Alastair Heathcote in the pages of The Sunday Times: who would have believed
it? He is not David Beckham. He is not Steve Redgrave. He has not bought
Manchester City or proposed to Paris Hilton. He hasn’t even been
Wikipedia’d! But what a story. And what a challenge. It isn’t often you
arrive for an interview with no idea of what your subject even looks like.
The team coach, Mark Banks, makes the introduction. We retire to a quiet
corner of a quaint French hotel and Heathcote eyes the recorder curiously.
He has shorn sheep in New Zealand; he has camped in the Himalayas; he has
walked the streets of Basra with a rifle in his hands; but he has never seen
a loaded one of these.
“Where have you come from?” he asks. “I flew into Geneva last night and drove
down this morning,” I reply.
“Just for me?” “Just for you.” “Honoured,” he blushes. He speaks with the
plummy tones of an old Etonian and wears an engaging smile of milk-white
teeth on a surprisingly wiry frame. The looks are deceptive. Heathcote is no
Hooray Henry and has served with the army (he’s a captain) in Bosnia and
Iraq. He is also one of the country’s finest rowers and today in Munich, he
will sit at stroke in the Great Britain eight for the opening round of the
world championships.
The eight is a team of stars; Tom Stallard and Tom Lucy are former world
champions; Tom Parker, Josh West, Tom Solesbury, Robin Bourne-Taylor and
Richard Egington have stood on the medal podium or competed at the Olympic
Games. Heathcote is the exception. He has never rowed at this level before
and makes his debut at the age of 30. But it’s his quest to reach the summit
that sets him apart.
He chews a biscuit and awaits the opening question but the writer seems
distracted and unsure where to begin. How do you talk sport with a guy like
Alastair Heathcote? Winning is the only thing? He will tell you about
survival. Football is more important than life or death? He’ll suggest a
visit to Iraq. Will he feel nervous on the eve of the world championships?
The notion seems preposterous. How do you reach a man to whom the norms
don’t apply?
My dream is that someone will come up to me and say, ‘You came to my
school and inspired me to get to the Olympics’. Still waiting for that. –
Matthew Pinsent
In his fine autobiography, A Lifetime in a Race, Matthew Pinsent tells a story
about the aftermath of his gold medal triumph at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics
and a morning spent at his old school, Eton, where he was invited to address
the students at assembly.
“I gave a 15-minute presentation,” he writes, “about how I had had no idea I
could be a champion in my sport, and went on to say that I reckoned there
had to be one guy in the room who could be on the plane to the Sydney
Olympics in 2000. I was wrong. There were two. Ed Coode and Andrew Lindsay
were in the hall that day and they were both in the rowing team that
competed in Sydney.”
Alastair Heathcote was also in the hall that day. The eldest of two boys born
to his parents Mark and Susan, he had spent the first 12 years of his life
in Athens, Buenos Aires and Islamabad, where his father worked as a diplomat
in the Foreign Service.
“A lot of the guys who go to Eton are from rich families,” he explains, “but
in my case, because my Dad was a civil servant, the government paid for
three-quarters of the school fees. For my Dad, it was one of the main perks
of staying in the Foreign Office, to get us through school, and I started
rowing there.”
Heathcote was 15 when Pinsent came to visit and still remembers the occasion
vividly. “It was the first gold medal he had won and we were all pretty much
in awe of him,” he recalls. “These school talks, sitting in front of 750
people, are probably the most daunting thing you could ever do but everyone
listened to what he had to say. There was a lot of respect there, especially
for someone who had been at the school.”
Heathcote loved rowing – a passion he inherited from his dad – and dreamed of
becoming a junior international. At 17, he made the top boat at Eton and won
the celebrated “triple” – the Schools Head, the National Schools Regatta and
the Henley Royal Regatta – on a team that included Lindsay, but in his final
year his performances dipped and he began to lose faith.
“There was always this doubt in my mind about whether I could really compete
or not,” he explains, “and I always worried that I wasn’t big enough. I was
tall and thin as a boy and just didn’t believe I could make it to an
Olympics. I remember looking at Matthew Pinsent and thinking, ‘He’s massive!
I am just never going to be able to compete at that level’.”
He left Eton, abandoned rowing and spent a year on a sheep farm in New Zealand
– hard, lonely work for miserly pay – but an interesting experience. On his
return to England he took a course in environmental science at Newcastle
University and started rowing socially again. The bug to compete returned
and was soon so strong that he took a Masters course at Oxford Brookes
University, primarily to row.
The year was 2000: Lindsay and Coode would soon win medals at the Sydney
Olympics and for the first time in his life he thought “Why not me?”. He
made the top team at Brookes, rowed at a European Cup and was invited to
join the national squad at an altitude training camp. He was on the cusp of
the breakthrough but had reached a fork in the road.
“It was a money thing really,” he says. “It’s only recently that you can get
funding when you show you have potential and I just didn’t have the money to
support myself for a year. I wanted to keep rowing but didn’t have a choice.
I had to get a job.”
He decided to join the Air Corps but failed his grading course. “I was just
s*** at flying, basically,” he laughs. “I had no coordination and just
didn’t have the aptitude and they said, ‘Look, you can’t join the Air Corps
but you could join another regiment’, but I wasn’t interested. I said,
‘Naah, if I can’t fly I don’t want to join the army’.” But a month later he
changed his mind and applied to Sandhurst.
His parents were against the idea and felt he was too laid-back for the army.
The officer selection board at Sandhurst agreed. He passed the entrance exam
but they weren’t sure about his commitment and invited him to attend a
three-month precommissioning course called Rowallan Company. It sounded like
a corporate jolly. Heathcote signed up for the ride but the three months
that followed were the toughest of his life.
“The first night’s the toughest, no doubt about it. They march you in
naked as the day you were born, skin burning and half-blind from that
delousing s*** they throw on you, and when they put you in that cell and
those bars slam home, that’s when you know it’s for real. A whole life blown
away in the blink of an eye. Nothing left but all the time in the world to
think about it.” – Red (Morgan Freeman), The Shawshank Redemption.
Alastair Heathcote has arrived at the barracks on the first night of the
jolly. He hasn’t murdered anyone. It just feels that way. They’ve taken his
clothes, his keys, his books and mobile phone and handed him his uniform. He
is marched to a dorm with 60 other inmates and shown his bunk. On the first
night, he is shaken from his bed at three in the morning and ordered into a
truck for a drive into the woods. The stretcher-racing and ammunition-tin
relays are about to begin.
The fun continues for the next four days and they are deprived of food and
sleep. On the fifth day, two crates of large white boxes are delivered to
the forest and an announcement is made. “Right, as you can see we’ve got two
piles of boxes here. One pile contains a cooked breakfast; the other
contains a packed lunch. You are going to race for five miles carrying two
ammunition tins and the first 10 get to choose whatever they want.” He
begins to salivate.
He explodes from the start-line like a 100m sprinter and seems to cover the
five miles faster than Sebastian Coe would have done. He is minutes ahead at
the finish and collapses over the line.
The officer invites him to make his choice. “I’ll have the cooked breakfast,”
he gasps, struggling to his feet, but the large white box feels surprisingly
light. He opens it and there’s just a dry biscuit inside. He can’t believe
it. The bastard has lied! He wants to cry.
They return to the barracks and sit down to an evening meal of a rabbit, a
carrot and a potato. The next morning at daybreak the inspections begin.
“The inspections could last for two hours,” he says. “You had two minutes to
lay your kit out on this little square poncho and it had to be absolutely
perfect.
“If there was a tiny speck of hair on your razor from when you had shaved
you’d be sent to the PT instructor and given press-ups or sit-ups.
“It would start to rain and you would run back down the line and find your
sleeping bag was wet. The inspectors
would arrive to examine your kit again. ‘Why is your sleeping bag wet?’ And
sometimes you’d just snap: ‘BECAUSE IT’S BEEN RAINING!’ And then it was,
‘Right! You are answering back, get up that hill.’ They were trying to break
you. You just couldn’t win.”
“But you didn’t break?” I suggest. “Well, I’m sure I had a few lip-wobbling
moments when things got on top of me but I’m sure everyone did. The whole
point of it was that you were never told what you were doing or what was
coming up. It was a test. They wanted to see what you were made of. My
personal view was that the people who got through that could get through
anything at Sandhurst. It selected a better person than Sandhurst did.”
In December 2002, after three months on the chain-gang and 12 training at
Sandhurst, he was commissioned into the Blues and Royals as a second
lieutenant. He did a parachute course with the 16th Aerial Assault Brigade
(not easy for a guy who hates heights), completed a troop leader’s course
and spent four months in Bosnia on a peace-keeping mission, his first real
job.
“It was very, very, different to how it was during the war,” he says. “We were
based in a metal factory in Banja Luka and the job was searching houses for
stuff left over from the war and to help the police investigate drug
smuggling. It was a good way to break your way into the army. There was no
danger. It was all very relaxed.”
He returned to England and was training with the parachute regiment when he
was given word that he was going to Iraq. The month was October 2004. A year
and a half had passed since the start of the invasion and for the first time
in his life he felt the chill of mortal danger. “I was attached to the Welsh
Guards and thought at first that I was going to do an economic development
thing for Al Amara, which is slightly further north than Basra, but when I
got there they told me I was going to the old state buildings in Basra as an
infantry troop commander.
“I had done all this cavalry stuff, now I was infantry. It was daunting. I
thought ‘Shit! I am really going to have to pull out the stops here and do
this properly.”
His first experience of death – a suicide car bomber who blew himself up
before reaching his target – happened a few days later. He arrived with
a patrol, cordoned the area off, and studied the crater of smouldering metal
and human parts on the road. “I don’t know if it’s the training but I didn’t
feel anything, really,” he says. “I wasn’t horrified and I wasn’t shocked
... It was almost like a situation you had practised before at Sandhurst or
something...
“You couldn’t really make out that it was a person – maybe
that was it, I dunno, it’s difficult to say. It’s definitely something that
stuck in my mind but I can’t really explain why I didn’t feel anything. I
just felt quite numb about it. I think what really brings it home is when
you have first-hand experience of something that happens to one of the guys
you are with.
“It would be fair to say – and I am lucky for this – that the
Welsh Guards went at a period when nothing really kicked off. There were a
couple of guys injured from mortar attacks but it was nothing like it had
been for the Tour before. There was a makeshift gym [at the base] with
weights and mats and stuff and the whole thing was shredded with shrapnel
from stuff coming in. You could tell they’d had a pretty hard time.
“There was quite a morose feeling when we took over from them and it was
worrying. We thought, ‘This is not going to stop. This is going to happen to
us’. But for some reason or other it wasn’t too bad.”
The patrol programme in Basra – three hours on, three hours off –
rotated though 24 hours and for seven days a week. He started thinking about
rowing again; three months had passed since the Athens Olympics and the
sight of his former schoolmate, Ed Coode, in the winning coxless four had
stirred the old craving again. He started lifting weights and working-out on
the rowing machine.
“I had no real idea at the time that I would like to give it a serious go but
wanted to keep myself ticking over. I’d had a machine brought down from one
of the other camps but it was very hard with the patrol programme and I’d
find myself training at stupid hours like three in the morning. You had to
carry your body armour, helmet and rifle all of the time so I had to keep it
right by the rowing machine in case something happened. It was difficult to
do but I think I maintained a bit of fitness.”
After a tour of duty that lasted 4½ months, he was promoted to captain, won a
Wyfold Cup at Henley, and taught tank gunnery in Dorset, where one of the
young officers in his charge was a four-time Oxford blue and recent
Olympian. Robin Bourne-Taylor was about to transform his career.
“The selection for the national team is done in pairs. ‘What about it?’ he
said. ‘Do you want to give it a go?’ I spoke to the regiment and they agreed
to support us.
“I can’t imagine that anyone, certainly recently, has had the difficulty we’ve
had in getting into the team. There was no water to row on [in Dorset] so we
could only row at weekends. There were no lights in the garage with the
rowing machines, so we trained at six in the morning before work.” The first
trials for the team were held in October 2006. They both rowed well and were
invited to join the team for the spring training camps. The final trials
were set for the second week in April. They honed their preparation at a
training camp in Italy. For Heathcote, the wheel had turned full-circle –
it was here, six years earlier, that he had abandoned his dream. Not this
time; he was ready, set, sure to make the team until they received a call
from Iraq that Bourne-Taylor’s girlfriend, Lieutenant Jo Dyer, had been
killed in a roadside explosion.
“It really tore him apart,” Heathcote says. “I thought he might not row again
and that this was the end for us but I wasn’t going to push anything. We
went back to England and didn’t do anything for a week and then he called me
and said ‘Let’s give it a go’, and we went out to Hazewinkel [in Belgium]
for the trials. We didn’t make the A final but we won the B final, which put
us seventh and in the Olympic class of boats.”
It was enough. A month later, they were selected as the stern pair in the
eight for the world championships.
Captain Alastair Heathcote in the Great Britain singlet: who would ever have
believed it? He is not Matthew Pinsent. He is not Steve Redgrave. But that
certainly won’t be bothering him when he climbs from his bed this morning.
“I have a lot of respect for the best rowers on this team,” he says, “but I
also have equal, if not more respect for some of the guys in the army.
“Rowing requires a lot of self-discipline but there are people doing things in
the army in terms of honour and bravery these days that are akin to what
happened in the second world war.”
“So what happens next,” I ask. “I’m not sure,” he replies, “this is really
kind of a blip. I never expected I would get here and though it’s obviously
very welcome, it was never part of the grand plan. I’m not going to row
anymore beyond the Olympics. I’m still, officially, a captain in the army
and if I was to quit rowing tomorrow, I’d go back to my regiment in Windsor
and do whatever job they gave me. I am doing this on the goodwill of my
regiment and I feel a lot of loyalty to them in that respect because they
have given me this chance.”
“But you’re not going to go back,” I suggest.
“No, at the moment my plan is to leave the army when I finish rowing at the
Olympics next year. I spoke to the adjutant the other day and there’s a
possibility my squadron will be in Afghanistan next year and there’s a
possibility I could finish the tour with them when the Olympics are over.
And in a way that’s something I would really like to do.
“The idea of flying from Beijing to Afghanistan and putting a helmet and body
armour on and getting my rifle out is a little bit daunting, especially
considering I will want to have a holiday, but if they give me a week off,
I’m sure I’ll be all right.”
