The first time Andy Hodge sat in the British Olympic four, he was uncomfortably aware of a ghost accompanying him on to the water. A big ghost with a ruddy face and four gold medals. What struck Hodge then was not how few adjustments needed to be made to the seat last occupied by Matthew Pinsent in Athens or how precisely he was having to fill unfillable shoes, but how forcefully he felt the moment. “I was thinking, ‘Holy s***, what am I doing sitting in Mr Pinsent’s seat?’” he recalls. “It was pretty amazing.”

Mr Pinsent indeed. Already, barely midway through their first season, the new British four of Hodge, Alex Partridge, Peter Reed and Steve Williams have put clear blue water between themselves and the past. The World Cup title has been secured with one regatta, in Lucerne this week, still to go, and Beijing rowers have learnt that a free medal is not on offer now that Pinsent and Redgrave have retired. Far from it.

“They have big, big potential,” says Jurgen Grobler, their coach, of the new post-Pinsent four. Hodge and his men have been respectful of the heritage without being subservient to it. The clock, in the form of the prospective gold medal- winning time in 2008, will dictate the output of blood and sweat from here to China, not some compromise with history.

Shorn of competitive experience with the retirement of Pinsent and Ed Coode and the sabbatical granted to James Cracknell, today’s duel with the Canadians at Henley, a reprise of the Olympic final, will be their sternest challenge yet. But the signs are promising, not least because in Hodge, the four’s new stroke, the British squad has unearthed a true talent.

To Hodge, Pinsent is a supreme figure from a distant generation. Both were members of the last Olympic squad, but that is the extent of the overlap. Their experiences in Athens were painfully different. While Pinsent was crowning a glorious Olympic career by winning his fourth gold, Hodge was in the British eight, also defending champions, who finished last in the B final. No wonder he would rather look forward.

“To try to deal in the currency of guys like Pinsent and Redgrave at this stage is a little naive,” he laughs. “I’d have to go through 12 years’ worth of Olympics, win four gold medals and 11 consecutive world championship golds or whatever to reach Matthew’s status. If I can fill his shoes, great. Personally, I don’t care. There’s x amount in me; if that proves to be outstanding, great. If I win one world championship, get injured and fall out of the sport, that’s me too.

“I have no qualms about saying that our goal is to win just like him. But how am I supposed to do what he did? I certainly don’t want to finish my career after winning, say, two golds, thinking, ‘I’m a failure’, because I didn’t win four. What I can achieve is what I can achieve, no more, no less.”

Emerging from nowhere to win the pairs trials at the start of the 2004 season, the speed of the 25-year-old’s rise to the front rank bodes well for the safe transfer of rowing’s golden mantle. A refugee from the rugby field, he climbed into a boat for the first time at North Staffordshire University, where, as a freshman of formidable power but scratchy technique, he was deputed to the engine room of the university eight. “At the end of my three years,” Hodge recalls, “my coach said, ‘You could be quite good, if you ever learned to row properly’.”

The truth of the assessment hit home during his first year at Molesey Boat Club, one of rowing’s academies of excellence. “I wanted to see how good I could be at this sport and there was no better club to find out,” he says. “There were certainly guys who could row better than me all around, but they weren’t as powerful.

“I’ve got long arms and a huge core. I’ve got wide shoulders, but they don’t taper down to my waist, they go straight down and that’s good because as the legs drive down in the rowing stroke the body opens out, so a lot of the strength comes from the middle of the body. It’s pure DNA.”

By the end of his first year as a proper rower, Hodge was invited to an under-23 national camp without understanding the implications of his selection. He was asleep when Redgrave made Olympic history in Sydney that year. He awoke in time to watch the eight win their gold. “It seemed like a distant world, really,” he says. “I didn’t know any of the guys in the squad and I didn’t know the system that got them there. I wasn ’t thinking, ‘I’m going to do everything I can to do that.’”

When, in a pair with Partridge, he won the national trials in the summer before the Athens Olympics, all doubts about his international quality were erased, further proof arriving in his authoritative stroking of Oxford’s winning Boat Race crew in March and another emphatic victory in the pairs trials the following month, this time in partnership with Reed.

“I’ve found something I’m good at,” he says. Just how good will become apparent in the next three years leading up to Beijing, where Hodge will finally face down his ghost. “People once said, ‘You can’t win without Pinsent,’ and he earned that. I want to be the next one. ‘Without Hodge they’re not going to do it.’ That’s the status I ’d like to earn in the long run.”