News archive 2004

Double Silver Olympic success

23 Aug 2004, PR 47/04

King’s student, Katherine Grainger, and King’s alumna, Frances Houghton, have scooped silver medals at the Olympic Games in Athens for the women’s coxless pairs and women’s quadruple sculls respectively.

Katherine Grainger, with Cath Bishop, claimed the woman’s pairs silver in dramatic style on Saturday 21 August. The 2003 world champions, trailing in fourth place for much of the race, made a late surge to pip Belarus for second.

They finished in seven minutes 8.66 seconds, just 1.20 seconds ahead of the eventual bronze medallists. The gold medal went to defending champions Romania.

‘One of the problems was we dropped quite early and in hindsight we should have pushed on with the Romanians in the middle 1,000 metres,’ said Grainger, who becomes the only British woman to win two Olympic rowing medals after landing silver as a member of the quad in Sydney four years ago.

‘It is bitter-sweet not to have won it but you can't be disappointed with a silver medal. We believed in it from the start and I think we have proved our point.’

Katherine is currently studying for a PhD in Law at King’s, researching the subject of homicide.

For Frances Houghton, Great Britain just missed out on the women’s coxless quadruple sculls title as Germany held on to gold on Sunday 22 August.

The team of Alison Mowbray, Debbie Flood, Frances Houghton and Rebecca Romero got to within half a boat of the Germans but left themselves with too much to do. Ukraine took bronze, only half a second ahead of defending world champions Australia.

The Germans have been Olympic champions since the event first entered the Games in Seoul 16 years ago.

Houghton said, ‘The Germans have done it before, so they know what it’s like. For anyone competing at the Olympics, just to win a medal is awesome and when I passed the line I just thought, ‘right, next time I want gold’.’

Frances, a recent graduate (Spanish Studies BA, 2003, and Jelf medallist) also competed in Sydney. She was just 19, and one year into her degree at King’s, when she competed in the double scull event in 2000.

Notes to editors

King's College London
King’s is one of the oldest and largest colleges of the University of London with 13,800 undergraduate students and some 5,300 postgraduates in ten schools of study. The College had 24 of its subject-areas awarded the highest rating of 5* and 5 for research quality, demonstrating excellence at an international level. King’s is in the top group of five universities for research earnings with income from grants and contracts of more than £93 million (2002-2003) and has an annual turnover of £320 million. King’s is a member of the Russell Group, a coalition of the UK’s major research-based universities.



Further information
Melanie Gardner, Senior Public Relations Officer, King’s College London
Tel: 020-7848 3073, email: melanie.gardner@kcl.ac.uk

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