BY JOHN JACKLIN
ON the penultimate racing day at this year’s Henley Royal Regatta, Greg Searle will be keeping close watch on a cricket match on the other side of the county.
The three-time Olympic medallist will be at the business end of his stewarding duties when Henley Cricket Club’s first team plays away at Oxford Downs.
Searle, 54, was elected chair of the cricket club last year, inspired by his son, Adam, 23, who captained the first team last year before leaving for the cricket season in Manly, Australia.
Searle said: “You could certainly say I will be looking at both what’s going on on the river, but also what’s going on at Oxford Downs.
“I will be checking up on the score, but I can also follow it up on the website. Oxford Downs actually commentate on their live stream.
“We haven’t got to that stage yet, but it would be an aspiration that we would get to that level.”
In exchange for his son, the club has recruited two Australians for the new season which kicked off last month.
Toby Seward and Josh Lawson, both from Manly, are living at Searle’s Marlow home while they’re loaned for the season.
Searle said: “We went to Chelsea, so we went to Stamford Bridge so they could experience a Premier League game because Josh is a massive Chelsea fan and has been spending however many years getting up to watch them at 3o’clock in the morning.
“Now he can actually go and watch them at 3 o’clock in the afternoon which is quite refreshing.”
Searle estimates he has attended 38 Henley regattas since first competing as part of the Hampton School first eight as a 16-year-old.
He said he is looking forward to this year’s event as he will be juggling both commitments.
He said: “Certainly the Saturday before regatta, that’s a fun day for me, because we’ll have a home game going on here and then at 4 o’clock I’ll go to Regatta HQ.
“I have to do a quick change into my white trousers and blazer, go into Regatta HQ while we do the planning for regatta and then I will have to choose whether I then go for a drink on Temple Island or whether I come back here and watch the conclusion of the game.
“I will probably want to watch the conclusion of the game, as a small aside too, I think England are playing football that night in the World Cup, so then I’ll be wanting to watch England play football that night.”
Both Adam and his sister Josie had a front-row seat to the demands of professional sport when their father came out of retirement ahead of the 2012 London Olympic Games at the age of 40.
Then nine and 11, Searle said they saw him return to the lifestyle of a full-time athlete for three years in the lead up to the event having been spurred on by the “inspire a generation” motto.
Searle had retired from competitive rowing in 2001 after taking home gold in the coxed pair in Barcelona in 1992, bronze in the coxless four in Atlanta in 1996, and fourth place in Sydney in 2000.
He said: “When London got to host the Olympics in 2012, they had a purpose which was to inspire a generation. So, I wanted to come back and be part of those Olympics”.
In this time, he had focused on his career as a consultant in leadership development, a focus he had maintained throughout his rowing career to help him stay in touch with reality.
‘If you watch the Olympic Games, they row over 2,000 metres, and they’ve only been doing that for 100 years and we’ve been doing this for 200 years’
He said: “Winning at the Olympics felt like winning other races, but other people’s reaction to us winning was completely insane.
“Crossing the line and winning at the Olympics felt like crossing the line and winning at Henley, but being in newspapers, TV game shows, walking into events and other people knowing who I was, it was all totally surreal but totally fantastic to be a part of”.
He said returning to the sport as a father gave him a stronger appreciation for the opportunity to play a sport he loved every day.
He said: “I probably enjoyed it more as an older person because I valued how fortunate I was to be a full-time athlete.
“I think when you’re younger sometimes you don’t like it because it’s really hard and grinding and difficult, but when I was older I really appreciated every day that I got to be an athlete.
“I think I also really appreciated what a good training environment felt like which links to trying to help this place, Henley Cricket Club, be a really good training environment.”
In 2006, he was invited to join the body of about 60 volunteers, mostly former rowers, responsible for organising and overseeing the event.
Throughout the week this will see him umpiring, timing races, checking crews on and off the water, and making sure the right crews show up for each race.
Searle said: “It’s an entirely voluntary thing being a Henley steward.
“It’s funny because it feels like an honour that you get a phone call one day from the chair of the stewards who says we would like to invite you to join this group and you go, ‘oh that’s great’.
“But then even though you feel honoured to be invited into this group, the truth is, for the rest of your life, you’re giving a week of your life to run this event and basically facilitate the event for other people.
“But I feel very proud to do that and I think what people will experience about Henley Royal Regatta and the magic of it is that it’s run by rowers and it’s run for rowers and it feels like the rowing is as good as it could possibly be and then there is this massive party going on alongside it.
“But we stewards want to ensure it’s more about the rowing than it is about anything else.”
Over his 38 years of involvement with the event, he explains he has seen it make leaps towards inclusivity, attracting competitors from a diverse array of backgrounds.
He said: “In 1997 we had our first women racing at Henley Royal Regatta, so that’s been almost a 30-year journey to get to gender parity.
“We are getting increasingly more state school involvement and more rowing clubs rather than schools and universities as we’ve seen the sport grow.”
He said he hoped if the event continued to adapt with the growing sport, he hoped it would be part of setting the tone for the sport globally, a feat he said it has claimed since its inception.
He said: “If you watch the Olympic Games, they row over 2,000 metres, and they’ve only been doing that for 100 years and we’ve been doing this for 200 years.
“The reason they row 2,000 metres is because that’s the distance between Temple Island and the bend in the river – 2,112 metres.
“We started in 1839 and so when people said, ‘well, how do you run a good rowing race?’
“Well, you do it over 2,000 metres because that’s what they do at Henley.”
After his first appearance at Henley as a 16-year-old, Searle went on the following year to win gold in the men’s coxless four at the junior world championships in Hungary.
The next three years would see him make the senior national team and then win gold at his first Olympic Games.
Searle believes he can bring lessons from this experience to his new role at the helm of Henley Cricket Club.
He said: “The memories I have of that team that I was in when I was 16 are so strong and it was such a special experience to go on a campaign with people I went to school with and then racing and winning at Henley Royal Regatta that I got to understand how brilliant sport can be.
“What I have been able to experience, whether it’s at a relatively junior level or it’s at the Olympic games, it’s about who you’re with, how you’re struggling together, how you’re challenging yourself, how you’re learning from setbacks and then having worked hard, then really enjoying the success
you get.”