“Rowing - tougher than a year in Iraq”. As Katherine Grainger and the rest of the Great Britain women's squad start an Olympics training camp in Italy, Cath Bishop, who won an Olympic silver medal with Grainger in 2004, is in Iraq working as a diplomat.

Grainger has talked her friend out of retirement twice - once to compete in Athens and again last year when they won the Women's Head of the River race - but the Scot will be working with a new crew in Beijing.

“I dragged Cath back once, so after Athens she joined the Foreign Office and went to Sarajevo saying ‘There's no way you can bring me back from there',” Grainger said. “And now she has gone to Iraq. She tells me about sleeping in a concrete bunker and having to hit the floor when a bomb goes off outside, but compared with doing a GB winter trial in Lincolnshire she says Basra isn't that bad.”

Beijing will be Grainger's third Olympics and after two silver medals she has high hopes of going one better. With Annie Vernon, Debbie Flood and Frances Houghton, Grainger won gold in the quad sculls at the World Championships in Munich last year - her fourth successive world title - and they were named the women's crew of the year by Fisa, the world governing body.

The women's and lightweight crews, both coached by Paul Thompson, last year's Fisa coach of the year, have as much chance of Olympic success as the more celebrated heavyweight men. As well as the women's quad, there was a gold in Munich last year for the lightweight men's coxless four and five other medals for the crews, who flew to Varese, in the Alps, yesterday for two weeks of training.

“2007 was a very successful year,” Thompson said. “If we build on that, there is an opportunity for these crews to leave a legacy in the way that Redgrave and Pinsent did for the men.”

In terms of longevity, Grainger, 32, has been compared with those two Olympians, but she says: “I am not the oldest in the team”. That is Sarah Winckless, the double world champion who is pushing for a place in the quad after missing 2007 with a knee injury.

Comparing the preparations with her first Olympics, Grainger said: “Eight years ago, I didn't know what I was doing. I was very new and just didn't want to let anyone down. I was the weak link. Now, I feel some responsibility and know so much more.”

Grainger is working so hard that she has had to put her PhD on hold. Her research subject is homicide and when she returns from China she hopes to be allowed to interview some of Britain's most notorious murderers.

So, she's rowing's Clarice Starling, then? “It's not quite that glamorous,” she said, referring to Jodie Foster's character in The Silence of the Lambs. “I always wanted to be in LA Law.”

If Grainger ever came close to having murderous intentions, it was after losing the final of the World Championships to Russia at Eton Dorney in 2006 - only to be given the title five months later when one of Russia's rowers was found to have failed a drugs test. Eight more Russian rowers have since been banned for doping irregularities.

“It is rare to compete at home,” Grainger said. “We were favourites and were beaten in the last ten strokes. It was devastating, I was haunted for months. Then Russia were disqualified. It was the worst way to win a World Championship, yet it made us stronger. We lost and didn't want that feeling again.”

Winckless, who was part of that crew in 2006, agreed. “I saw the Russians in Seville this winter,” she said. “I was surprised at my reaction, they gave me motivation and energy to do well this year. They took winning in front of our home crowd away from us and we want our revenge.”

The Great Britain men's team won four gold medals and a bronze at the Fisa Team Cup in Seville on Saturday and four golds in the Andalucian International Regatta on a 500-metre sprint course yesterday. Wins came on both days for the coxless pair of Peter Reed and Andrew Triggs-Hodge, for the coxless four, for Alan Campbell in the single scull and for the men's eight, while Colin Smith and Stephen Rowbotham came third in the double scull on Saturday.

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