... were the rowers whose little cox famously fought back the tears on the victory rostrum at Barcelona, but with incomplete success.
If you say that out loud it sounds quite rude, making it necessary to point out that the event was the Coxed Pairs, and the name of the cox was Garry Herbert (who, like most coxes, was – and probably still is – undeniably quite small, at least in comparison to the Searle brothers).
It's also worth noting that British competitors still found gold medals hard to come by in 1992, and almost anyone that won one became a household name. At Barcelona we won 20 medals in total: 5 gold, 3 silver and 12 bronze. Atlanta in 1996 was even worse: only one gold (Pinsent and Redgrave in the Coxless Pairs, repeating their Barcelona success), eight silver, and six bronze (total 15). It was at Sydney in 2000 that lottery funding began to kick in and Britain's medals tally began to improve. In fact it's increased each time since then; at Rio in 2016 we won 27 golds, 23 silver and 17 bronze (total 67), putting us second in the table behind only the USA. In 1996 we were 36th.
1992 was the last time that the Coxed Pairs event was included in the Olympics. The Searle brothers went on to win bronze medals in the Coxless Four at Atlanta (1996), and Greg won another bronze in the Eight at London (2012).
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