PARIS – Helen Glover is not wrong when she insists that “everyone had those weird lockdown projects”.

But what’s different about Glover is that while some people learned a new language or took up crochet, she set about becoming an Olympic athlete again.

The rower, who will carry the flag for Team GB at Friday’s opening ceremony, retired from the sport after her second gold medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics. She gave birth to her first child Logan in 2018, and twins Kit and Bo in January 2020.

“After Rio, I had a huge sense of satisfaction around my rowing career and I just felt like there was nothing left to achieve,” Glover, now 38, tells i.

“I had done everything I could have wanted to do and then done it again. I felt a lot of satisfaction around that. But I still found it hard, like a lot of athletes leaving sport, unless you have something directly to go into.

“I was drifting a little bit. I was okay, I was fine. I did miss sport but I also felt a lot of the freedom.

“But I definitely wasn’t considering going back or thinking about going back. It was definitely lockdown – and having kids – that changed me and brought that on.”

It started off as just getting on the rowing machine in the house while her twins slept, but then she “started to see scores that were actually quite reasonable” and began to wonder if Tokyo 2020 might just be a possibility.

While delaying the Games by a year – it took place in 2021 – caused massive upheaval for thousands of people, it was perfect timing for Glover.

She made history there as the first mother to row for Great Britain. Although she finished fourth, she had achieved her goal of proving to her daughter that she could, and should, try to do anything. But it still left her wanting more. She took a year off and then came back for a second time. Now Paris is all about medals.

“I want to be the athlete I was,” says Glover, who previously competed in the women’s pair but now sits in the bow seat of the four.

“I’m getting PBs [personal bests] on things and in the gym, I’m lifting more on some of the lifts than I ever have done before and all my erg [rowing machine] scores are as good as they ever have been.

“If those things weren’t there, I definitely would start to doubt myself and I would start to doubt my position and I started to think, ‘Hang on, this seat in the boat should belong to someone else.’

“But actually seeing that I’m in as good a shape as I have been when I won Olympic gold, it justifies me being there.”

One might expect Glover has had to make concessions about time spent with her children to cope with rowing’s punishing training schedule – but not so.

Head of women’s rowing Andy Randell, high performance coach James Harris, and weights coach Ben Sheath have helped build a unique training schedule that allows her to leave at 3pm, a non-negotiable end to her GB day.

“I can do the school run, I can do pick up then I can go to swimming and pick up from gymnastics,” Glover says.

“Yeah, it means I miss out on my break between sessions two and three, and yeah, it means I’m training on my own in the gym, but it’s just the way we make it work, and it’s been working.”

Undeniably so. The women’s four won the European Championships in April and World Cup gold in Varese and Lucerne this year. They are odds-on favourites to win gold, which would make Glover only the third British woman in history to win three Olympic gold medals, and only the second to do so across three different Games.

It is an achievement that would mean all the more for the huge community of parents who have rallied around her comeback.

“I never personally feel like a role model or an inspiration of any kind,” Glover says. “But then parents go, ‘This is really cool and it’s made me put my running shoes back on.’

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“There was one woman who got in touch saying it had made her get back into pottery because she loved it before having her kids. That was amazing.

“And then there was an other element of the parenthood community, which was like, ‘I want my kids to see this, I want my boss to see this.’

“That is the most humbling overwhelming side effect of what I’ve done. It wasn’t the reason I’ve done it. But it’s the proudest outcome I have of it all is that you can make a difference to people’s lives.

“And I sometimes think I’d love these people to be a fly on the wall and watch me muddle through the total mess of almost everything that I do, and somehow getting away with it half the time.

“Because I think the message is that it isn’t easy, [but] it isn’t something that you have to be superhuman to do, and it’s not something you can do perfectly. I really don’t think you can do it perfectly.

“But it’s really exciting what you can achieve by being imperfect.”

There are few things more perfect than a gold medal. Not bad for a weird lockdown project.

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