Since winning gold in August, Imogen Grant has just started her first foundation year placement, 20 years after deciding to pursue a medical career. When I pick up the phone to talk to her, she is in the middle of a busy shift on the ward. Not wasting any time, we get straight into the questions.

“One of my supervisors actually put in my supervision report that my work improved when I was ill and wasn’t able to row”

Grant had never tried rowing before arriving at Cambridge in 2016, but quickly fell in love with the sport. For a large chunk of her rowing career, balancing both sporting and academic commitments was a difficult task. But, according to Grant, it was also essential. “If you want it enough, you’ll find a way. And that’s kind of brutally simple,” she tells me. “I’ve always been adamant that this is what makes me like a whole person, like having this balance and having that variety of what I do every single day.”

A mixture of passion, discipline, and “a little bit of spite” kept Grant going throughout her degree. She recalls a moment in her first year: “One of my supervisors actually put in my supervision report that my work improved when I was ill and wasn’t able to row, which has always really stuck with me as a reason to keep doing it and prove that I could do both, and that I could excel at both.”

“We knew better than anyone that coming in with good performances doesn’t guarantee you a medal.”

It seems that being a rower has actually made Grant a better medic. She tells me “how important recovery is” in both contexts. “You know, if I’m standing on a medical ward and I’m feeling like I’m nodding off or zoning out or struggling, [it’s] actually recognising that in myself and [listening to] the athlete brain going ‘I’m not actually getting anything out of this right now, I need to either figure out a way to make it useful, or I should actually be focusing on recovering.’”

Having come fourth in the Tokyo Olympics (by a margin of 0.01 seconds), Grant and her partner Emily Craig took nothing for granted in the buildup to the final. “We’d gone into the games as the favourite, being unbeaten, but we knew better than anyone that coming in with good performances doesn’t guarantee you a medal.”

She tells me that in the final race “we were so internal and so process driven …keeping ourselves focused on exactly what we wanted to do, rather than focusing on the enormity of what we were trying to achieve.” I ask her how it felt to cross the finish line. “The first emotion I felt was disbelief … that disbelief of ‘oh my goodness, we’ve actually done this thing, and it’s actually a massive deal.’”

It’s a lesson that can be applied to sport, academia and beyond. Rowing is a sport that depends on the natural environment, and over the last few years, Grant has become an advocate for sustainability. She tells me that “being an elite athlete, and seeing what someone can achieve if they put their mind to achieving one goal, it just puts into perspective what we can achieve if collectively, we focused on something like that, in the same way.”