Katherine Grainger, Great Britain's most successful female rower with three world titles and two Olympic silvers in her medal collection, will mark 10 years on the British team when she defends her crown at the World Championships, which commence in Munich tomorrow.
For Grainger it has been a career that has kept her away from Scotland and her family and friends for eight years and at the team's training camp in Italy earlier this week, the Glaswegian recalled how it all began.
"In 1997, my first year on the team, I did the under-23 World Championship and the senior World Championships and medalled in both," she recalled. "Because it had been a successful year, there was pressure on me to move south, but at the time I was finishing my degree at Edinburgh University.
I made plain from the start that I wasn't going to give that up and had to finish.
"Through 1998, I had a lot of pressure to move down, but I stuck to my guns. In April 1999, we had final trials in Nottingham, which finished on a Thursday. They went very well and they said I was wanted for the quad for the 2000 Olympics, but the boat, the people, the coaches are based in Marlow, and we start on Monday morning so, if you're there on Monday morning, ready to go, you'll be part of that team; if not, you won't'.
"It was a big ask but it is what it was going to take, so I literally left, hired a van and drove down on the Saturday."
Even now it is clear that Grainger finds the arrangement hard. "It's always been a big sacrifice," she said. "I live further from home than anyone else on the team and it makes things incredibly hard. We don't get many days off, and if you do, it's just one day - not enough time to get home."
Along with crew-mates Annie Vernon, Debbie Flood and Fran Houghton, Grainger is in the Camelot-backed quadruple sculls crew and, like the top men's crew - the coxless four, which is also backed by Camelot - the team go into the worlds as defending champions. It was only in January, though, that the British women became champions, having been beaten on the line in last year's final at Eton by a Russian crew that were later discovered to be drug cheats.
However, Grainger and her crew still feel bad about their performance in last year's final. "I still say that whatever the Russians were on, and however they won, on that day we should still have beaten them," she added.
Since last year, a new challenge has arisen for Grainger. China has exploded onto the international rowing scene, and among their victims in the World Cup series was Grainger's crew, well beaten at the second World Cup in Amsterdam in June. Although, in the absence of the Chinese, the British crew went on to win the World Cup final in Lucerne three weeks later, the same Chinese quartet will be in this week's field as the main threat to Grainger's title ambitions.
"We knew that on the run-in to Beijing, China would be a massive force," said Grainger, looking ahead to the start of the crew's campaign on Monday, with their final and a probable showdown with the Chinese, scheduled for next Sunday.
"I genuinely feel we lost, rather than they won at Amsterdam. There were lots of reasons why we didn't race at our best. It was a healthy reminder to us that, yes, we're good enough to win, but we have to be at our very best to win."
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