Monsters wanted

Mohamad Sbihi is 6ft 8in tall. If weighed in stones, he is probably comparable to a decent-sized quarry. Unsurprisingly, he's known as Big Moe.

Six years ago, when he was 15, coaches from GB Rowing's World Class Start programme visited his school in Surbiton, spotted his size and physiological prowess and convinced the Arsenal fan he could star somewhere other than Highbury.

"We had a special PE lesson and they asked all the tall guys to attend. I wasn't too excited - I wanted to play football - but I did the tests and found I could be good at rowing," he told me.

"I was shocked but excited and a couple of years down the line I started to realise my potential."

All sorts of sports have been jumping on the bandwagon in the run-up to the London Olympics, through talent identification initiatives like Sporting Giants, Pitch2Podium and Girls4Gold.

But GB Rowing is well ahead of the curve - its programme was in place before the Athens Olympics of 2004, and it is really starting to bear fruit now.

Fifteen members of the squad for the World Cup regatta in Banyoles three weeks ago, came through the programme, including all four the members of the men's quadruple scull, who gave Olympic champions Poland a real battle before being forced to accept a silver medal.

Two of the leading women, Olympic medallists Annabel Vernon and Anna Bebington, were both graduates of World Class Start in its early stages.

Steve Gunn is in charge of "looking for highly motivated monsters" and he knows just what it takes to be an Olympic champion.

Gunn coached the Searle brothers (and their cox Garry Herbert) to gold in Barcelona in 1992 and was chief coach for New Zealand, when single sculler Rob Waddell won his country's only gold in Sydney.

Waddell has one of the highest VO2 max intake levels ever tested, meaning he is able to take and use more oxygen from his blood. He still holds the world record over 2000m on the indoor rowing machine, at 5 min 36.6 sec.

"We're looking for tall people - about 5ft 11in for women and 6ft 3in for men. We like them to have arms longer than their height, they should be naturally very strong and either very fit or able to react well to training," Gunn explains.

Once talent has been identified, World Class Starters are spread among 11 full-time coaches at eight centres around the country. They attend seven training camps a year in Nottingham, where their progress is tested.

For Gunn, the biggest challenge at this stage is tailoring training to suit these extreme candidates.

"Some of the things are already Olympic standard - they may have Olympic standard quads but couch potato abs," he says.

"In a normal club programme they could get injured, or be clumsy and lose interest."

It's not just about the size of the engine, of course. Rowing is still a very technical sport, even if many of the skills can be learnt rather than being down to natural ability.

Gunn reckons it takes six years to take someone who has never rowed before and turn him or her into an international rower.

"If my technique's not there I'm deadweight in the water, no matter how good my physiology is," says Moe.

For much of the programme, WCS athletes are still amateur. Some training may be subsidised but it is not until they are singled out as having medal potential that any funding kicks in.

And cash is a hot topic for many people when it comes to rowing. Those cut-glass accents and stripey blazers put a lot of people off even thinking about taking up the sport.

I was particularly keen to talk to Moe because he seems a long way from the public perception of a rower. Rather than Eton and Oxford he went to state-funded Hollyfield School and St Mary's College, Twickenham.

And he's a practising Muslim with family in Morocco, taking part in a sport that is almost exclusively white.

"Wherever you go there are going to be potential barriers and I deal with them by ignoring them," he says.

"You're told about the perception of what it's going to be like so you can't help but notice.

"But you see in other sports that people are breaking down the image barriers and that's what's going on now - rowing is totally different to what it was 10 or 20 years ago."

Gunn says the opportunity to alter rowing's demographic is a nice one but coincidental.

A former window-cleaner from Scarborough is starting to make an impact on the lightweight squad while a farmer from Orkney is training at the WCS centre at Reading University.

"Our aim is to add a different talent stream, to reach out to people who otherwise wouldn't have a chance, either because they never thought of rowing or because their situation in a club is not strong enough," Gunn explains.

"Moe is an example of someone who never thought of rowing until we raided his school and did tests."

When he was first asked to try his hand at rowing, Moe admits, he knew about Steve Redgrave and Matthew Pinsent, Oxford and Cambridge, but not much else.

Now, after winning medals aplenty at U23 level and still only 21, he us in his first year in the senior squad, towering above the five seat in the GB men's eight.

Moe describes the silver medal his crew won in the opening World Cup event of the season as "the first step on the long road to 2012" and adds: "The whole idea of getting into the sport was the prospect of being a 2012 athlete."

Gunn says: We're starting to make an impact and to add value to the team.

"We were the top rowing nation at the Olympics and this gives us an edge to stay at the top."