Thames Ditton's Sporting Giants
This year, Sir Steve Redgrave (photo) launched the Sporting Giants programme, a joint initiative between UK sporting authorities to identify particularly tall and fit athletes from all over the country with the ability to take to the international sporting stage. The aim is that the best of them will stiffen the UK Olympic rowing, handball and volleyball teams in 2012.
Nearly four thousand applicants for the rowing programme aged 16 - 25, all over 6'3" for men and over 6'0" for women, were earlier this year weighed and measured and put through a battery of tests at several centres throughout the country. Of those that met the ideal specifications for height, build, posture, reach, leg and arm length, symmetry, strength and cardio fitness, just 100 were selected for the programme. And of those 100, two of them live in Speer Road, Thames Ditton!
Boyhood friends and close neighbours Nicholas Fitzgerald and Peter Brown, both aged 22 and a rangy 6' 5", have joined seventeen other regional giants being trained at Molesey Boat Club. If successful after a three month trial, they will then enter the next phase - the World Class Start programme. As well as training at Molesey they will attend regular sessions at the lottery-funded national training centre at Caversham, near Reading. Molesey Boat Club, one of just four clubs in this programme, is a leading rowing stablishment that numbers Olympic and World medallists among members past and present. Here our men are getting dedicated coaching and training nearly every day. While Nick, a former pupil at Thames Ditton Infants' School, had previously rowed at Kingston Grammar School, Pete is new to the sport. But both have been seen frequently burning up the rowing machines in Colets.
Two rowing eights will be formed from the 'giants' at Molesey, with the initial aim of getting at least one of the eights qualified for the Thames Cup at Henley next summer. A tall order? Why not! Nick and Pete are determined to go all the way. We're right behind them!