Trinity alumna Imogen Grant and her rowing partner Emily Craig are going for gold in the Lightweight Women’s Double Sculls at the Paris Olympics 2024, which begin this Friday.
Imogen, aged 28, graduated from Cambridge in 2023 after nearly a decade studying Medicine and rowing for Britain, interspersed with the COVID pandemic.
At the Tokyo Olympics, held in 2021 due to the pandemic, Imogen and Emily missed out on a medal by a hundredth of a second in a race that saw the top four finishers within ten seconds of each other.
After the race Imogen tweeted: ‘You win or you learn.’ And she and Emily have gone on to do exactly that.
They won the World and European Championships in 2021, 2022 and 2023, when they also set a world record for the lightweight women’s double sculls and were World Rowing Crew of the Year. Their winning streak continued with a World Rowing Cup victory in Varese, Italy, this April.
‘I think we’ve got 10 regattas under our belt unbeaten at this point and that’s not really the kind of winning streak that you can ever expect to have,’ Imogen told BBC Sport East in a pre-Olympics interview.
The pair have also been lucky, in an unexpected way. The axing of lightweight rowing at the Olympics was postponed due to the pandemic, so Paris 2024 will be its last outing.
As Imogen told The Sun recently:
The reason that I came back is because we want to win Olympic gold and we want to taste that victory.
It’s not a given though. There’s a lot of very fast lightweight women. It’s the only event at that weight, so all of the best athletes are in it.
It’s daunting, but also quite exciting to be able to say that that’s what we want, and that we might actually have a chance of achieving it.
Imogen, who is from Cambridge, tried all sorts of sports at school but until she came to Trinity in 2014 she had never rowed.
‘But by the time I got to sixth form, the academics had taken over, I didn’t feel I could do both and so when I arrived at uni I was probably the least fit I’d ever been and rowing really turned that around for me.’
But she only got into a boat because of the lure of free drinks, as she has recalled:
‘ … I nearly didn’t go [to the taster session] but felt bad because I’ve got the two free drinks so I sort of chased them down, made my way to the boathouse, got into a four, and someone said – oh you’re picking this up really quickly – and I thought – great! I signed my name for the next session and it sort of went from there.’
Four years later she won her first world championships medal. As well as wining three Boat Races on the Thames with the Cambridge Women’s Crew, Imogen has a Cambridge Blue in cycling.
All this from someone who, as a young student, thought rowing ‘was a silly sport because you went backwards!’
Whatever happens next week, when Imogen and Emily power down the course at Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, it will be the culmination of a nearly-decade long journey and the start of a new era for the Trinity alumna. Three days after the Olympics’ final she will be in Oxfordshire, beginning her foundation years as a doctor.
Read more:
Imogen Grant & Emily Craig: Tokyo disappointment fuels Paris dream – BBC Sport
Imogen Grant in epic Olympic race – Trinity College Cambridge.