'It will take something phenomenal to stop us': Emily Craig and Imogen Grant are the Team GB rowing duo on course for Olympic gold in Paris after Tokyo heartbreak

There's a picture on Emily Craig’s living room wall that shows what can be lost in a blink. There are also a few other items on there which demonstrate how much can change for the better.

They are all tightly linked on a line between cause and effect, so to understand why Craig and Imogen Grant travel to Paris this summer as the invincible team of Team GB, revisiting that photograph from a rowing lake in Tokyo is an essential starting point.

It was taken in 2021 and the occasion was the Olympic final of the women’s lightweight double sculls. When Craig says ‘not all fourth places are equal’, it is because the pixels of the image remind her and Grant every day of a brutal truth — their boat was not only a mere 0.5sec shy of gold but missed bronze by the impossibly small margin of 0.01sec as well.

‘I remember seeing the results come up and just having this overwhelming feeling of nothing,’ says Grant, sitting with Craig at Team GB’s rowing base in Caversham.

‘It was just absolute nothingness,’ Grant adds. ‘There’s no coming in for a medal. There’s nothing physical to show for everything that we’ve just done for years. All that effort and what do you get?’

You get a picture on a wall. And it’s one that catches Craig’s eye most mornings, but she doesn’t wince when she sees it.

‘It’s less psychopathic than it might sound to have it there,’ Craig says. ‘It’s there because it’s part of the journey. To be honest, had we got bronze in Tokyo, I don’t think I would still be racing. So whatever we go on to do in Paris, Tokyo was pivotal.

‘With the picture, I’m not sitting there eating my breakfast and staring at it, thinking, “Damn, why did it have to be this way?” It’s more like, “0.5sec off gold after going through a pandemic and all that disruption, what is possible if things are smoother?”

The three years since Tokyo have contributed to an exciting answer and it’s one that is written across the certificates in those other frames on the wall — they celebrate the world titles won by the pair in 2022 and 2023.

European golds were also collected in each of those years and their current streak is an astonishing 20 straight victories. Every big race, every gathering of significant rivalries, Craig, 31, and Grant, 28, have crossed first, though so much of that almost never happened.

For the thick end of nine months, they didn’t race together after Tokyo. Craig, who has a degree in east Asian art, disappeared to work in an auction house, selling rare coins mostly, and repeatedly told her friends she was unlikely to go back. At the same time, Grant returned to Cambridge to complete her medical degree, with no guarantee of a reunion.

‘I needed to go away and sort of find myself again before I could decide whether or not competing at this level fitted into the person I wanted to be,’ Craig says.

‘I suppose it was about finding my love for the sport again, but I may have told a few people I wasn’t going back along the way! It was probably February 2022 when I decided I would.’

Grant says: ‘When we jumped back in the double, we were both like, “Oh, OK, so this could be quite good”.’

How good remains to be seen now that they compete with targets on their backs.

‘Our coach (Darren Whiter) keeps saying we’re in the position that everybody wants to be in,’ Craig adds. ‘When he talks about it with us, he says, “It’s hard being you guys, but it’s harder being everybody else”. 

'So in a way, it’s nice remembering that we’re obviously in a position that everybody wants to go into the games being in but also a bit scary if you think about it too hard.’

Grant says: ‘I think because of our experience in Tokyo, we know more than most people that it really doesn’t matter what we’ve done. We quite famously lost a race before — we’ve seen too much! I think we both feel really acutely that none of this could matter if we don’t get it right in Paris.’

Their story is one of those snapshots that make the Olympics so special and so brutal — the ability for one race, or one hundredth of a second, to determine how years of early mornings and late finishes can be perceived.

For Craig and Grant, the only crew in the GB Rowing set up that emerged unchanged from a squad that failed to deliver any gold in Japan — Britain’s first such blank at an Olympics since 1980 — there is a confidence they can rewrite the messaging. Most of the time, they keep it well hidden, but occasionally it slips out.

‘It’s never enjoyable feeling like people are trying to chase you down and trying to find your weaknesses,’ Grant says, before suddenly chucking some spice to an answer about the pressures of being the team to beat. ‘The only way you can respond to that is by saying, “All right, try to race us and see where that gets you”. Usually it gets them blowing up in the second half of the race.’

Two years of dominating a discipline suggests Grant is on to something. Craig is on the same page.

‘Again, we know the margins involved in this sport and what can happen, but I think it would take something pretty phenomenal from someone else to turn us over,’ she says. ‘If they do then fair play.’

If they don’t, then there could be another, happier picture on that living room wall before long.