Fiona Murtagh’s leap from sweep to sculling has proven restorative. “For the first time in a long time it feels like the sky is the limit,” says the history-making Olympic medallist, whose decision to try the single followed a crushing Games and wholesale changes at Rowing Ireland. “I found my love for the sport again, but in a completely different way.”
“It came at an important time; I needed that change,” says the Galway native. “People ask me, ‘What if you’d found the single sooner?’ No. I found it at the time I needed to find it. I wasn’t ready before.”
One of four siblings, Murtagh started rowing fifteen years ago, following her twin brother Alan into the sport. He didn’t expect her to stick it, but she excelled. With consecutive titles at the Irish National Championships and a solid performance at the 2013 Junior World Champs in Lithuania, Murtagh caught the eye of American recruiters.
“I’d just turned 18 when I left for New York,” says Murtagh of her decision to accept a rowing scholarships to Fordham College in New York City, USA. “I’d never left home before. At the time I didn’t like Dublin because I thought it was too big of a city – what was I doing moving to New York?
“I was hemming and hawing, but Mam helped me make the decision. She said: ‘If you don’t like it, we can get you the next flight home’. So I thought if it doesn’t work out I’ll just come home and live my life knowing I tried it and I didn’t like it.
“But I tried it and I loved it! It changed my life. At that age you grow up quickly. It was the best thing for me.”
As Murtagh relives her earliest sporting crossroads, what becomes abundantly clear is the gratitude she has for her family’s support. She describes her parents’ non-pushy, confidence-giving outlook as: “Do what you want to do, the world is out there and it’s yours.”
Fast forward a decade and Murtagh is riding high off after another roll of the dice.
The Irishwoman has had a transformative season. After the Paris Olympics, where she and her longstanding teammate Aifric Keogh finished second in the B-final, far outside the women’s pairs podium they’d targeted, the two-time Olympian’s future was unclear.
“What am I doing here? It was a disappointing Games and I didn’t know where I stood with rowing. We had a complete management turnover, and our coaches suddenly left. It was going to be my first time as a high-performance athlete without them. It was a massive shock, a massive amount of uncertainty. I didn’t know where I’d fit into the organisation: do I go back to a centre full of scullers? What do I do?”
Rowing Ireland had chosen not to renew the contract of their high performance director, Antonio Maurogiovanni. Murtagh’s coach Giuseppe De Vita left too, and her pair’s partner, Aifric Keogh, along with a number of other sweep rowers, retired. Murtagh credits Maurogiovanni and De Vita for her first shot at international rowing. “I am the athlete I am today because of them.”
On-paper her reinvention as Ireland’s single sculler was an immediate hit. At her senior sculling debut she won a silver medal at the Europeans, and a month later another at the Lucerne world cup. Nine months prior the picture looked very different. “I started the year very vulnerable, very unconfident and very unsure.”
Given the choice between a session in the single or on the erg, Murtagh says until this season she would have always opted for the erg, no matter how beautiful the weather or flat the water.
“I used to actively avoid it. ‘Sculling? No that’s not me, that’s not my strength.’ I didn’t enjoy it and I didn’t think I’d be any good at it.” She’s come a long way. “I’ve learnt so much about myself. It’s a confidence thing for sure, sometimes borderline delusional. You know? It has to be.”
It took time and patience to get comfortable in her newfound discipline. “There’s another blade in my hands! What do I do with it?” she quips of her first sculling foray. “From November to January I was crawling up and down the river. Honestly, just crawling. Understanding what it feels like to be on your own, gaining confidence in any conditions, and mastering the balance, those things take time. But you have time in a post-Olympic year.”
This year, alongside learning to scull, Murtagh has worked for the financial services company JP Morgan. “It’s given me a different focus. It’s hard but it has benefitted me so much.” Fitting the mileage in around office hours means a lot of early starts and late finishes. In the winter she’d occasionally see her squadmates slip by in the early morning gloom as they boated, and she docked.
“I was training on my own and that took a lot of getting used to. I was so used to having Aifric in my ear and a coaching launch alongside me all the time – but this year there has been a lot of time when it’s just me. Two words are behind all this single sculling: Dominic Casey. It was his doing, entirely.”
The former Skibbereen head coach has been the driving force behind so much of Ireland’s success, including their first ever Olympic medal – at the Rio Olympics in the lightweight men’s double, and latterly has taken charge as the interim head coach. Murtagh is thankful that Casey could see that she had more to give.
“It’s been a mad year, a mad journey,” says Murtagh. Has it sunk in?
Apparently not. “‘The Irish Four’ or ‘The Irish Pair’. Now it’s my name, which is weird, I’m not used to that at all,” Murtagh says of race commentary. “I’m still getting used to the concept that I’m the single sculler. When I think of an Irish single sculler I think of Sanita [Puspure] because that’s who it’s been for so long.”
If her recent encounter at the Irish Rowing Championships is anything to go by it may be a minute before she catches up with her new status. She celebrated her 30th birthday on the first day of competition. “The kids at my old boat club, Galway Rowing Club, gave me a card. They’re a lovely group, so wholesome and cute. On it they’d drawn a single sculler in a yellow boat. I looked at it and thought, ‘Why is Sanita on the front of my card?’”
Murtagh laughs: “I didn’t clock it! They think of me as the single sculler, which is wild. It’s mad that people think that I’m that person. I’ll always think of Sanita as the Irish sculler.”
