EXCLUSIVE
From winning Olympic gold, to working at Rolls Royce, to now competing in $1million sailing races - Matt Gotrel has had quite the career so far.
Gotrel jumped onto a Zoom call with talkSPORT from his home in Barcelona, where he has just relocated to with his family.
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The 35-year-old has moved there to be closer to the teammates for SailGP and Americas Cup preparations.
He has packed in plenty to his career already and has plenty of anecdotes to tell.
Sailing was his first love, having been dragged into that world by his father and grandfather as a child.
Gotrel initially joined the British sailing team in 2007, before the Beijing Olympics, and crossed paths with Sir Ben Ainslie there - who would become his boss more than a decade later.
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Ainslie stepped down as Britain’s SailGP driver in January, being replaced by another Olympic legend in Giles Scott, but is still heavily involved in the team.
Sailing, though, did not provide him with the opportunities to go to the Olympics, it was actually rowing.
He told talkSPORT: “When we were sailing in those early days, they used to do fitness tests on the rowing machines.
“I remember the physiologist at the time always said to me, ‘Oh, if you ever stop sailing, you'd probably make quite a good rower’ just for my size.
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“I kind of went to university, obviously wanting to get a degree but also wanting to try something new.
“I remember walking into the bazaar with all the sports clubs at uni, and I think I took two steps in before this 6ft 5in guy put his arm around me and said, ‘you're coming rowing’.
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So by that point I didn't really have a choice.”
His talent was quickly spotted at Loughborough University and he was put on a talent pathway scheme.
London 2012 came and went, and he was in the right place at the right time to be on the Rio 2016 cycle.
“There were a few guys that had left and they were looking for the next group of athletes to come into the senior men's team and I was in the right place at the right time.
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“I'd had a good summer and I was given a shot to join the senior men's team, so I went straight from university to rowing full time under what was Jurgen Grobler’s programme.”
Grobler was the famed British rowing coach who helped win gold medals at Olympics from 1996 all the way to 2016. His programmes were known to be particularly gruelling and brutal.
Gotrel won gold in Rio in the men’s eight and was then at a crossroads of his career. Do it all again or try and get another job?
He continued: “It was a tough one. So I only started rowing when I was 21 and six or seven years later I was on the start line in Rio.
“I remember one of our last camps before we went to Rio, I sat with a few of the older guys who had kind of been there and done it and they were saying ‘what are you gonna do if you win?’
“I remember them saying, if you win, you can get out like you've done it. That's it. There's not much more in this sport that they can offer you.
“And these are guys who had got one gold medal, two gold medals, and I was like, Wow, that's quite a lot.
“I did come back to training after for a bit a And I think that's kind of when I realised that I didn't quite have the same hunger and I needed to potentially find something else.
“I did have a degree amidst all the rowing that had happened. I was lucky enough that actually, one of the colleagues that I rode with back at my club in Nottingham, he was quite high up in Rolls Royce and said we've got this opportunity open for new engineers.”
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That degree was in engineering and he went on to be a systems tester for Rolls Royce, but the call to get back into sport didn’t take long.
“Then it was kind of 10 months into that that I got a phone call from some of the guys that I used to sail with and said we’re setting up a British team for this event called Sail GP and we need some grinders [a very physical position within the F50 boats].
“I jumped at the chance and did have to put on 10kg to do it though, which I did in eight weeks.
“I just jumped into that and loved every second of it, and it was kind of all very new, but the sailing kind of mindset and I knew kind of what was going on.”
He competed in the inaugural SailGP series in 2019 and has not looked back. SailGP sees teams compete in Grand Prixs around the world in F50 foiling catamarans.
Season Four will see the winner of the Grand Final taking home $2m in prize money, with it's next stop being Christchurch in New Zealand before going to Bermuda, Halifax, New York and then finishing the calendar in San Francisco.
And it was in New Zealand where he fell overboard as the F50 darted over the water, dragging him underneath along for the ride given he was tethered to the boat.
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"I was a little bit battered and bruised," he said at the time, insisting it looked worse on camera.
Of course, being the competitor he is, the only thing on his mind was finishing the race.