Siobhán McCrohan: I’d failed enough, says rower of world-beating comeback

After Siobhán McCrohan won gold at the World Championships in September she was interviewed by David Gillick at the lakeside in Belgrade. Her story needed to be fleshed out for an audience meeting her for the first time but the outline was simple and stunning: it was more than 10 years since McCrohan had left rowing’s High Performance system; during the summer she had turned 36. Now this. Are we going too fast?

Along the way, she had reached a separation with the water and the boat, and the ambitions that had inflamed that relationship, until there came a stage when nobody wondered any more. Gillick’s last question was, why? What had brought her back?

She gave a long answer because there was a story to tell but the first line parted the curtain. “It wasn’t so much that I made a decision to come back,” she said. “It was more that I couldn’t stay away any longer.”

The final part of the journey started with an accidental partnership the season before last. Leah Coakley needed somebody to fill a double and though she was based in Dublin, her dad was a coach with Tribesmen, McCrohan’s club in Galway. He made the match.

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At weekends Coakley would travel home to Galway so that they could train together and her commitment lit a fire in McCrohan. So she pushed harder, silently waiting for her body to break down again. Instead, she went faster. “It made me feel that I could actually, potentially, come back.”

Years ago McCrohan had been immersed in all this. In 2010 she got into a boat with Claire Lambe with the goal of reaching the London Olympics. Since qualification was introduced in the 1990s no Irish women’s crew had made it to the games and for a while it looked like they would be the ones to break through. In the end, they came up short.

McCrohan started back for the next Olympic cycle but it wasn’t long before her shoulder started seizing up. It didn’t happen all the time but there was no telling when it would strike. At the National Championships one year it happened in the middle of a race. Once she came off the water a physio performed dry needling for more than an hour but as soon as the needles were removed the muscles went into spasm again.

They couldn’t get to the root of it. One specialist sent her for MRIs in search of an underlying cause but nothing showed up.

“There was no actual damage to the shoulder,” says McCrohan. “There was something wrong but it wasn’t actually damaged. The muscles would seize up and I wouldn’t be able to use it. I couldn’t straighten my arm sometimes. It was a very dramatic shoulder.”

She spent a year trying to complete the return to training protocols, building the intensity of her output in graduated blocks. But with each adverse reaction she would have to retrace her steps and start again. After four attempts that season she conceded defeat.

“Nobody was ever able to figure out what was wrong with it,” she says of her shoulder. “The current working theory is that I had always been using it in a slightly wrong position [in my stroke] but because I had always trained it in that position there was enough muscle there to get away with it. Then, when I had the long break, everything weakened off enough so that when I started training again I was able to train it properly.”

She reckons she went “four or five years” without any rowing in her life. Ask her if she missed it and the pause is longer than the answer. “It wasn’t a case of missing it or not – I just wasn’t doing anything [on the water].”

Did she think she would eventually get back? “No.”

Had she made peace with that? “As far as I could tell there wasn’t any choice – one way or another.”

Her first experience in the High Performance system had been unfulfilling. She was just 20 in 2007 when she qualified a boat for the World U-23 championship but she performed poorly at a World Cup race later that season and they put somebody else in the boat. By her own account she “sulked” for a year.

“I did row that year but I didn’t row in the national championships,” she said a couple of years later. “I didn’t trust the system and I was too ambitious to go for domestic rowing. When I didn’t have goals I didn’t bother. I was always ambitious but I didn’t have the focus. I didn’t know how to get there. I just knew I wanted to and I thought I was good enough to.”

Those feelings were buried – alive. McCrohan came back for trials in 2018 but the shoulder acted up in the first race and she knew she wouldn’t be able to row the following day.

It wasn’t really like there were that many different options. It was now, or never attempt it again

—  Siobhán McCrohan

“One of the big differences between the [High Performance] system previously and the current system is that when I spoke to Dominic [Casey, head coach in the lightweight programme] about my shoulder that day he brought me to the side, away from the crowd, to have a short chat and say, ‘Look, get yourself sorted out, get yourself ready to train and see if you’re coming back or not.’

“In previous systems it would have been, ‘Oh well, you can’t perform. Go away.’ Now, there’s much more, ‘Oh, the rowers are humans.’ It’s a good change.”

In the autumn of 2022 McCrohan presented herself again. In the double with Coakley she had felt strong and healthy. The way the system works, you submit scores that you’ve achieved on the erg [rowing machine] and if they’re above a certain threshold you’ll be invited for open-water trials. The trials continued into 2023 and each time she met the standard required. She had a decision to make.

“I suppose it was on my mind for the few months [with Coakley] that I realised I could train again.”

Was it a tough decision to go back? “It wasn’t really like there were that many different options. It was now, or never attempt it again.”

In November of last year she left her job as an aeronautical engineer in Shannon and returned to full-time training. Without any international performances in the bank for 10 years she didn’t qualify for Sport Ireland funding, so she dipped into her savings to buy a new boat and whatever else it took to lead the life of an elite athlete. When the international season came round Tribesmen opened a GoFundMe page and raised €5,000 to lighten the load.

In May McCrohan returned to Cork. She rented a room in a family home, five minutes walk from the Rowing Centre on Inniscarra Lake, and landed in a world she thought she had left behind, like a returning emigrant.

So much was different. When McCrohan first trained in Cork there were no more than 10 full-time athletes in the Rowing Centre; now, there are more than 30. The space that used to be a cafeteria overlooking the lake is stuffed with rowing machines. In the time she was away, rowing had turned into the most successful federation in Irish sport. Winning changed the energy.

And the training? “It’s probably a harder programme now but I used to be more tired from our old programme because we didn’t really get any nutritional support. We didn’t know how to eat properly, basically – which does make a difference. There are nutritionists for us to talk to now.”

Is the programme better? “Well, there are actually results from this one.”

McCrohan made the team for the Europeans in late May and in an astonishing performance was denied a bronze medal by less than half a second. Time trials were held in camp before the European Championships and again before the World Championships, and in just three months she shaved 15 seconds off the clock. By the time she reached the final of the World Championships in Belgrade McCrohan was the second seed in the race, primed for the performance of her life.

You wonder if coming back now, so late in her career, there had been any fear or failure? She pauses again.

“I’d failed enough already – so I had already done that.”

Clear water ahead.