‘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 photo on Emily Craig’s living room wall that shows what can be lost in the blink of an eye. There are also a few other things that show how much can change for the better.

They are all intimately connected on a line of cause and effect. To understand why Craig and Imogen Grant will travel to Paris this summer as Team GB’s invincible team, it is an essential starting point to look again at that photo of a rowing lake in Tokyo.

The photo 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 created equal,” it’s because the pixels of the image remind her and Grant every day of a brutal truth: their boat was not only 0.5 seconds off gold, it missed out on bronze by the impossibly small margin of 0.01 seconds.

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

“It was just nothing,” Grant added. “There’s no medal to win. There’s nothing physical to show for all the work we’ve been doing for years. All that effort and what do you get?”

Craig and Grant painfully missed out on a medal in the women’s lightweight double sculls final at the Tokyo Olympics

You get a picture on the wall. And it’s one that catches Craig’s eye most mornings, but she doesn’t bat an eyelid 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, if we had got bronze in Tokyo, I don’t think I would be racing again. So whatever we do in Paris, Tokyo was crucial.

“With the picture, I’m not sitting there, eating my breakfast and staring at it, thinking, ‘Damn, why did this have to happen?’ It’s more like, ‘0.5 seconds behind gold after a pandemic and all these disruptions, what’s possible if everything runs more smoothly?’”

The three years since Tokyo have contributed to an exciting response and this is reflected in the certificates in the other frames on the wall: they celebrate the world titles won by the pair in 2022 and 2023.

European gold medals were also won in each of those years, and their current run is an astonishing 20 consecutive victories. At every major race, at every convergence of significant rivalries, Craig, 31, and Grant, 28, have finished first, although that has almost never happened.

For the nine months that followed, they did not race together after Tokyo. Craig, who has a degree in East Asian art, disappeared to work at an auction house, where she mainly sold rare coins, and repeatedly told her friends that she probably would not return. At the same time, Grant returned to Cambridge to complete her medical degree, with no guarantee of a reunion.

“I had to get away and rediscover myself before I could decide if I wanted to compete at this level and be the person I wanted to be,” Craig said.

“I think it was about rediscovering my love for the sport, but I may have told a few people I wasn’t going back! It was probably February 2022 when I decided I was going to.”

The pair are on a stunning run of 20 consecutive victories. Pictured: Craig and Grant celebrate winning the women’s lightweight double sculls final at the 2024 World Rowing Cup

Grant says: ‘When we jumped back into the double, we both thought, “Okay, this could be really good.”‘

How well they do remains to be seen now that they are competing with a target on their backs.

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

“So in a way it’s nice to realize that we’re in a position where everyone wants to go into the Games, but it’s also a little bit scary if you think about it for too long.”

Grant says: ‘I think we know more than most people from our experience in Tokyo that it doesn’t really matter what we’ve done. We’ve lost a race before — we’ve seen too much! I think we both feel very strongly that none of this matters if we don’t do well in Paris.’

Theirs is one of those moments in time that make the Olympics so special and so brutal: the power of one race, or one hundredth of a second, to define how years of early mornings and late finishes are experienced.

For Craig and Grant, the only crew in the GB Rowing line-up to emerge unchanged from a side that failed to win gold in Japan – Britain’s first Olympic blank since 1980 – there is a confidence that they can rewrite the message. Mostly they keep it well hidden, but occasionally it slips out.

“It’s never fun to feel like people are trying to catch you out and find your weaknesses,” Grant says, before suddenly adding some spice to an answer about the pressure of being the team to beat. “The only way you can respond to that is to say, ‘OK, try to beat us and see where that takes you.’ Usually that causes them to blow up in the second half of the race.”

Grant exercises as head of rowing at the Vaires-Sur-Marne Nautical Stadium in Paris

Two years of dominating a discipline suggests Grant is on the right track somewhere. Craig agrees.

“Again, we know the margins in this sport and what can happen, but I think it would take something really special for someone else to get us to do it,” she says. “If that happens, then fair play.”

If not, then perhaps there will soon be another, more cheerful painting hanging on the living room wall.