JAMES CRACKNELL, the Olympic rowing champion, has been reunited with his two stolen gold medals after a dog found them under a hedge near his home.

Burglars stole the medals and other possessions last month when they broke down the back door of Cracknell’s West London flat when he was out at a restaurant with his wife, Beverley Turner.

The thieves ransacked the property, which the couple were renting while their nearby house was being renovated.

But last night the gold medals won by Cracknell in Sydney and Athens were back in his possession after the dog’s owner returned them to a neighbour in Chiswick.

Ms Turner, a television presenter, was quoted in today’s edition of The Sun: “We are absolutely thrilled to get the two gold medals back so quickly. It was heartbreaking to think they might have been lost for ever.”

Also stolen in the burglary were Cracknell’s diamond and platinum wedding ring, a laptop computer and £30,000 of watches, including a limited-edition Oakley timepiece given to Sydney gold medal-winners.

After the raid, Cracknell said that he was most upset by the missing laptop, which contained photographs of his two-year-old son, Croyde, growing up.

It also stored pictures and 20,000 words of text for a book about Cracknell’s 2,500-mile transatlantic rowing trip alongside Ben Fogle, the television presenter, in January.

After the theft Cracknell said: “Every time the phone goes I hope it’s someone to tell me I’ll get the laptop back. There were pictures of my son and the last two Olympics.

“You don’t think when someone burgles your home that they will take your pictures. You think they don’t nick the family portraits. And I’ll have to do all that work again.”

Police arrested a suspect trying to sell one of the stolen watches in a London pub after they were contacted by a customer who had read press reports of the raid.

Officers later traced the man to a flat where they found some of the possessions, but not the laptop or medals. A man was charged with burglary.

Cracknell missed the 1992 Games in Barcelona because of injury and missed out four years later in Atlanta when he contracted a virus the day before he was due to race.

But he made it third time lucky in Sydney in 2000, when he and Steve Redgrave, Matthew Pinsent and Tim Foster, his teammates, won gold in the coxless fours.

He repeated the feat four years later in Athens with Pinsent, Ed Coode and Steve Williams.

Cracknell announced his retirement from the sport in February saying that he had lost his hunger for rowing. “In our sport you have other people's dreams in your hands. If you’re not committed you’re going to let them down as well as yourself. That’s not fair,” he said.

The dog’s discovery has echoes of Pickles, the mongrel who found the old Jules Rimet World Cup trophy, which was stolen from a London exhibition before the 1966 tournament.

It was found a week later wrapped in newspaper under a bush in Norwood, South London, by Pickles.

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