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[[Rowley Douglas, GE Capital and GE Olympic Ambassador] My name is Rowley Douglas, ]
[and we're down at Molesey Boat Club, which is just southwest of London. ]
[The sport that I do is rowing. ]
[In 2000 I won an Olympic gold medal. ]
[I stopped rowing the year after that and ended up working for General Electric, for GE Capital. ]
[I worked in Six Sigma, which was similar to the sort of things that I was doing in the boat, ]
[in that it was very process-driven, looking for efficiencies, ]
[which is ultimately what my job in the boat is.]
[It's to make the boat efficient, make it go as fast as possible. ]
[Then I made the mistake--I broke one of my golden rules of going back out in a boat again,]
[probably 9 years after I had stopped. ]
[I had a great race, really enjoyed it, really excited by it again, ]
[that feeling of being back out on the water.]
[And a lot of people will say to you, "Why don't you have another go at this?"]
[So I approached GE and said, "This is what I'm thinking of doing." ]
['Can I stay here working and doing it, and can we do it together, really?"]
[My role--I'm the cox. The role of the cox is, at its most basic, steering the boat. ]
[The more important jobs are to, in effect, be the coach inside the boat. ]
[The taskmaster or the person that, I suppose; understands the vision of what]
[the coach is trying to achieve, that has a good grasp of how to execute it]
[within the boat based on feel, vision, sound, in some cases as well. ]
[[male voice coaching rowers]]
[Part of my role is really to take the pressure away from the athletes, ]
[absorb a little bit of that, and then almost put it back to them as a positive. ]
[I love being part of a team. ]
[You could almost be doing something slightly wrong, ]
[but if you're doing it all together, the boat's going to be going quicker than ]
[8 superstars doing their own different thing. ]
[For us, training entails 7 days a week.]
[We're out on the water twice a day. ]
[Comparative to the last Olympic cycle, it's very different for me, ]
[because obviously I have the different dynamics of a job now, ]
[a wife, children--just take, say, the last 2 months of training. ]
[I think I've been home a total of 5 nights in that time. ]
[You know, it's all or nothing. ]
[And, also, I'm very much on the back foot now.]
[Then, I was on a kind of run going upwards. ]
[Now, I've been there and done it, but no one's going to roll the red carpet out to me. ]
[So I'm very much having to get down and scrap and fight, but]
[I personally wouldn't have it any other way. ]
[The selection process has been running throughout this year. ]
[They told me that they'll be continuously assessing everyone in the team]
[and that it's always got to be best person for each seat, because]
[they need to make the boats go as fast as possible. ]
[It would be very short-sighted to be talking about just getting selected, ]
[because to me that's just not good enough. ]
[The only goal can be winning at the Olympics.]
[[27 July 2012, London 2012 Olympic Games.] [29 August 2012. London Paralympic Games]]
