Not Much Fits

Before she was a world champion under-23 rower, Vicky Thornley was a model. And before that she was a national class showjumper. No wonder, then, that the 6ft 3in blonde from Wrexham has become a totem for the new Tall and Talented talent identification scheme launched by UK Sport last month.

“You can do a lot in a short space of time if you put your mind to it,” she says. Thornley is the most successful product of the original Sporting Giants scheme set up two years ago by UK Sport to recruit talent to height-specific sports. She might have become part of the GB team for handball or volleyball. Instead, her profile matched the demands of rowing’s World Class Start programme, sponsored by Siemens, and she soon found herself balancing precariously and often unsuccessfully in a single scull.

“I seemed to spend my whole time falling in and it was November so the water wasn’t warm,” she says. “But I’d read Steve Redgrave’s autobiography and Matt Pinsent’s to find out what they did day to day so I knew how tough it would be. It’s about what I expected.”

Less expected was the moment last summer when Thornley, seven crewmates and a cox sat on the starting line for the final of the under-23 world championships with a realistic chance of becoming the first British women’s VIII to win a world title. Thornley tried not to think of the strange route that had taken her to the biggest day of her life or of the consequences of victory or defeat. She just rowed for her life.

“We had two days after the heats to hang around for the final and I had a lot of time to think about what had happened to me and what it would be like to win,” she says. “I tried just to think of the processes. I can’t remember the race at all. I knew I’d gone places I’d never been before, pushed myself harder than I ever have done before and it was good to find that out about yourself. We just rowed the perfect race.”

Thornley can remember the whole process of selection for the Sporting Giants quite clearly. The ergo tests, the arm pulls and the leg presses, all monitored for scientific analysis. What she remembers best, though, is feeling normal, normally tall. “I’d never been in a room with so many tall people,” she says. “It was good to be normal. Because I’m around people who are tall I don’t feel different any more and that’s given me a lot of confidence about my height.

“I’m just over six feet three now and I was tall even at 14 so I always felt out of place and a bit gangly. People say nasty things at school and in the showjumping world I always stood out. On the ponies I had to kick my legs back so I didn’t hit the poles with my feet.”

Horses were so clearly Thornley’s passion that her parents moved to a farm near Wrexham to start a stables. Her original pony, Marquis, now 31, still lives in the field there and, when rowing commitments allow, Thornley will return to the sport at which she was talented enough to compete for Wales. After A-levels came a gap year and a chance to pursue a career as a model. In London, they said she was too tall — “I was six feet seven in heels, something ridiculous, and nothing fitted” — so she did some work in Manchester for a year before heading back to London to study business management at City University.

“I was a bit in limbo,” she admits. “I didn’t really know what to do next. Studying wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to do. My parents saw an advertisement for the Sporting Giants programme in the paper and a friend heard it on the radio, so I signed up, not knowing what to expect.”

She considers whether any skills are transferable to rowing from showjumping or even the catwalk. “I was nervous about the pain in rowing, but more about messing up and letting people down,” she says. “Handling the nerves helps and I had to make sacrifices in showjumping just as I’ve had to do in rowing. But with rowing I had to become an elite athlete almost overnight.”

Thornley now trains at the University of Bath and, to keep her mind agile, studies French at evening class. Her coach, Paul Stannard, exhorts her to put on more weight, but her physique still seems more suited to the catwalk than the ergo.

Her body is hurrying to catch up with the changes in her life. “If someone had said to me two years ago, ‘Vicky, you’re going win a gold medal in a rowing boat’, I wouldn’t have believed them. It’s happened so fast. It’s changed my life. In a way, I don’t believe what’s happened. It’s been very emotional.

“Now I’ve got to make the step into the senior team for next year because, like everyone, London 2012 is my dream.” It will be a big jump. Vicky Thornley is quite used to those.