Olympic legend Alex Gregory on how rowing around the world redefined his sense of adventure
Alex Gregory is one of Britain’s most accomplished rowers, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and five-time World Champion who has turned his experiences on the water into powerful lessons about teamwork, resilience and leadership.
Today, as an inspiring after dinner speaker, Alex shares the highs and lows of life at the top of international sport from early setbacks to the moments that defined his Olympic career. His honest reflections and stories of perseverance continue to motivate audiences in business and beyond.
In this exclusive interview with the Champions Olympic Speakers Agency, Alex reflects on the mindset that drove him to success, the power of trust within a team, and the lessons from rowing that still shape his outlook today.
Q: In elite sport, teamwork often determines success or failure. From your own Olympic experience, what truly defines an effective team and why is collaboration so crucial to sustained performance?
Alex Gregory: “I was never the best at rowing. I was never the most naturally gifted, talented athlete. I was not stronger or fitter than anyone else out there, and yet I won more races in my sort of last eight years of that career than most other people in the world in this sport, in rowing.
“Because I found a way to work with people, and I understood that I needed other people. As we’ve talked about, we need other people if we want to achieve something in our lives.
“No one can do anything alone. You can try - it’ll be hard work, it’s unnecessary, it’s not as fun, and people want to help us. People want help, so give them that.
“Why not be kind and give people the chance to help you? It helps you out. You’re going to get more out of yourself, you’re going to get a better performance out of it, and it makes what you do more enjoyable. So, there’s that. I discovered that and I started to understand that.
“But going deeper into that - how did I get the best out of people around me, and how did I get the best from people around me?
“Well, the way I understood it, and the way it worked for me, was to make it easy for those people around me to do what I needed them to do.
“So, for example, I used to race at - I raced at two Olympic Games - in a boat with four people, the four of us in the boat. And Mohamed in my boat, Big Mo, he’s always going to be stronger than me. He’s a massive guy; his physical strength is his strength. I could train for the rest of my life and never be as strong as him.
“So, I knew I needed his strength in the boat. How do I make it easy for him to get the best out of himself? Well, I sit in this way in the boat, I adapt myself in that way. He gets nervous before races, so I speak to him in a certain way before races, and I’ll help him.
“I’ll do everything I can to help him be comfortable, be the powerful guy he is in the boat, and make him comfortable.
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“Same with Andy. Andy has the best rhythm out of anyone in the world. I need his rhythm to get me down the course, to get me across the line first, to win the race. I can’t do that; I’m not as good as him at that. So how do I make it comfortable for him to do that?
“By doing that, what I discovered was that not only was I making it easy for them to get the best out of themselves, but I was also taking the pressure off me.
“So, in those big race situations - and we don’t even have to be talking big, serious race situations, we can be talking day-to-day stuff - I was taking the pressure off me because I was focusing on them.
“I was making it easy for them, so I was thinking about what does Andy need? Okay, so I’ll do this, I’ll speak about this. I knew I was taking care of myself, I knew I was performing at my level and doing what I could do, and I wasn’t worrying about it.
“I wasn’t thinking about it, I wasn’t worrying about it, it wasn’t causing me to get tense - tense in my mind, tense in my body - and so I was performing better as well, and we were, as a crew, as a team, performing better.
“So, I think teamwork comes down to accepting that you need other people. You need the skills of other people. You’re not better than anyone else in your team. Everyone has a skill that you need, so make it easy for them to get it out.”
Q: What qualities separate exceptional leaders from the rest - and how did your experiences under coach Jürgen Grobler shape your understanding of great leadership?
Alex Gregory: “Yeah, okay, so taking Jürgen as an example. Jürgen was very different as a coach and as a leader to any of the other coaches that I’d come across with at the time because he gave us complete trust. His trust was for us to lose, rather than for us to earn.
“So, we turned up and we had his trust. There were things we could do for ourselves to lose his trust, but we had his trust initially, and that was a very important confidence booster and very different to any of the other coaches that I’d worked with before.
“As I mentioned, the way Jürgen worked was that if we had a problem in the boat - if we had a problem with, call it, a project that we were trying to work on together as a crew - sort of turning it into normal work situations, we have a project and there’s a problem and we can’t figure it out, he won’t tell us what the problem is. He won’t say, ‘Alex, it’s you doing this, you need to change this’ He would never, ever say that.
“He’ll say, ‘Guys, the boat is doing this.’ It’s something technical with the boat - the boat is doing this - so he’ll highlight the problem, and we probably knew, as a team, as a crew, what the problem was, but he’ll just highlight it, and then he’ll be silent, won’t say anything.
“And that can be the most infuriating thing when you’re out on the water, when you know your boat isn’t working properly, and you just think, ‘Just tell us! What can you see? Who is it? Who’s doing it?’
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“But actually, after that initial frustration, you start to work together, you start to think about it together, you start to talk together. And so, Andy down the boat will say, ‘Okay, I’m just going to try this,’ and you try that, and it doesn’t work and nothing changes.
“And then Pete or someone else in the boat will go, ‘Oh yeah, actually, I’m going to try this,’ and whoa, that made a difference! And then the next time we go out, Jürgen will be with us every metre we do for two hours. He’ll watch every stroke, and he won’t say anything.
“And for two weeks, he won’t say anything, and yet he’s been with us the whole time. But in that time, we have been working things out together, discussing it together as a crew, trying things, experimenting.
“And two weeks later, out of the blue, he’ll just shout across the water, ‘Guys, it’s fantastic - you’ve solved it! Well done.’
“And what that has done is it’s created a robust change. We’ve figured it out ourselves, we’ve understood the root cause, we’ve come to a solution together, and we’ve made that change together. Come six months down the line, on the start line of the Olympic Games, that will be embedded in us. We know what we need to do.
“And so, we’ve formed that together, and he’s just facilitated us, giving us the trust to form that change together and make that and turn that thing right.
“Everyone else - every other coach or every other leader that I sort of worked under - would, in a training session, say, ‘Alex, change that,’ and I’d change that.
“I’d change something, and then ten minutes later, they’d go, ‘Alex, you need to change that, push your legs harder, push your legs faster, do something different,’ so I’d change that and forget about that first thing.
“And then ten minutes later, they’d say something else, so I’d change that and forget about those first two things. And after two hours, you’ve changed a hundred things, and nothing... They come to the next session, and you have to change everything, or nothing has stuck - everything needs changing again.
“And you get to the end of that two hours, and you’ve changed a hundred things, and nothing has changed. And so, that element of trust was so important because he initiated something for us.
“He gave us the job to change it, and I think the reason is he wasn’t in the boat, so he doesn’t necessarily know how to change it.
“It wasn’t his role, it wasn’t his job to be that technical expert in the boat, to be that person to make - to feel what we’re feeling in the boat. He gave us the trust and the responsibility to do that job.”
This exclusive interview with Alex Gregory was conducted by Chris Tompkins of The Motivational Speakers Agency.
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