Three-time Paralympic champion Lauren Rowles has called time on her rowing career and has returned to wheelchair racing. In honour of the history-making Brit, we revisit her interview from Issue 52, when, on the cusp of her history-making three-peat, Rowles sat down with Editor Tom Ransley to share her hopes and fears ahead of the Paris Games.
At 13 Lauren Rowles suffered a life-changing illness; five years later, she made her Paralympic debut in the most emphatic of ways, winning gold. “Sport was my therapy. My way of battling the demons,” she says. Adolescence is never easy, but Rowles’s route through teenagerhood surpasses the typical hormone-fuelled rollercoaster most mere-mortals ride.
When we meet, Rowles is excited. Who can blame her? Eight years on from her debut she’s now one win shy of making history. The Brummie sculler is dead set on delivering gold in Paris. If successful, she’ll become the first Para rower to ever be crowned Paralympic champion at three consecutive Games, but this isn’t why Rowles is excited. She’s days away from becoming a mum for the first time.
“I’m trying to cash in on all the sessions that I can before the baby comes at the end of the week,” says Rowles. Her heavily pregnant fiancée, Jude Hamer, is a triple Paralympian wheelchair basketball player and the pair’s relationship started in lockdown before the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Games.
“It was never our plan for it to happen this way,” says Rowles of the timing of their firstborn. “We feel lucky to be in this position and having the baby. When you are a same sex couple you obviously must go through the clinics and stuff. We have seen so many people who have struggled to have children. I see it in a different way now. It isn’t as easy as people make out.”
“Our lives are massively going to change. It is going to be the hardest thing that we’ve ever done. Doing it in this year isn’t an easy thing to do. I’m not walking into it blindly. I just must have good management of it all.”
As a former athlete Hamer “gets it” when it comes to managing life and training, says Rowles. As does her coach Nick Baker, who recently became a father. “You were a baby when I first knew you, and now you’re having a baby!” Rowles laughs, repeating Baker’s running joke.
“After Tokyo I went through a tough time with my mental health. I was in a very suicidal place.”
Lauren Rowles
Rowles, who turns 26 at the end of April, came to rowing young. Then a sixteen-year-old wheelchair racer, she was scouted by British Rowing coaches visiting Stoke Mandeville Hospital. Soon after, Rowles persuaded her mum to make the 100-mile journey south to the British Rowing centre at Caversham.
“I still remember the moment I got in the boat for the very first time. I remember how it made me feel,” says Rowles. “When I took my first strokes, well, air strokes(!) I’ll never forget that feeling. It was something I’d never experienced before. Pushing off from the side, being on the water and not being in my wheelchair – that was a powerful moment in my life. I was free from my disability for the very first time since I had it.”
Rowles has Transverse Myelitis, a rare neurological condition caused by inflammation of the spinal cord. It presented without warning. “I was completely able-bodied when I went to bed and the next morning I woke up and I didn’t have any feeling, and barely any movement in my legs. It got worse and worse, and I was rushed into hospital: Birmingham Children’s Hospital.
“I was diagnosed with inflammation in my spinal cord in my neck and in my back. I spent the next nine months of my life in hospital before being thrown back out into the world,” says Rowles. “The world was never the same, for me.”
“My dream growing up was to be an Olympic athlete, I wanted to be a runner. When that ability to run gets stripped away from you – obviously – I was in a really bad place in my life, I didn’t even care about the walking side of things: I just wanted to run.”
Disability was completely foreign to Rowles. “I’d not grown up around disability; I never saw disability; I definitely didn’t know what Paralympic sport was. I never knew there were all these different kinds of disabilities in the world.”
London 2012 Paralympic Games proved pivotal. “A real turning point,” says Rowles, who returned from a trip to London awestruck. She’d gone to the Games with her mum on the recommendation of a hospital nurse.
“I remember watching these athletes do things,” she says, joyously reliving the moment. “I distinctly remember sitting in the stands of the aquatics stadium watching this guy with no arms and no legs swimming faster than I’d ever seen any of my school friends swim.”
With a cheeky grin she says: “You lot are losers!” Recalling what she’d thought to herself about her classmates back in school, while sat in the stands. “I’ve just seen a guy with no arms and no legs swim – firstly just SWIM! – but he won the gold medal. He beat people with arms. This is mad!”
“I saw things that day: I just never knew this whole world existed. Going to watch London [sparked] that moment of, ‘Oh wait, there is a future’.”
“Growing up I got taught if you had a disability, you’d be forever lonely and dependent. It was a sad picture of what life would be,” says Rowles, who was bullied as a child for being queer and in a wheelchair. “To find out that life wasn’t going to be like that…,” says Rowles, pausing. “I needed to see lived experience.”
“Pushing off from the side, being on the water and not being in my wheelchair – that was a powerful moment in my life.”
Lauren Rowles
Notions of what it meant to live with disability, and what possibilities existed, were re-shaken when she joined British Rowing in February 2015. “Athletes like Tom Aggar [GBR PR1 M1x 2007-2016], he had a life, kids, a partner, a family and he’d been to university. I remember thinking for the first time that people with disabilities can live normal lives.”
These life-defining lessons still motivate Rowles and compel her to share her story. “I scream from the roof tops about being queer and being disabled and what life is really like because it is not as bad as everybody makes it out to be. There are young people out there who don’t have the people around them in their lives to show them what life is like.
“People might not think it’s important. Why does Lauren keep blabbering on about these things, telling her story and talking about her trauma? I do it because there’s a young girl out there, just like I was, in a very bad place in her life, thinking she’s got no future. That’s the reason why I do what I do. That’s why I keep ‘blabbering’ on about my life.”
Her own sporting hero came from the wheelchair racing ranks. Tatyana McFadden spent the first six years of her life in a Russian orphanage before being adopted by Americans. She went on to win twenty Paralympic medals, including eight golds.
“She was the best of the best; I didn’t see her any differently from a top-level Olympic athlete. I thought she was so badass: athletic, muscular, strong and powerful. She was the fastest woman in the world at the time. I remember thinking, ‘You are really cool’.”
“Starting out that’s what I wanted to look like. She’s probably still got more impressive shoulders than I do,” says Rowles laughing. “I like turning heads. When I go to a public gym there’s something about unracking a set of dumb bells and putting them over your head, and some guy next to you is like, ‘Woah!’ I love that.”
Rowles admits elite sport has been so central to her existence that transitioning out might yet be one of the hardest hurdles. “That’s something that scares me, one day I won’t be able to do [this].”
“I’ve been on this journey with a lot of people, especially staff members [at Caversham], they’ve seen me grow up, been there through my developmental years, late teenage years, been there for a lot of my mistakes and a lot of my highs. The moment when I do eventually leave will feel like I’m leaving a big part of me behind.”
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“Rowing gave me an opportunity to completely re-root my life. Look what I’ve done with it, you know, if I’d not taken that opportunity the coaches gave me – to try and pursue and be good at something – I wouldn’t be here today with two Paralympic gold medals around my neck: the titles that I have, but also the life that I’ve built myself.”
“I’m blessed that this has been my life. I’m 25 now and the last ten years I’ve done stuff that no one my age and from where I grew up in Birmingham has done. I remember when I got my MBE and met the Queen: people back home were like, ‘What! This is mental.’ It’s one of those things you don’t think anyone you grew up with would do, but for it to be you is even weirder!”
“Every so often I go through a phase where I think that my life is so abnormal – you feel like you’ve missed out on the everyday and part of your childhood has been robbed. You don’t get to do the going out, the girls’ holidays to Ibiza, the nights outs. … [at times] I begrudged rowing.”
Rowles is candid about the toll sustaining elite performance has taken on her health.
“After Tokyo I went through a tough time with my mental health. I was in a very suicidal place,” says Rowles. “Sometimes we put too much pressure on ourselves to do the next best thing. I felt that pressure straight away after Tokyo,” snapping her fingers to underscore the point, “It’s like I crossed the finish line and everyone was like, ‘What next?’.”
“How can you demand more from me when I’ve literally just given the world another gold medal. It just never felt like enough,” she pauses, “When you’ve been in that very low place you don’t want to go back there.”
In a better place now, Rowles is on the precipice on achieving her goal, but the field continues to evolve. Which crews are on Rowles’ radar?
“The Chinese boat for sure, they are silver world medallists at the minute, and you can never rule out the Dutch boat, two epic athletes there. Someone always comes along though. There are athletes who have been competing for the last ten years and are only now finding their rhythm and hitting their peak. Like that Polish boat, they are on the rise. The Ukrainians have had a good couple of seasons too. You can never predict what’s going to happen.”
“Nations are investing more and developing more,” says Rowles. “The Chinese and Americans have more coaches and more money than we do. Going forward we are starting to see a real investment in Para rowing. That’s exciting, but GB, as a nation, must keep staying at the top, that’s our focus. As these nations get that development and investment, their trajectory will increase. We’ve been ahead of the curve for a very long period time now because we already had this amazing infrastructure.”
“Let’s be plain and simple. I want to be the best. Three back-to-back golds. No one has ever done that.”
Since our interview Lauren and Jude welcomed to the world their baby boy Noah Arlo.
This article first appeared in Issue 52
