No fairytale finish for Helen Glover after the mother of all comebacks

Usain Bolt redefined what’s possible by running the 100m in 9.69sec, Nadia Comaneci did it by scoring perfect 10s, Michael Phelps by winning eight gold medals at one Olympic Games. And at the Sea Forest Waterway on Thursday morning, British rower Helen Glover did it by finishing fourth in the women’s pair with her partner, Polly Swann. Fourth, of course, is the worst place to be, the one position no one wants to end up in, and it would be a lie to say Glover, who won gold at London 2012 and Rio 2016, dreamed of being there herself this time around. It wasn’t the fairytale finish. But then this wasn’t a fairytale story.

It was a story about what people can do, not what they can dream about doing. Glover, 35, has three children under five, the youngest of them a pair of twins who were born in January 2020. She only decided to try and make her comeback in January this year, a decision she’s described as “a lockdown project that’s gone too far”. There are people out there who might say that because they started making sourdough and ended up buying a breadmaker, and plenty more with kids the same sort of age as Glover’s who would consider anything more than making it through the News at 10 without falling asleep on the sofa to be ludicrously over-ambitious.

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Glover started thinking about competing here when she was working out on her home rowing machine. She wanted to do it for herself, yes, and for her kids, especially her daughter, and also for every woman out there who’s ever worried about what postnatal life will be like, whether becoming a mother will close off their options, or stop them from doing the thing they love. For the past six months, she has juggled her rowing with her childcare, making shuttle runs between her house and the team’s training facility in Caversham in between naps and feeds, after nights of broken sleep.

The startling part isn’t that Glover and Swann finished fourth, it’s that they were here at all. None of this has ever been done before. No other mother has ever rowed for Great Britain at the Olympics, no other team have made it to the Games after squeezing four years worth of work and preparation into the space of just six months. When one journalist suggested that fourth wasn’t a great reward for it all, Glover was having none of it.

“I disagree,” Glover said. “I think the reward is knowing that we crossed the line giving it our all. The frustration would have been coming away from thinking we had more and we didn’t.” The race was won by the New Zealand pair of Grace Prendergast and Kerri Gowler, who had set a world record in the semi-final. The Russian pair were second, and the Canadians third. Glover said she felt that on another day, in different weather conditions, she and Swann would have caught the Canadians and won bronze, but the wind and choppy water meant their sprint finish wasn’t as effective as it would have been on flat water.

In the end they were 2.86 seconds away from doing it. There was a time when Glover would have obsessed over that, ruined herself fretting about where they lost those precious seconds. Not now. “I think your perspective changes when you have children, and the perspective for me is that it very much about what effect you have, what impact you have, what does this journey mean and what does it lead to, rather than just the result that’s a dot in the timeline of your life,” she said. She only stopped breastfeeding her twins three months ago and now here she was competing against teams who had rowing in international competitions while she was doing it.

Swann, 33, has an extraordinary story of her own. She also took time out from the sport after winning a silver with the women’s eight in Rio. She finished her medical degree, and then, when the pandemic started, volunteered for a role as a Foundation Interim doctor. She has spent most of the last year working on the frontline of the NHS. This time next week, she’ll be back working shifts at Borders General Hospital in Scotland. In many ways, there aren’t a more impressive pair of athletes on the British team, whatever medals anyone else wins. Swann says she is thinking of making a comeback for Paris 2024.

“Maybe I’ll do a Helen Glover,” Swann said, “maybe take one year to work, one year to have a baby, and one year to do a comeback. We’ll see.” She was only half joking. After all, Glover has shown it can be done.

“The last year has been a journey for us both, ” said Glover. “I think when you’re caught up in the moment of it and the day-to-day grind, it all feels so immediate. But I’m going to look back in a few years and think ‘what was all that about? How the fuck did I do that?’” She’s not the only one thinking it. “Everyone will remember the year of the pandemic for their own reasons, but for me I’m going to think ‘that was the year that took me to another Olympics’. And that’s bonkers.”