Brothers raise the gold standard

The Searles are in a bigger boat, heading for glory in the World Rowing Championships. Andrew Baker reports

LAST Thursday should have been a day of household chores for Greg Searle: getting the washing done, packing his bags ready to fly out to the World Rowing Championships in Finland. Instead he spent a good chunk of the afternoon at the Chiswick headquarters of British International Rowing, compiling a questionnaire for his fellow rowers. He has just been voted athletes' representative by his team-mates, and he is taking the job very seriously. "Mind you," he said, "it's not all heavy stuff. One of my jobs is organising the team piss-up at the end of the championships."

Greg and his elder brother, Jonny, became nationally famous in 1992 when, with their cox Garry Herbert, they won the gold medal in the coxed pairs at the Barcelona Olympics. The image of the three men on the rostrum is a classic of sports photography: Greg with his head back, still gasping for breath, Jonny grinning beneath his mop of manic curls, and Garry Herbert's face distorted in an utterly vain attempt to hold back tears.

This week all three will be pursuing gold medals, but in two different boats. Garry Herbert coxes the Great Britain eight, while Greg and Jonny team up with Rupert Obholzer and Tim Foster in a coxless four.

Why change a winning team? Because the event they won will not be raced at the Atlanta Olympics. Garry Herbert will relish the chance to cox the eight, a much more complex job than his role in the coxed pair. And the challenge of rowing as part of a team of four, which they have been doing now for just over a year, has been a relief to the Searle brothers.

"We don't feel the same pressure that we did when it was just Jonny and me," Greg admitted. Their long-time coach, Steve Gunn, went further. "Even if the coxed pairs had not been dropped as an Olympic event," he said, "I think Greg and Jonny would have wanted a year out of it - to stop them tearing each other to pieces. They get on pretty well, but when there are only two people rowing in a boat, every comment seems like an insult."

From their days at Hampton School to the Olympic final and beyond, the brothers have always driven each other on to greater efforts. In the early days Jonny, the elder by three years, was the teacher. Friends recall that Jonny always sat behind Greg in the boat so that he could talk to him while they trained, educating and exhorting. Greg rarely spoke: he knew he had to catch up.

He has - and not just in terms of rowing ability. Greg now possesses all the self-confidence that so marked out his brother at Oxford. He also possesses the confidence of his fellow athletes, as witnessed by his appointment as their spokesman, and he is not afraid to speak his mind in the boat. But no one individual dominates the four. "A leader?" Greg scoffed. "That's sort of an amusing notion. If any of us were part of another crew, we'd expect to be in charge. We're all strong-willed, but we've had to learn to bite our lips and listen to the coach instead."

In the absence of a cox, however, someone has to steer, and someone has to make the calls. Tim Foster does the steering, but the calls are something of a delicate area. In a boat full of leaders, no one wants to be subordinate. "It's bound to be a bone of contention," Steve Gunn said, seeming somewhat reluctant to reveal the identity of the caller. In the end he gave way. "It's Jonny. He's the oldest and the wisest. Well, he's the oldest, anyway."

It is Jonny's job to read the race situation and decide when the crew should put in extra effort. But he keeps it pretty simple. "The guy calling can't just babble away," Steve Gunn pointed out. "He doesn't have the breath. And if he did keep banging on the others might begin to suspect that he was not pulling his weight."

The four have been training for three weeks in Varese in Italy, the first chance they have had this year to work together over an extended period. The Searles both have jobs, and Rupert Obholzer is a medical student, so training time is at a premium. "Varese was great," Greg enthused. "Fantastic facilities, a big open lake, and all the back- up you could want." The crew took full advantage. "We've come on leaps and bounds for the work we did," Greg said. "We're a new boat really."

The coxless fours is a very strong event at this year's championships: Greg believes that 12 crews have medal prospects. A further problem for the British crew is that some of their opponents - in particular the Italians - have been in training all year. Greg neatly turned this disadvantage into an advantage. "That means that they may not find much of an improvement in their form for the championships," he reckoned, "whereas we have only just done our hard work, so we should improve a lot in Finland."

Most of the work in training was fine tuning: "Ten one-minute bursts of high-quality work, that sort of thing," according to Greg. But the oarsmen were also working on their minds with the team psychologist, Brian Miller, whose influence over them is second only to that of Steve Gunn.

Miller teaches the athletes to focus on what they are doing. "When we are racing, we are concentrating on racing," Greg explained. "When we are relaxing, we are relaxed. You see an awful lot of people at regattas walking around between races with long faces - that's not the way to do it." Out of the boat, long faces have never been the Searle brothers' style.