew we were capable of it.

“We became better people after Tokyo by taking time out and having some perspective. I don’t think there is any reason not to do that again.”

It would, however, feel a shame if they are lost to the sport after this most epic of highs. Team GB’s biography for Grant states her “journey in rowing began” when she signed up for a taster session in exchange for two free drinks during freshers week at Cambridge. This has turned into quite the deal.

Romania took silver, more than a second behind Team GB’s finishing time of 6:47:06. Greece earned third. There was historic glory for Ireland elsewhere, Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy becoming the first athletes from the country to win back-to-back Olympic titles since 1932. O’Donovan and McCarthy took gold in the men’s lightweight double sculls.

Earlier, as the sun broke through in eastern Paris, Tom George and Ollie Wynne-Griffith threatened to precede Team GB’s women to gold. George and Wynne-Griffith took the impetus right from the start of their men’s pair final and still held a commanding lead with 500m of the 2000m race to go. They fell victim to a Croatian rampage, Martin and Valent Sinkovic flying through to grab the lead over the closing strokes. Croatia’s winning time of 6:23:66 was less than a second ahead of the British. The brothers are now three-time Olympic champions. Switzerland took bronze.

“There was a lot written and said about this team post Tokyo, tough questions asked,” said Wynne-Griffith. “I’m really proud that a lot of the athletes are returning athletes from Tokyo, the same people who learned from that experience, came back as a team and made people proud across the board.” The subplot to that, of course, is that sports such as rowing rely heavily on Olympic prominence to retain essential funding. Failure here would trigger more of the kind of awkward probing to which Wynne-Griffith referred.

George and Wynne-Griffith, bronze medalists in Tokyo, have been close friends since school. “That’s a huge part of the journey,” said George. “You couldn’t really write it. Being able to do this is really special and it’s worked really well, especially in a pair where there are points that are super-tense and the blood pressure rises, which is where it’s worked really well. We know when to give each other space and when to push each other.

“We had the perfect race, from start, pretty much to finish. It hurts a lot now to not get it in the last three strokes but we still got a silver medal. This has been a hell of a journey for us.” It felt like a day of them. We are left to ponder whether that of Craig and Grant ends for good here.