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Question: How can you be sure in advance whether an event is good value for money? Answer: when it features no fewer than three World Record holders.

This finale of the London Business Forum season was headlined by Sir Steve Redgrave, the most successful Olympian of all time, with five gold medals at successive Games. He wanted to persuade us that our dreams were achievable with the right planning, dedication and team spirit. But the most spectacular part of the show - as Redgrave himself acknowledged - belonged to Americans Jon Wee and Owen Morse. Known collectively as "The Passing Zone", these masters of extreme juggling hold five Guinness World Records for various feats of dexterity. They wanted to illustrate the benefits of planning, dedication and team spirit by throwing knives and chainsaws at one other.

Sir Steve's story is one that covers the entire history of rowing as a modern sport. As the title of his biography, A Golden Age, suggests, his was an era in which rowing found its professionalism, raised its profile and became a very serious business. When he started rowing competitively in the 1970s, people didn't even keep written training schedules, he pointed out. When you turned up for training in the morning, "the coach might say: we'll do some 500m pieces today or work on some endurance." Everything was ad hoc and based largely on gut-instinct.

"Now, it's planned out almost for a whole Olympiad," Sir Steve said. So, for example, when he rowed in the coxless pairs event at the Barcelona Olympics, he and his team planned every tiny step towards ultimate victory by working backwards from the day of the final through the qualifications, venue-acclimatisation, altitude training, winter training and numerous regattas.

They also calculated in advance how fast Sir Steve and team-mate Matthew Pinsent would have to row, by extrapolating the performance improvements of winning teams at previous Games. This was a technique pioneered by a US swimmer called John Naber, after he missed the chance to compete in the 4x100m medley relay at the Munich Olympics in 1972. (Thanks in part to his analytical innovations, he won four gold medals just four years later.)

This training methodology had a huge impact on the training regimes of many sports, Sir Steve explained. In rowing it meant that, for every training session, the team would work to a percentage of their "gold-time". For example, they might row for 20km continuously at a "low level" of 75-80%, holding their heart rates somewhere between 120 and 140 beats per minute. Then, he said, "we'd come off the water, have some fluid intake, have a bit of a rest, sometimes a bit of food, and then move into the next session about two hours later. That would be slightly less in distance, somewhere between 16 and 20km, but the intensity would be up... somewhere between 130 and 160 beats per minute." The second session would consist of four or five segments in which the team built up to their race pace.

"We used to do that seven days a week," Sir Steve sighed. "It's not glamorous - you could programme a robot to do all the training [but] at the elite level, the mental side is what counts."

Training in this way is not simply a matter of "doing your best" but of working methodically towards a specific target. Nevertheless, it can only succeed with the support and dedication of a huge team. "At beginning of my career, I always thought it was about the athlete, the individual," Sir Steve said. "People were telling me that I had the potential to become world champion and I believed it. I thought my name was engraved on the trophy. All I had to do was bide my time and one day it would happen. But it doesn't work that way. You have to make it happen." In the end, he said, the support of 162 people was essential.

Sir Steve's speech ended with a Q&A session, during which he was asked to give us a progress report on the "Sporting Giants" scheme organised by UK Sport to find Olympians of the future. "We thought we'd get about 500 applicants for that, but we had nearly 4,000," Sir Steve said. "We thought maybe one or two people would have a chance of getting to the Games in 2012 [but] the standard of people involved was absolutely huge. There are 58 people who have been selected - some in rowing, some in handball, some in volleyball. And there are six people who didn't fit the criteria of those three sports but who have been moved into canoeing and cycling. A lot of those athletes have got chances of being part of 2012 and some, I think, of medals. It just shows you what talent is walking around the streets."

We also got some valuable advice from Sir Steve on how to deal with failure. In essence, you simply have to "use it as a positive rather than a negative," he said. "Matthew [Pinsent] and I went through five years without being beaten in any category of boat... We'd come back from international regattas and assess how we did and talk about every detail. We'd win a race but come back disappointed because we could have done better. We mentally tuned ourselves to say: 'Let's treat that as a loss.'"

The reverse of this situation is allowing complacency to set in after a string of victories. Sir Steve recalled that in one season he and Matthew Pinsent occasionally hid from their coach behind an island on the Thames in order to do less work. They only narrowly won their next World Championship and, after crossing the line, Pinsent's first words were: "We're never hiding behind that island again!"

Over the 10 years the pair rowed together, it was their losses that made the biggest difference to their overall performance, Sir Steve said. "When you lose a race... the motivation going into the next training period is second to none. In 2000, we only lost one race - the last race before the Olympic Games. So our training from there to the Olympics was fantastic. Everyone thought: 'They've lost that race, so perhaps we can beat them.' So it upped the game of everybody."

A much more serious setback occurred in 1997, when Sir Steve was diagnosed with diabetes, just before the British rowing team were due to leave for a training camp in South Africa. "I really struggled - my performance was really non-existent," he recalled. "There were 16 of us and I would come in half an hour behind everyone else after three hours of cycling." The way he got through this crisis was by telling himself: "'I can complete this stroke and then I'm going to stop. I can do that one, I can do the next one.' That's how I'd get through each session." The benefit of pushing himself like this was that his recovery, once the symptoms of his diabetes were under control, was much faster. "My overall performance was poor, but when I started to get better I was able to perform at almost my best a lot quicker than if I'd sat on my arse."

When the Q&A had finished, the tone of the event changed dramatically as The Passing Zone took the stage. "While we could stand here and talk about teamwork, it's much more fun to show you," said Wee. And with that he and Morse proceeded to juggle clubs, bowling balls, rings, knives and various other objects in highly complex patterns. As they put it: "Risking serious injury for your amusement." The skill on display was incredible, but occasionally an item would drop to the stage, and it seemed for a while as if the pair's jet-lag was going to put someone in danger.

It was at this point that a true LBF hero emerged - a member of the audience by the name of Richard, who was dragged on stage in his suit, tie and brogues to have sharp sickles juggled inches from his face while balancing a spinning ball on his head and two plates on either hand. The burst of applause he received was even more thunderous than the one that occurred a few minutes later, when The Passing Zone donned leotards to juggle a pair of chainsaws while dancing a ballet. It was with a sigh of relief that the LBF concluded its 2007-08 season, and managed to avoid its first fatality for another year.