Steven Redgrave Bio - Biography

Name	Steven Redgrave
Height	6 ft 5 in
Naionality	English
Date of Birth	23-March-1962
Place of Birth
Famous for	Rower

Steven Redgrave is a retired British rower who won gold medals at five consecutive Olympic Games from 1984 to 2000 as well as a bronze medal at the 1988 Summer Games, totaling 6 Olympic Medals. He has also won three Commonwealth Games gold medals and nine World Rowing Championships gold medals. He has carried the British flag at the opening of the Olympic Games on two occasions.

In 2011 he received the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award. With 5 gold medals and 1 bronze, Redgrave is the most successful male rower in Olympic history. Redgrave was born in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, and educated at Great Marlow School, a comprehensive school there. He is the only Olympian to have won gold medals at five different Olympic Games in an endurance sport. This achievement has led to him being hailed as Britain's greatest Olympian. Redgrave stands 1.95 metres (6 ft 5 inches) tall. In his prime, he weighed more than 100 kilograms (16 st; 220 lb). His primary strength was in sweep oared rowing, where he has the distinction of being one of the few oarsmen to have won Olympic Gold rowing both bowside and strokeside (starboard and port). He also enjoyed success in indoor rowing, winning the World Championship for Indoor Rowing in 1991. He was also a successful single sculler winning the Wingfield Sculls five times between 1985 and 1989, but not quite a world champion class single sculler. From 1991 onwards, Redgrave, and the crews in which he rowed, became renowned for their consistent dominance. They set themselves apart from many other internationally successful crews by winning almost every time they raced. Indeed, the very occasional lapses in this winning run, such as the Lucerne regatta in 2000, were regarded with surprise by both the rowing community and the press.

For much of his career, Redgrave battled severe illness. In 1992, he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis (although he had continued to train for a considerable time prior to diagnosis). In September 1997, Diabetes mellitus type 1 was added to his list of ailments. Through careful management, however, he was able to continue training right up to the Sydney Olympics. In April 2006 he completed his third London Marathon, raising a record £1,800,000 for charity. In April 2008 Redgrave took part in the Olympic Torch relay for the games in Beijing. Redgrave is a supporter of Chelsea Football Club.

Redgrave is commemorated at Burnham Grammar School, Redbridge Community School and Broadlands Science and Engineering School as one of the four houses there. At Linton Village College in Cambridgeshire and Woodcote High School in Croydon, there is a school faculty (house) named after him. He starred in Top Ground Gear Force (although he did not realise until it was too late) for Sport Relief in 2008, where the Top Gear Team (Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond) took on Ground Force with predictable results, and trashed his garden. He launched his own Fairtrade Cotton Brand of Clothing called FiveG which is sold in Debenhams department stores.