After missing Olympic qualification for Paris, 2025 became the year Finn Hamill came into his own. The 23-year-old New Zealander claimed medals across the World Cup circuit, a Henley title, and his first World Championship start in the men’s double. For an athlete once on the fringes of the national program, it marked a decisive turn from promise to presence.

Photo Finn Hamill strokes the NZL02 CM2x at the 2024 World Rowing Coastal Championships.

The story of how Hamill arrived here begins with his family and the sea.

To understand why Finn Hamill insists on doing things his way, you need the boat, the brothers, and the weight his father carries. The Hamill family have, on and off, lived aboard Javelot, a 43-foot Fountaine Pajot catamaran and their first long passage took them from New Zealand to Tonga.

Then the family took an emotional voyage, retracing the last journey of Finn’s uncle, Kerry, who was captured by the Khmer Rouge in 1978 after a storm blew his yacht, Foxy Lady, into Cambodian waters. Canadian crewmate Stuart Glass was killed at sea; Kerry and Briton John Dawson Dewhirst were taken to S-21 Tuol Sleng prison, tortured, forced to sign false confessions, and later murdered. Months after the family finally learned what had happened, Finn’s uncle John took his own life.

In 2009, Finn’s father, Rob, testified in a Cambodian court at the trial of Kaing Guek Eav, known as Duch, the commander of S-21. Rob said: “It is my conviction that what happened to John is directly linked to Kerry’s death at S-21.” He later explained why he and his wife, Rachel, chose a life afloat and home schooling for their children: “All you can do is live the life they might have otherwise had. A life of adventure.”

Finn has grown into that sentence. “It’s important to be open and discuss these things,” he says. “Dad talked about it but being quite young you don’t fully comprehend what actually was going on and what had happened.” Visiting Cambodia and seeing the prison helped. “It’s super sad.”

His schooling was unconventional. “I got expelled from home school because I wouldn’t listen,” he says. “I was upset about it. Mum told me. I remember her [saying] if I wouldn’t pull my head in she was going to send me to school. I didn’t believe her. There must have been a last straw, and I was sent off to school.”

Finn started at “a very small country school where everyone knew everyone,” then moved to St John’s College in Hamilton. Between ages 12 and 13 he spent another full year outside mainstream education, living aboard.

“When I came back to sit my high school starter exam – to see where you’re at and which class you’ll go in – I ended up scoring super high on everything and I was put in the top classes.”

People often question home schooling, he says. “You might not be as book smart, perhaps, but in other ways, and in a general sense as a person, you are a little bit more developed – just from being out in the real world and getting a lot of life experience at a young age.”

Adventure has edges. A free-diving blackout nearly cost Finn his life. “If Dad hadn’t spotted me, I might have sunk back down, too deep to be recovered,” he says. “Dad’s lost two brothers: imagine what it would be like to lose a son.”

“The last legit memory I know was real was when I looked up and thought, ‘that’s a long way and I really need to breathe’. After that it all gets daydreamy.” He came to on the surface, gasping and confused. It was scary, and it landed him in the hospital on oxygen, but he made a full recovery.

Walking His Own Path

The Olympic year required a different kind of courage. Then aged 22, Finn was game to test himself and wanted to emulate his father by racing the New Zealand lightweight men’s double in Paris, the last Games to feature lightweights. “That was a big driver of it,” he says. “I thought it would be cool. I was going to do the same event as Dad did, and it was going to be at the last ever Olympics with lightweights.”

New Zealand’s lightweight double finished ninth at the 2023 World Championships, two places shy of an Olympic spot. Finn had been reserve and raced the lightweight single. On returning home he became sick and lost his place on the team.

New Zealand chose not to send any lightweights to the Final Olympic Qualification Regatta. “We tried to [change their minds] but we got stonewalled. We even offered for them to just sign the paper, enter us, and we’ll do the rest, we don’t even need to be part of the team, we’ll go and do it ourselves. But nah.”

He watched Paris. “It was frustrating. The Irish [Paul O’Donovan and Fintan McCarthy] were pretty untouchable. If we had our day I think we could have been in the medals: but who knows, it’s all speculation.” The lingering feeling is raw. “Missing out on the lightweight double for Paris took a long time to get over. In fact it still angers me, and when I think about it I get emotional.”

That independence others sometimes read as stubbornness hardened into a plan. “Something I struggled with early on was being part of the system. I know I was labelled as difficult to manage. I like to do things my own way. That probably didn’t do me many favours. A lot of that probably comes from the fact that I’ve been raised in a family where we’ve been a little bit more – well, doing different stuff.”

So he asked to train differently. “We do a lot of work in singles and not in the double together.” It is unusual in New Zealand. “I drove it. Gary [Roberts, the coach] was real good about it this year. I’ve had three years of being on the outskirts but sneaking into the team: always coming in from the outside. I’d do my own training and beat a lot of people at nationals, then I’d come into the team, follow the team programme and get slower. I put that across. It’s certainly not a common thing [individualised training] and they [Rowing New Zealand] haven’t been good at doing it in the past, but I knew it had to be that way, or it wasn’t going to work.”

Durability is his weakness and his study project. “I don’t do super well on the huge volume. I overtrain easily. I get sick,” he says. “It’s about trying to find a consistent level of training that’s manageable. We did pretty well this year, but after our results this week that has been a point for discussion.”

Relations with the federation have thawed. “I’ve definitely got my opinions and chips-on-shoulders when it comes to Rowing New Zealand, but from that side of things it’s been a good year this year. We’ve found a middle ground, of sorts, and I appreciate that.”

Becoming One of the Best

Once the structure changed, the results followed. He and Ben Mason began the year with modest expectations. “When we first got into the double I was like, ‘We’ll be lucky to win the B-final: we’re new and it’s a hard field’. So when we medalled at the World Cup – holy shit!”

A bronze in Varese, a silver in Lucerne, and an audacious Henley run in the single took him from promising to proven. In the Diamonds he beat Paris medallist Simon van Dorp and the reigning Olympic champion Olli Zeidler. He closed his regatta with his first red box in the Double Challenge Sculls. When asked if those were the best races he has ever raced, he doesn’t overcomplicate it. “It’d have to be,” he says. “Winning the double, and those races in the single were insane.”

He felt primed for worlds. “Right here and now, I feel like I’m in the best condition of the year. We had a proper peak for the race. I’d argue Ben would’ve been the same had he not got sick.”

In Shanghai they chased a familiar rhythm and never quite caught it. “I don’t know, we just didn’t fire,” Finn says. Illness, heat, and a washy course added noise. “Ben got sick just before we left New Zealand. He was still under the weather when we got on the plane, the journey set him back. A 12-hour flight, not getting the best sleep, and the heat probably wasn’t helpful either.”

Technically, he was uncomfortable. “Rowing in that washy water was uncomfortable. We toyed with the boat setup every session: we never got it right. Before the heat we reset everything to how it was in Lucerne because we knew that had worked.”

The semifinal delay? “You just deal with it. We were one of only three or four nations that voted to carry on and race it that afternoon, but the majority wanted to race the next day.” In that race, New Zealand were fourth, two seconds behind Switzerland. “The first thousand was all good, but the Swiss moved on us in the third 500. At that moment I was feeling calm and physically all good. Sweet, we’ll sprint back through them at the end: but we couldn’t get it on. Ben struggled at the end of that race.”

It left them second in the B-final, off the podium for the first time all year. The disappointment is honest, but so is the trajectory. “So many little things; so many what-ifs. Who knows? The crux of it is that we never got back on the rhythm we had at the World Cups – that easy feeling, especially in the second thousand when we’d step on.”

Yet, the season’s arc still points one way. He imposed himself in two disciplines, proved he can win in a crew boat, and showed he can duel giants alone, as demonstrated last month in Boston, where he successfully defended his men’s single title at the Head of the Charles, widely regarded as one of the most exciting and individually demanding events in rowing. 

Should Finn continue to make everything look easy and controlled by doing it his way, then a stellar career filled with multiple World Championship and Olympic medals awaits.

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