I met Roger Barrow in 2008, shortly after our abysmal single-silver performance in the Beijing Olympics. South African sport was (rightly) doing some soul-searching, and one of those sports, rowing, was about to lose its head coach and director to Great Britain.Roger had ambitions to assume leadership of that sport. He had a vision for taking a sport that had some foundation (we'd won a bronze four years earlier in Athens) and turning it into a world power.Well, as much a world power as our tiny, insignificant funding would allow. You have to remember that rowing is among the most expensive sports to succeed at - it takes costly, hi-tech equipment, huge space, and large teams of people.For comparison, it is the most expensive sport in Great Britain's hugely funded sports system, a cool £33-million over four years. At current exchange rates, that's R143-million a year. Eye-popping stuff. Roger Barrow will not see R143-million in 15 years, let alone one, and so the magnitude of developing a world-class rowing system cannot be underestimated.Roger and I met because at the time, I'd developed a 12-year strategy for SA sport, at the request of the then-minister. That never saw the light of day thanks to Sascoc, but Roger did read it (he has an insatiable appetite for learning, which is part of his genius), and so we met to discuss his own vision and strategy for his sport.He has it all - incredible technical knowledge, combined with a rare ability to think strategically to see the whole picture. The former is relatively common, and many people know "stuff". Roger certainly knew his stuff about rowing. The latter is far less common, and the combination is exceptional. There are not many people who see the whole picture and every single pixel simultaneously, but Roger is one.And finally, he had extraordinary emotional intelligence, the ability to work with a group of competitive, hungry young athletes and both inspire and control their sometimes volatile personalities in extremely demanding situations.It is that combination that helped Roger build a team of coaches, young athletes, sports scientists (the first and only employed sports scientist by a sport in this country, Jimmy Clark) and medical support. The result, spectacularly, was that gold medal in the lightweight fours in London.Roger was not satisfied, however. Every time we spoke, he'd point out three or four challenges before acknowledging success. He was preoccupied with where they should go next, what should be improved, rather than what they had done.That next step was to grow the size of the world-class programme. One gold was great, but it was the only final we reached in London. Roger wanted to leverage that success into the growth of a programme that would get multiple boats into Rio finals.Last week, that happened. Five boats made it to Rio, and every single one of those reached the A final. I cannot overstate how extraordinary that is, on literally 4% of what Great Britain spends.Glory followed on Thursday, when the men's pair won silver. All looked good with four finals on Friday. That day would prove agonising. Two fourth places, and two fifth places is as cruel as sport can be. Four medals were within about 10 seconds, in total, across four events. We got none."Today I learned the raw brutality of the game" is what Roger said to me when we spoke on Friday night.He will take time to reflect because, having climbed to the summit in 2012, he has managed to get five teams within sight of it in 2016. The key word there is "learned" - from the summit, Roger continues to learn. And with a bit of luck, he'll take those lessons forward, and we'll be in seven finals in Tokyo, and get three or four medals.And if Sascoc wishes to learn from Rio, since SA seem likely to fall just short of expectations in Rio, it's that if they could imitate what rowing has done, our medal haul would double. And they could do a lot worse than put Roger in charge, let him build his own organisation of people, and then get out of his way...