“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.
Helen Glover – video transcript
People see the fact that I just started rowing, picked up an oar, and the next time you see me, I'm on the top of a podium listening to the national anthem. But that's so far from the truth.
I was really fortunate to grow up in Cornwall because I had the outdoors on my doorstep. I grew up running on beaches and going cycling. I'd never thought of it as training, and I thought of it as just being outside and loving it. I always remember loving sport, but also being naturally really quite competitive. I had something in me that made me want to cross the line first, or score the winning goal.
I remember really vividly sitting in an assembly and I must've been about 12, and the teacher said, "Okay, hands up if you know what you want to do when you're older." And I was sitting there going, "I know what I want to do. I want to be an Olympian, I want to be a sports person." And when I put my hand up, I didn't say that. I said, I think I said a teacher or a vet, or something like that, because things like that didn't happen to people like me. 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.
I didn't really choose rowing. Rowing chose me. I was, I remember I was at university and London had just got the bid for the Olympic Games and they had started some new sort of talent procedures looking for people who were tall who could go into rowing, handball, volleyball, and sports that height could be, you know, helpful. The height criteria was 5'11" and I thought I was 5'11". And I got there and realised I was 5'9" and a half and I had to stand on tiptoes to actually make the height criteria. But I'm very glad I did because I was offered the opportunity to start rowing. And so in 2008, I started rowing with the ambition to become Olympic champion.
The first two years were probably the hardest of my whole career. I wasn't given any funding to begin with, so I was teaching and working as a PE teacher in the day and early in the morning, late into the night trying to do my training. And I was doing that, trying to beat girls who were on the team training full time. I took a chance and left my job for a month before the Great Britain rowing trials, and I thought, I'm either going to be jobless and look like an idiot or I'm going to have enough recovery to scrape onto the team. And in 2010, that's what I did. I just made it as the last person, the bottom ranked rower on the women's team.
London 2012 was my first Olympics. I'd started the sport four years before that. So getting onto the team was amazing. Being handed my first piece of kit with the Olympic rings on at the beginning of the summer was an incredible feeling. And I suddenly had this flashback to me sitting there as a 12-year-old girl in a room full of people I was too embarrassed to put my hand up and say, "I want to be an Olympian," because I never, ever thought I would do it. And suddenly I had done it.
We won the first gold of the London 2012. And the moment it was too big, I honestly was watching it through a fog as if it was happening to somebody else. Surely it wasn't me that had just done that. When we did, we were the first women to ever win a British rowing gold. I was almost looking around going, waiting for this amazing person to walk onto stage and thinking, but it's only me. And I think that gave me a real reality here as to actually it's normal people. It's people who actually work hard and sometimes don't even feel, don't even feel like it belongs to them.
I think anyone would be lying if they said they're motivated all the time. I think when you look at people who are exceptional or high achievers, you can often get a picture of them, which is actually quite inaccurate. You can assume they're always motivated. They always try as hard as they can. They never make mistakes, they never have regrets. And that's just so not true. Part of being human and part of achieving your goal is experiencing the rollercoaster of highs and lows. And definitely in my career I experienced motivational dips. And the way I got out of them was I would often think about, "okay, what am I trying to achieve here?" "Is this going to get me there?" So if I was struggling to push through a training session, I would imagine my rivals were right beside me, and that would always make me push that little bit harder.
You know, there's a reason Olympians cross the finish line and say "follow your dreams." There's a reason people who are great singers or great actors who have made it in their career say "you can achieve if you work hard." And that's because it is true.
I was given this height requirement. I was told "you need to be this tall." Actually, I wasn't actually, you can, you can break a mould that you don't have to be different or special, you just have to work hard and have a great team around you.
END CARD
Helen Glover became the world number one female rower.
She won Olympic gold in the coxless pairs at London 2012, just four years after starting the sport at 21 years old.
Her accolades include two Olympic gold medals, three world titles, five European gold medals and eighteen World Cup wins, making her one of the sports most decorated rowers.
