Imogen Grant and Emily Craig celebrated an emotional win in the lightweight women’s double sculls in front of their families and friends after Grant’s parents set up an “Emily and Imogen in Paris” WhatsApp group.
The two claimed the seventh gold medal for Team GB on Friday having missed out on a spot on the podium at the Tokyo games by one-hundredth of a second – an agonising moment which Craig has had a picture of on her wall ever since.
Craig was in floods of tears at the medal ceremony and both of them appeared to sing the national anthem loudly.
Cambridge University Boat Club and University of London Boat Club both congratulated the Olympic champions, with the former praising their “dominant display of lightweight rowing” and the latter posting on Instagram: “They’ve only gone and done it”.
Matthew Griffiths, Grant’s fiance, was one of her first novice rowing coaches at the University of Cambridge where they met around 10 years ago while the Olympian was studying medicine.
“She accelerated her own career and kind of left me behind there but we stayed together,” he joked, speaking to the PA news agency ahead of the Games.
He continued on a more serious note: “I’ve seen her entire journey from novice to Olympian.
“It’s also been an immense privilege to be able to see what that journey looks like.
“If you’re doing a medical degree at Cambridge at the same time, it’s quite difficult to do everything well but it’s one of her great strengths.”
He still coaches rowing on a voluntary basis at Upper Thames Rowing Club, in Henley, and called himself a “rowing nerd”, saying he and Grant “never run out of things to talk about there”.
The rower’s mother, Tracy, set off from the UK with union-flag painted nails and predicted she would be shouting “very loudly” while watching her daughter compete.
Grant and Craig’s success comes after Britons Ollie Wynne-Griffith and Tom George took silver in the men’s pair – losing out to Croatia by less than half a second after leading for much of the race – and Ireland rowers Fintan McCarthy and Paul O’Donovan completed back-to-back Olympic titles in the lightweight men’s double sculls.
Wynne-Griffith and George went to school together at Radley College, Oxfordshire, and then studied at Yale and Princeton respectively, before linking up again at Cambridge University where they competed in the Boat Race.
Michael Gennaro, heavyweight crew head coach at Yale, trained Wynne-Griffith in the Olympian’s final year at the university.
He told PA: “I always felt like at practice and around the team Ollie always treated it like it was Olympic training.
“You could just tell that everything he did was at a high standard and he would have an off day and just getting really down on himself about it and it’s like your off days are still pretty good, but he just wasn’t living up to his standard.
“You always knew that he had his eyes set on going to the Olympics and being a big time oarsman and that’s just kind of how he carried himself.”
Mr Gennaro did not coach George but knew of him and his rowing at Princeton and described the teammates as “top notch”.
Away from Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium, diving duo Jack Laugher and Anthony Harding came third in the men’s synchronised 3m springboard, with fellow GB divers, including Tom Daley, leaping to their feet in the stands after the final round.
Lois Toulson, who is in a relationship with Laugher, congratulated the pair with a message on her Instagram story: “What a team!! The best teammates anyone could ask for”.
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