Helen Glover takes Silver and a first for Sporting Giants

UK Sport Press Release:

Sporting history was made in New Zealand last weekend, where Helen Glover from Cornwall, whose talent for rowing was discovered just three years ago via the UK Sport and English Institute of Sport talent recruitment drive ‘Sporting Giants’, won silver in the women’s pair with Heather Stanning at the Rowing World Championships.

Spearheaded by Sir Steve Redgrave, Great Britain’s most successful Olympian of all time, in 2007, the talent identification programme set out to awaken potential sleeping giants of British sport. In the first appeal of its kind, UK Sport asked potential athletes to make themselves known – providing they fulfilled the basic criteria of being tall (a minimum of 6’3” or 190cm for men and 5’11” or 180cm for women), young (between 16 and 25), and with some sort of athletic background.

The response was overwhelming and when the registration period closed the project leaders had around 4,800 applications to sift through – with just under 4,000 applications meeting all the basic criteria. Glover, who had never set foot in a rowing boat before and was making her senior World Championships debut in New Zealand, was one of the 4000, and following a rigorous talent assessment and confirmation period, was selected to join the GB Rowing Team’s World Class Start programme. And the rest is now history, as she has become the first of these athletes to win a senior World Championships medal.

Read the full story on the UK Sport website.