Steve Redgrave

Redgrave, the son of a carpenter, was a frustrated, dyslexic student when he left school at age sixteen to become a rower—and began more than two decades of six-day-a-week, five-hour-a-day training sessions. "When you're dyslexic, you are always trying to get around situations, to find another way to do some things," Redgrave told Diane Pucin of Knight-Ridder Newspapers. "If you find something you are quite good at, then you tend to stick with it. Some people call me obsessive, but I think it was just that, at a time in life when you need to fit in, I found something that I was good at."

Redgrave claimed his first Olympic gold medal at the 1984 Games in Los Angeles in the coxed four race. Two years later, in 1986, he won the first of his nine World Champion gold medals and won three gold medals in

Steve Redgrave

the Commonwealth Games: in the single sculls, coxless pairs and coxed four events. At the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, Redgrave teamed with Andrew Holmes and they blew away the field to win gold in coxless pairs. The next day, on a whim, they rowed in the pair with coxswain race—and won the bronze medal.