James Cracknell on winning Olympic gold and why he and Matthew Pinsent "just didn't speak"

Inside, a group of four Viking-sized British men lie on bunk beds and prepare in their own individual ways for what’s to come. It’s something they have been dedicating every waking hour to for the past four years – or 12 years, in the case of James Cracknell, who had to miss the previous two Olympics due to injury and illness.

He’s therefore making his debut at the Games at the ripe old age of 28. "It was like being in a nervous adult creche," he remembers now. "You can hear the commentary and you’re lying there, just bricking it.

“Everyone copes with it differently. Matthew Pinsent would get really revved up by thinking how good he was – he went to Eton, so that gave him confidence. Whereas I was thinking, 'They all look good.' If we spoke about it, I’d think he was over-confident and he’d think I was really nervous. So we just didn’t speak to each other."

At the time, sharing a boat with Pinsent, Oxford alumnus Tim Foster and established titan Steve Redgrave, Cracknell felt keenly aware of his status as a grammar school boy. Today, 24 years on, he counts his blessings that he was there at all, competing in a sport he acknowledges is "still posh".

"There are far better athletes than me walking down the street. A lot of how people go into their sport is down to luck. Somebody broke their neck playing rugby at Kingston Grammar School a few years before I went there, so they stopped it as a sport and took up rowing in its place, and I had the luck of being there.

"The reality is you have to have a river in your town, and it’s difficult logistically. More people row at Eton than there are pupils at Kingston."

Talking to RT a week before the general election, the 52-year-old adds: "Rowing is dominated by independent schools, who will struggle even more if Labour come in, because the VAT [exemption] will have gone."

Cracknell was sufficiently moved by this, and presumably other matters, that he stood as the Conservative Party candidate for Colchester at the election, something he resists discussing when we meet prior to the vote, in which he went on to come second to Labour’s Pam Cox.

Before the election, he voiced contempt for allegations of insider bets within his party, saying, "If one of my teammates got caught for cheating, they’d be dead to me."

He is clearly a driven man – where does it come from? "Some people may say it’s a character fault. I think it’s an admirable quality, but maybe not the easiest to live with."

He pauses. "I don’t think I would have won in 2000 if I hadn’t had tonsillitis on the morning of the opening ceremony in 1996. I would have probably stopped, gone into the military, but then I thought, 'I’ve missed two, I want to make it to the start line.'

"Stand me next to Matthew Pinsent – he got four gold medals, I got two – I’m not going to say I fought up from the gutter, but I did have to come back from setbacks."

The arena of competition clearly suits him, but I wonder if re-entry into civilian and family life presented more of a problem.

Since retiring from the sport Cracknell has busied himself running the brutal Marathon des Sables across the Moroccan desert, running a 430-mile race across Alaska, rowing across the Atlantic with Ben Fogle and, aged 46, becoming the oldest ever rower in the Boat Race’s history, winning for Cambridge in 2019.

He doesn’t appear to think any of these achievements is particularly impressive when held against his Olympic efforts. "You don’t appreciate how lucky you are to be doing sports full-time. I miss the feeling of waking up in the morning knowing you’re going to ask your body a serious question, and can you answer it?

"There’s real internal exposure, it’s horrible. You have to be friends with lactic acid, which isn’t nice. You rarely get to ask yourself those questions. You don’t want to, but it’s quite addictive, and I miss that.

"But when you spend all that time trying to get better, it’s nice doing things where you’re not that good and you get better quite quickly.

"Going for a run for an hour is nothing, it’s less than 10 per cent of what the day used to be. Plus, being physically healthy means you’re making the most of your life, your kids’ life, your grandkids’ life.

"The bigger problem is not viewing food as fuel, enjoying going out for a meal and having a social experience. There was a small window when food was actually quite exciting, and then I got knocked off my bike, so now I can’t taste anything."

In 2010, Cracknell was cycling in Arizona as part of an endurance race when he was hit by an oncoming petrol tanker and suffered a serious head injury. Despite his achievements since, he recognises he’s still battling perceptions – both others’ and his own.

"It’s always the question of what I can and can’t do. When I went to study at Cambridge, it was to prove myself academically and in the Boat Race, so the question would become irrelevant."

Divorced in 2019 from TV presenter Beverley Turner, with whom he shares three children, Cracknell married American financier Jordan Connell in 2021, and remains aware his accident took his life in a different direction.

"I’m married to Jordan, who’s amazing. I’m really happy, but whether Bev and I would have got divorced or not… I wake up and my kids aren’t always in the same house. It would be nice to wake up and take them to school.

"I know half of marriages break down, but I’ll never know. That is difficult. But physically, it’s all good."

His political ambitions notwithstanding, Cracknell continues to push himself into his sixth decade.

In his candidate’s literature, he wrote: "I want people to have the confidence, drive and ambition to set their own limits." Bearing in mind the challenges as well as the glory that rowing has brought him, I wonder how he would react if one of his children wanted to follow him into elite sports.

"I wouldn’t be horrified. I’d say, 'OK, but you must have some career development outside, so you don’t leave at 28 a much faster swimmer but not grown as a person and totally naive to life.' That would be my only fear.

"And have a focus away from sport. I did a master’s in physiology." He smiles. "The easier option would be to relax, but…" We both know that’s not really an option.

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