Earlier today the news came that British oarsman Andy Holmes, who was born on 15 October 1959, died last night, 24 October, age 51. It was reported last Monday that he was taken ill of what the doctors thought was a bacterial infection called the Weil’s disease. Holmes began to row when he was 12, and won the Thames Challenge Cup at the age of 19. At the 1984 Olympic Games, he won the gold medal in the coxed four, together with Steve Redgrave, Richard Budgett, Martin Cross, and cox Adrian Ellison. Holmes and Redgrave also took the gold in the coxless pair and the bronze in the coxed pair at the Seoul Olympic Games in 1988.

Read Rachel Quarrell’s article in today’s The Daily Telegraph by clicking here.

Find The Daily Telegraph’s obituary here.

Read Peter Nichols’s obituary published in The Guardian, here.

Martin Cross, Holmes’s former team mate, remembers him in The Guardian, here.

Here is a short clip from Andy Holmes’s and Steve Redgrave’s race in the Seoul Olympic Games, final coxless pair with 1,000 metres to go:

Click here to read what British Rowing is saying about Leptospirosis or Weil’s Disease.