Olympic champion rower’s philosophy that led to successful turnaround

Leander Rowing Club Book Talk
Cath Bishop — The Long Win
Leander Club, Henley
Wednesday, November 19

ON Wednesday, Rowing Olympian Cath Bishop, author of the book The Long Win, of which the second edition was recently published, visited Leander Club to talk about her book. Among the many attendants were two previous interviewees at the Leander Library Rowing Book Talks, Tim Crooks and Greg Searle. Tim and Cath exchanged books and autographed each other’s copies.

Cath has rowed in three Olympic Games. She initially retired from rowing after two Olympics but decided to make a comeback two years later, as she felt that she had not yet reached her own true potential. After returning, she was initially “binned” from the rowing squad for not sculling fast enough, but four months later became World Champion rowing in the coxless pair, clearly showing that the right performance indicators had not been used for selection.

She also decided that her third Olympic cycle would need to bring her an experience beyond the potential result of winning, so that it would add to her life as a whole. She won a silver medal at the Athens Olympics in 2004, an amazing result and a feeling that she was now satisfied with what she had achieved for herself.

She had used a more holistic approach in developing performance rather than focusing on the win alone, which became her “long win” philosophy, as described in her book.

After rowing, she worked at the Foreign Office as a negotiator in the former Yugoslavia and in Basra, Iraq where her training as an elite athlete had put her in a good position to deal with the extreme situations she encountered there. Cath had worked there approximately 10 years when she was invited to give a presentation on the “long win” philosophy and this was received so well that she wrote her book and started her own business as a business coach.

The book is structured in two parts. The first part outlines how many people — and businesses — operate on the basis of achieving short-term winning results and that this is not always successful. The second part covers the holistic long win approach, how we are still aiming to get the best possible business results, but we now include the experience individuals have as one of the metrics. Once people are heard and listened to, the winning results follow automatically.

This book talk was part of series four of the Leander Library Rowing Book Talks. Cath Bishop is a trustee and former chair of Love Rowing, the charitable foundation for British Rowing and the proceeds from this talk were split between Love Rowing and the Leander Trust.

During this talk, 14 copies of the book were sold, the full proceeds of which were kindly donated by Cath. For more information on the Leander Rowing Club Book Talks series, email librarian@leandertrust.org

Irene Hewlett