Going for Gold

In between being a three-times Olympic gold-medal winner and Royal Navy officer, Pete Reed is a keen photographer. Geoff Harris catches up with him for a chat

- Geoff Harris

Pete Reed is a man with many strings to his bow, the most famous being the gold medal he won for rowing in the Men’s Eight at the Rio 2016 Olympics. He is also a serving officer in the Royal Navy, and somebody who counts photography as one of his biggest interests – particularly since he discovered the Fujifilm X-series of mirrorless cameras.

‘I’d been to some nice places with the Navy, and always fancied having some photographic memories, so I first bought a point-and-shoot compact back in 1999,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t until I started going abroad with the GB Rowing Team that I decided I wanted to take photography more seriously. So in 2006, I bought a Nikon D80 and kit zoom lens for about £400 and learned how to use it by forcing myself to shoot in manual mode. I read everything I could about photography and caught the bug.

Pete reckons he’s always been quite a disciplined person – something that was also drilled into him during his training as a Navy officer, and, of course, as a world class sportsman. ‘I enjoyed photography, so it felt more like playing than learning,’ he says. But even a polymath like Pete admits he struggled at the beginning.