You can't rush into a decision about going on to Beijing, but I know my wife wouldn't stand in my way. She knows it makes me happy."He will be 37 at the next Olympics and, as he said, even when you win a gold medal you don't suddenly put on a pair of rose-tinted glasses when you look at the world you have inhabited for four years. It came from Redgrave, the taciturn, iron-clad eminence gris of the amphibious-pain business It wasn't showy. It wasn't David Beckham leaping on the back of a team-mate after a goal against the Ukraine or Luxembourg. It was a man of great experience and achievement looking into the eyes of someone younger, someone in whom he had invested vast trust, and saying: "You did all that you had to do."Pinsent says he will take a month or so to clear away the swirl of emotions that in Sydney four years ago left him, as he put it, "bipolar". "I had to run to him," she said, "because I knew how much this had meant to him, and what difficult times he and the crew had, and it had all come right at the finish and you could see all that was going through him."There was another embrace at the water's edge. He had to go down into his innards in pursuit of that last little bit of strength and resolve.When the photo finish was in, when the gold was confirmed and Pinsent stood in the fierce morning sunshine and his crewmates sang the national anthem with a tuneless passion, his emotions flowed out - so fiercely, so uncontrollably, that his Canadian-Greek wife Demetra rushed to his side and embraced him.

So what could we do? We just had to give it another 10 strokes, and in the end we didn't beat them by a stroke but the timing of a favourable part of that stroke. Before that, when we had the lead, we kept putting in the strokes and I kept waiting for us to pull away - but it went on and on and on, and you just couldn't know how it was going to finish." But he knew what he had to do. "When after putting in 30 strokes I looked over and saw that not only were they still there, they were still ahead. It seems absurd, this fragment of time, when you retrace the 2,000 metres of the Schinias Lake that saw the world champion Canadians push Pinsent and his crew of James Cracknell, Ed Coode and Steve Williams to what for one terrible moment seemed like a point of breakdown which could never be redeemed. But there it was, the difference between Pinsent's standing as a giant in his own right and the unavoidable sense that his three previous Olympic golds had been the gift of his uniquely-motivated former crewmate, Sir Steve Redgrave.However unfair, even false, that impression might have been, it was something to be banished and Pinsent did it in the flicker of an eyelid."I couldn't believe it when the Canadians didn't crack," said Pinsent. If we didn't know it before, we know it now after the weekend of Pinsent and Ainslie, the rowing-sailing firm of Olympians that will surely always be registered with the gods.Matthew Pinsent, in possibly the greatest rowing race the Olympics has ever seen, won in the men's coxless fours by a margin of one eight-hundredth of a second.

It is built over the years, with pain and unremitting application, but then there will always come a time when everything that has been achieved must be defined, once and for ever Greatness doesn't come in one game, one race. Or it can take eight days in shifty wind and treacherous seas. She was happy for her training partner and sad about herself." Van Commenee remained cautious about how Sotherton might progress from here "Her javelin is weak, as well as her shot They will never be strong events, but she can improve. I think Kluft is so strong I don't think she can be beaten really."Kelly's happy, and I can understand that. When you were 27th in the world 12 months ago, as she was, you can't dream about a bronze.

So when you travel home with a medal, you are going to be pleased But it's not the right attitude.". Greatness doesn't come in one game, one race. "She put her heart and soul on the line to get a medal, and she couldn't do it She didn't want to face the embarrassment any longer. She was devastated.""Her reaction to Kelly getting a medal was bittersweet. But I think she will carry on at least until the 2006 Commonwealth Games."While Sotherton was standing on the podium, adjusting her Olympic wreath with a suggestion of coquettishness that roused the stadium to a rumble of approval, Lewis was in her room at the Olympic Village, distraught."She was crying her eyes out," van Commenee said. I think she didn't do herself justice."It has been a huge commitment for her over the last year, in terms of her personal life, her finances, and her little daughter She didn't get anything back from it So we will have to sit down and consider the situation.