Richard Bath: The only medal that matters

FOR most athletes, winning an Olympic medal is the stuff of dreams. But, for rower Katherine Grainger, after three silver medals and a decade spent as the best female exponent of her craft, anything less than a gold medal is the stuff of nightmares

Many Olympians suffer from an external weight of expectations but, for 35-year-old Grainger, the desperate drive to win comes from within, from the knowledge that this will almost certainly be her last shot at collecting the one medal that has eluded her during an illustrious career. Grainger doesn't need affirmation of her talent but she does need to avoid the "emotional and devastating" heartbreak that accompanied her silver medal in Beijing.

Yet a year out from London 2012, the girl herself is in characteristically relaxed mood. Indeed, she is fantastically chipper, but then you'd expect nothing less from a rower who earlier this month notched up one of the most impressive wins of her career. That win at the World Cup in Lucerne, when Grainger and British double skulls partner Anna Watkins won against all expectations after coming back late and unprepared following Watkins' debilitating back injury, has bolstered Grainger's belief that the pair now have the mental strength and character to handle anything that is thrown at them.

"The season before we had a dream season, where we were unbeaten and winning races by world-record margins; things simply couldn't have gone any better," says Grainger. "Then Anna's back injury hit her very suddenly, knocking us right out of our stride. There's no way you can avoid using your back, so all of a sudden there were all of these doubts and frustrations: we couldn't row together and Anna didn't know whether she'd be able to come back and, if she did, whether she'd be as good as before.

"We were able to train in the run-up to Lucerne but, with just over a year to London 2012 it provided us with some really important questions. Do we only race if we're confident that we can win? How important is protecting our title and our record? Do we risk losing knowing that we'll get some really tough racing? How much of a boost would our opponents get from beating us, from finding out that we're vulnerable and beatable? How much extra confidence would we get if we were able to win?"

In the end, the decision was no surprise to anyone who has ever spoken to Grainger for longer than five minutes. The Scot relishes the challenge and the fight, and for an athlete for whom races have tended to be triumphal processions, Lucerne was an opportunity to reaffirm her capacity to tough it out. It was also an opportunity to find out a little more about how 28-year-old Watkins would react to the sort of stress that's likely to descend in the final of the 2012 Olympics. The outcome was classic Grainger: a hard-fought victory by almost a length from their nearest rivals, the world championship silver medal-winning Aussie boat. Yet, if it looked close, it was a win that was never in doubt; Grainger and Watkins won by a mental mile.

"I loved being the underdog for once," laughs Grainger. "It gave an extra sense of satisfaction, mixed with relief and a genuine confidence boost. There had been some dark days when we wondered whether Anna would ever be as good as she was, so to win was an enjoyable privilege. We knew that if the Aussies could take us then it would make us suddenly seem beatable. Instead, we'd toughed it out and come through. You learn so much more from that sort of experience than you do from the comfortable victories that we've enjoyed over almost two years of seamless success."

A sportswoman whose law degrees and criminology PhD on homicide make her an engaging interviewee, Grainger is one of the most articulate, personable and intelligent athletes you'll ever meet. She's already aware that, in the run-up to a home Olympics, as a good talker with a compelling story and a high chance of a gold medal, she will come under extraordinary pressure as the hype rises as the tournament draws near. That win in Lucerne has, she says, helped settle her own mind that she has the mental toughness to withstand the attention and focus sufficiently to finally win gold. "It was perfect timing. You don't go looking for trouble, but it's comforting to know that when things do go wrong, as they surely will, that we can respond."

Grainger says that she's already becoming aware of just how big a deal these Olympics will be. Accustomed to being as anonymous as a world champion and three-times Olympian can be, she is now regularly stopped in the street. She has, she says, already talked more about London 2012 than she did about Sydney, Athens and Beijing combined. "Complete strangers are taking a huge interest, and there's already this incredible feeling of support and enthusiasm," she says. "It's a fantastic privilege to be lucky enough to have your career coincide with a home Games, but from here on in the pressure and stress will mount and mount."

Even at this remove, the Olympics are completely dominating Grainger's life. The PhD she has been sweating over for most of the past decade, and which has provided some much-needed "light relief", has been put to one side, and her immersion in rowing is total. If she doesn't win that gold medal, it won't be for lack of effort.

"At every Olympics I've felt under more pressure," she admits."My first Olympics in Sydney were a fantastic experience because a medal (in the quadruple skulls] was so unexpected that we just felt under no pressure at all. In Athens (above], Cath (Bishop] and I had been (coxless pair] world champions in the previous year so there was some pressure, but we were up against maybe the best women's pair there has ever been (Romania's Damian and Susanu].

"It was all different in Beijing, though. I'd already got two Olympic silvers and was world champion, so it was 'this must be the time' to get the gold. I was the most experienced member of the (quadruple skulls] crew and felt a huge responsibility; that was the biggest pressure I've ever felt.

"Losing to the Chinese was also the toughest defeat I've ever had to deal with, a very hard and painful process that's at the back of my mind all the time. It's the reason I never get complacent, why I don't care if I win every race on the way to London because I know that it doesn't just happen, that I've no right to that gold medal. I now know that this wonderful, happy story won't just happen. As horrible and difficult and emotional as that defeat was, it keeps me motivated. A part of me even loves the fact that there's still something I haven't won, that there's something left to achieve."

Yet the pressure is unrelenting. Grainger was giving a talk at a primary school last week, and was reminded of how many hopes she carries as the children trooped past her, one after another telling her that "I hope you get the gold medal this time".

If Grainger hopes that Lucerne turns out to be a watershed moment in her preparations, she also knows that London "will be such a cauldron of emotions, with the fear levels heightened to an incredible degree, that in some ways it'll be impossible to prepare for". Determined to enjoy her final Olympics, her coping strategy is to go back to the things she can control.

The first is obviously her choice of partner. In Beijing she was one of four, with the obvious margin for error that entails, but in London it'll be just her and Watkins, the rower who earlier this year inflicted Grainger's first solo loss for six years when she beat the Scot at the British trials.

After next month's world championships, there will be the endless training camps: Portugal and Majorca in the winter, Germany and Italy in the summer. These will provide a particularly intense focus, and will provide a "refreshingly mundane" existence that will allow Grainger to focus on the minutiae of racing technique. For the whole year, there will be the relentless routine of three sessions a day, two on the water, the third in the gym, plus the endless meetings. No wonder it's a full-time job.

Most of all, though, there will be the mental challenge of coping with the pressure. "There's no point running away from the personal significance of the next year," she says."It's healthy to talk about it, to confront the issues head on and to be completely honest in dealing with the past heartbreak of the three silvers. I accept that this is the biggest race of my life, I'm not going to hide from that. If you try to lock yourself away, disaster beckons."

The Olympic Games begin in a year's time. For Grainger, the mind games have already begun.