“I thought people who did that were superheroes, and people who did that were different to me. They weren’t the little girl from Cornwall who sat there in the assembly.”
Double Olympic champion, three-times World Champion, and world record-breaking rower Helen Glover knew she wanted to be a sporting champion. She just didn’t believe things like that happened to people like her.
Glover didn’t start rowing until she was 21-years old, when in 2008 she applied to the UK's Sporting Giants programme who, ahead of the London 2012 Olympics, were looking for tall female athletes to train. Unfortunately for Glover, she didn’t meet the height requirement of 5ft 11, standing just short at 5ft 9.5. Did that dissuade her? Absolutely not! She stood on her tip toes to meet it!
At the start of her rowing career whilst other women were training full time, Glover had no funding and so continued working as a PE teacher alongside training before and after school. When she joined the GB Rowing Team in 2010, she was the bottom-ranked rower…but not for long.
London 2012, just four years after starting the sport, Helen Glover was competing in her first Olympic Games. Partnered with Heather Stanning in the women’s coxless pair, not only did they win Team GB’s first gold medal of the Games, but the pair made history as the first British female rowers to win an Olympic gold.
Glover continued to excel, securing multiple World Championship titles and Olympic gold for the second time at the Rio Games in 2016.
Then a new chapter in her life began. First with the birth of her son in 2018, then with the birth of her twins in 2020. She now balances her athletic career with life as mum too, continuing to break records. Five years since rowing competitively, and just over a year after the birth of her twins, she won another European Championship. A few months later at the Tokyo Games she became the first mother to compete for Team GB in rowing. Then in Paris 2024 she secured a silver medal. A true legend!
Glover teaches us to follow our dreams. That anyone can achieve something incredible with the right people and the right work ethic. You don’t have to be born a superhero.
