In 2003, a German television crew approached 41-year-old Birgit Fischer to shoot for a documentary. She had retired as a legendary canoeist with 10 medals in Olympics and 38 in World championships.
The film required her to enact rowing.
Before the shoot was over, she decided acting alone would not do.
She wanted the real thing.
So, a year later, she saw herself, along with her three German team-mates, trailing the Hungarians in the final of the women’s K-4 500m, with just metres away from the finishing line at the Hellinikon Olympic Canoe/Kayak Salome Centre.
Powered by Fischer’s seemingly inexhaustible reserves of energy, Germany beat Hungary by 0.2 second.
And she got her eighth Olympic gold.
It was for that one more gold that she trained so hard for about a year, after shooting for that documentary.
And it was 24 years earlier that she had won her maiden Olympic gold, at Moscow, in the K-1 500m.
If she had, at 18, become the youngest to win an Olympic gold in canoeing in 1984, she became the oldest in Athens, at 42.
That is one record that will take some beating.
Between Moscow to Athens, she was quite in a class of her own.
She would have been decorated even more if she was not forced to miss the Los Angeles Olympics because of the Eastern Bloc countries (she was representing East Germany).
Besides her dozen Olympic medals, she also won 38 World championship medals.
She is undoubtedly one of the great sporting legends of our time.
