Former Oxfordshire school boys Ollie Wynne-Griffith and Tom George claimed silver for Great Britain in the men’s pair at Paris 2024 as Croatia pipped them at the post.

The duo pushed hard from the start and held a narrow lead from Romania at halfway.

They looked as if they would hold in a frantic finish, but Martin and Valent Sinkovic of Croatia took gold with a desperate burst to the line to win in six minutes 23.66 seconds – less than half a second in front of the British pair.

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Wynne-Griffith and George went to school together at Radley College in Radley near Abingdon and then studied at Yale and Princeton respectively, before linking up again at Cambridge University where they competed in the Boat Race.

Cheltenham rower George said: “We took 217 perfect strokes and one duff one and that can cost you. I don’t want to watch it back, it will be painful to do so.

“They put the pressure on and the pressure causes you to make a mistake. That’s fine, that’s Olympic racing, and we’re really proud of the way we raced.”

Wynne-Griffith said: “We pushed as hard as we could. We had the perfect race plan up until then.

“I wouldn’t say it was a mistake in terms of, I’ve done something wrong.

“It’s more a case of working so hard, your vision starts to go, your movement patterns start to go.

“Credit to Croatia, they put that amount of speed on, they put the pressure on the boat in the last 200.”

Imogen Grant also celebrated an emotional win in the lightweight women’s double sculls in front of her fiancé and first-ever coach who now applies his trade in Oxfordshire.

Alongside Emily Craig, the pair claimed the seventh gold medal for Team GB on Friday having missed out on a spot on the podium at the Tokyo games by one-hundredth of a second – an agonising moment which Craig has had a picture of on her wall ever since.

(Image: John Walton)

Matthew Griffiths, Grant’s fiance, was one of her first novice rowing coaches at the University of Cambridge where they met around 10 years ago while the Olympian was studying medicine.

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“She accelerated her own career and kind of left me behind there but we stayed together,” he joked ahead of the Games.

He continued on a more serious note: “I’ve seen her entire journey from novice to Olympian.

“It’s also been an immense privilege to be able to see what that journey looks like.

“If you’re doing a medical degree at Cambridge at the same time, it’s quite difficult to do everything well but it’s one of her great strengths.”

He still coaches rowing on a voluntary basis at Upper Thames Rowing Club in Henley and called himself a “rowing nerd”, saying he and Grant “never run out of things to talk about there”.

The rower’s mother, Tracy, set off from the UK with union-flag painted nails and predicted she would be shouting “very loudly” while watching her daughter compete.

Before the Games, Grant said it was going to be “amazing” to have her loved ones watching her compete.

“My parents set up a WhatsApp group called Emily and Imogen in Paris,” she said.

“I know that that invite link has been sent around to a lot of people. It’s really exciting and it’s going to be amazing having everyone there.”