Epic rowing battle for gold captures glory and cruelty of sport in microcosm | Jonathan Liew

Wife, mother, three-time Olympic medallist … not necessarily in that order! As Helen Glover crossed the finish line and slumped forwards, letting the oars hang loose at her sides, it was almost as if a great weight was being lifted from her, a sensation not dissimilar to the soul leaving the body.

To either side, pure elation: for the victorious Dutch on the right, for the bronze-medallists from New Zealand to the left. What did she feel? An hour later, silver medal around her neck, she still wasn’t quite sure. “Very mixed,” she said. “Because on the one hand, we knew we had the potential to win. On the other, we felt like we raced as strong as we could.”

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And this was an epic boat race: a test of physical endurance and mental resilience, the ability to maintain the head in a state of utter composure when the body is in a state of pure torture, when the seconds feel like minutes and the minutes feel like hours. Afterwards the Dutch spoke about how they had taken inspiration from the British comeback triumph in the quad sculls , how they had stayed calm under the utmost pressure. One sixth of a second, over 2,000 metres, after four years of stress and struggle: this is the glory and cruelty of sport in microcosm.

For the Dutch three seat, Marloes Oldenburg, this was her own tale of comeback and triumph against the odds. Two years ago Oldenburg was lying in a hospital bed in Austria, being asked by a doctor if she wanted to donate her organs in case she died during surgery. Oldenburg had crashed her bike on a holiday ride and broken her back.

The surgery lasted six hours. It was a month before she could walk again. She is still unable to turn her neck sideways. “For anyone who needs some inspiration, break your neck and you can win Olympic gold,” she trilled after the race, and perhaps the real lesson here is that rowing seems to attract a particularly cussed and headstrong breed. Most of us have a little protective voice in your head that whispers in our moments of greatest trial: “Nah, best not do that.” Rowers do not seem to have that voice, or at least are able to shout it down more efficiently than most.

And this is also the tale of Glover, whose return to top-level rowing while having three children under two has generated a good deal of deserved admiration, as well as some slightly unhelpful discourse. What matters here, and what doesn’t? The “supermum” tag has always felt a touch belittling, with its unspoken subtext that birthing and raising a fellow human is somehow insufficiently heroic in its own right, unless you also have an Olympic gold medal in the cabinet.

In fairness, Glover has always pushed back against this description, against the fetishisation of motherhood, the implication that going back to work as a mother is somehow heterodox or worthy of special adulation. And we are dealing with two separate issues here: how we talk about mothers and how we support mothers. Throwing flowers from a distance is the easy part. Giving working parents the tools to flourish – and yes, there are also rumoured to be several fathers competing at these Games – is a different matter entirely, and this ultimately comes down to choices.

These Games, for example, are the first to feature a nursery in the village, albeit not so much providing supervised childcare as a few toys and soft cushions so parents can spend time with their children. Even this minuscule concession comes 124 years after women were first admitted to the Olympics. The latest round of UK Sport funding for Olympic and Paralympic athletes runs to £314m. How much of a difference would it make if even a fraction of that were spent on providing on-site childcare to parents while training? How many more new parents might stick with the sport instead of making compromises, or giving up entirely?

“I’ve had to become extremely accepting of imperfection ,” Glover told this newspaper this year, and for all working parents there is always a measure of compromise: on quality and thoroughness of work, on family time, on sleep and mental bandwidth. Glover has borne these burdens not because she wants to but because she has to, because of the societal expectation that women who have children simply have to sit out the rest of life for a bit. Whatever the next chapter of her life holds, you only hope that those who come after her have a slightly easier time of it.