Sir Steve Redgrave will miss the Olympics for the first time in 40 years after losing his role as a BBC pundit to Dame Katherine Grainger and the race to become British Rowing performance director to Louise Kingsley.
Redgrave, who has been at every Games since winning the first of five consecutive gold medals in 1984, told the Daily Mail he would not be in Paris unless he received a last-gasp SOS.
He said he had lost his role as a BBC pundit after UK Sport chair Grainger began working for the corporation alongside Sir Matthew Pinsent and it decided it did not need all three of them.
The last Games also saw Redgrave in the job of high-performance director of China’s national rowing team.
“I wasn’t told that I’ve been discontinued, but it’s sort of evolved,” said Redgrave, whose most recent Olympics for the BBC was in 2016. “Matt is the presenter and Katherine Grainger is the equivalent to what I was doing. The three of us worked together at the World Championships the year after Rio, but then they went, ‘Male-female, covered on Olympic medals, why have three?’. Working for China at the last Games probably didn’t help matters.”
Redgrave also walked off set at Rio 2016 during a live broadcast after being angered by the BBC not showing the whole of the Helen Glover-Heather Stanning women’s pair semi-final live.
Amid fears he would be dropped for an incident for which he was known to be contrite, a spokesman for the corporation said at the time: “There is absolutely no issue between the BBC and Sir Steve Redgrave and Steve will be part of our team for our concluding Olympics review programme on Sunday.
“We would never discuss future contracts of any of our talent.”
Redgrave became a coach for China in 2018, helping take them from 16th in the medal table in Rio to joint sixth at the postponed Tokyo Games three years ago.
Britain finished down in 14th after failing to win gold for the first time since 1980, with Brendan Purcell subsequently stepping down as performance director.
Redgrave applied for the role but did not even make it to the final round of interviews, with Kingsley promoted from her role as interim.
“I’m disappointed that I couldn’t give my skills to helping the team,” said Redgrave, whose wife, Ann, will be in Paris in her role as chief medical officer for GB Rowing. “I felt that I was in a position to be able to help with the experience of my career, and the experience of being out in China, taking them from nowhere on the Olympic medal table to sixth, well ahead of the British team.
“I felt that I was the right person at the right time to do that. Obviously, the powers at British Rowing didn’t think that was the case.”
Redgrave could have stayed with the Chinese team until Paris but left in December 2022 amid coronavirus restrictions that made it difficult to visit his family.
Asked how he would respond to an SOS from another country with 100 days to go, he said: “If someone said, ‘Would you help us through to LA [2028]?’, that would be a harder decision to make. But to, ‘Will you help us out for Paris?’, the answer would be yes, I’m sure.”
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