When Steve Trapmore was winter rowing in the rain on the Trent 30-years-ago, he never imagined that just a few years later he would be racing for gold for Great Britain at the Olympics. But today, he is recognised in an exclusive group of gold medal winners as an athlete and a coach.
Steve’s rowing career started on the Thames, but when he came to study at Nottingham Trent University his career really took an upturn as he began racing for Great Britain. Rowing for his nation was a real contrast from his time rowing in London as a child.
The Olympic medallist recently coached his team to gold in the Paris Olympic games in 2024 and Great Britain’s fifth medal, for the eights rowing team, from the six Olympics since Steve won gold in Sydney.
Steve says that he didn’t originally set his sights on rowing for GB, but his rowing club encouraged him to carry on- despite struggling when he first started rowing.
“I actually don’t think I wanted to become an Olympian. I got involved in rowing when I was young, my dad used to row and I used to steer the boats that he was in,” he said.
“I can’t tell you how bad I was but my rowing club were so supportive and I just started doing a bit of training and getting a bit better, I did a few races and generally everything was quite encouraging and gave me the bug for trying to get a bit better,” Steve added.
Steve also spoke about how studying at Nottingham Trent University and having the Trent on his doorstep was vital for his progression.
He said: “Rowing on the Trent was vital, I was rowing with Nottinghamshire County Rowing Association, it’s a fantastic city and the outdoor sports facilities being able to row on the Trent is really good.
“It’s one of the things that make it such a vibrant city, I think having the rowing culture was really special. As an athlete it makes it fun to be in an environment where you meet loads of new people, Nottingham was a melting pot of interesting people and was a catalyst for moving my career on,” Steve added.
Steve was part of the GB eights team- a rowing category in which eight people row in tandem in a long racing shell- who won Britain’s first eights gold since the 1912 Olympics, in 2000 at Sydney.
In the build up to the games the team finished second in the World Championships but came in to the tournament as underdogs.
“The win in Sydney was bonkers, in my last year at Trent I was invited to race at the World Championships after that I was invited to train with the senior team full time,” he said
“The eight is a big boat and it’s like a football team where everybody had their individual role, we had a point to prove so it was pretty special, it was intense, it was almost unbelievable. To be able to for fill our goals was special,” Steve added.
Internally, the team had put pressure on themselves having come into the Olympics on good form and having watched Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent win gold in the pairs at the Atlanta Olympics four years earlier.
The pairs win in Atlanta inspired the National Lottery to fund Great British rowing and allowed Steve Trapmore to have his racing funded and has elevated the teams quality of rowing since.
Following Steve’s win in Sydney, his team were all awarded an MBE in the 2001 honours list for their services to rowing.
“To be recognised for something that you did and that we love doing is amazing, you’re in this room and it seemed strange,” he said
“To be included in such an eclectic mix of people for recognition was amazing and to be presented to the Queen was very special,” Steve added.
Much like rowing in the Olympics, Steve never imagined that he would go in to coaching and after retiring at the age of 27, he initially spent time running an IT business with his friends.
Steve said: “I don’t think I thought I’d go into coaching, it’s a bit like when I started rowing a few people asked me to help out coaching so I did that for a bit while I was working.
“Then it got to a point were the coaching started taking over and I was offered a job at Imperial College, then I went to Cambridge and in 2018 I went to Great Britain,” he added.
In the Tokyo games in 2021, a Covid hit GB rowing team managed to win bronze, missing out to New Zealand who won as underdogs and Germany who pipped Britain to the silver medal by a matter of inches.
Steve then became part of an exclusive group of people who have won Olympic golds as both an athlete and a coach when he helped the eights to a gold medal at last summers Olympics in Paris.
“I can’t really put the achievement into words, my biggest motivation was that I wanted the team to feel what I felt as an athlete, I wanted them to know what it’s like to stand on that top step and know that on that given day that they were the best,” he said.
“On that day when it actually came to it, they were the ones who actually put their necks out in the way that we’d been learning to do for that three years, in some respects it was relief that they crossed the line first,” Steve added.
Steve is currently on a training camp in Portugal, coaching a new team of rowers who are preparing for the next Olympics in Los Angeles in 2028.
The team have trials coming up before the European Championships in Bulgaria at the end of May before the World Championships in China in September.
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