Paris via the Erne for Ugandan rower with Fermanagh links
Olympics 2024
UGANDAN Olympic athlete Kathleen Noble has been training away in Fermanagh with the 2024 Rowing World Cup and the Olympic games in Paris just over the horizon. The 29-year-old has family connections in the Erne county and has been in town the past couple of weeks visiting grandparents, Derek and Elma, who own the Lackaboy B&B on the Tempo road.
She qualified for the last Olympics in Tokyo 2020 for the first time, representing Uganda after growing up in the East African country following her parents’ move in the 90s.
Noble sealed another appearance at this year’s Olympics – where she will compete in the women’s single sculls – upon qualification in October last year with a fourth-place finish at the African Championships in the 2,000m women’s single sculls event in Tunisia.
Her skills will be sharpened when she competes in the World Rowing Cup in Varese, Italy, next weekend.
“It’s my only international race before the Olympics, so it’s the only chance to get to that sort of level of competition which is really useful because there’s just not that many opportunities to compete,” Noble said.
“You can train as much as you want but a race is always very different, so the more racing experience you can get, the better.”
She has spent her time in Enniskillen training alongside the Enniskillen Royal Boat Club (ERBC) and says it’s been an enjoyable couple of weeks.
“I have loved it,” she added. “I was out two days ago, that was my first time out ever here and it’s just beautiful, the river has quite a strong current.
“That was new. Especially going under that bridge, going up under the bridge is quite an adventure, it’s like little rapids. I’ve never been in rapids in a rowing boat before, but it was fine.
“Other than that, just occasionally beautiful. It’s nice that there’s not much in the waters, where I normally row there’s debris that gets picked up from the sides like leaves and logs and shopping trolleys, so it’s nice that there’s not much to hit out there.”
Now living in Tennessee, working as a software engineer, Noble recalled making the switch from rowing to swimming having represented Uganda at the World Championships, aged just 17, but has since gone on to make the switch into the boat becoming the first ever Ugandan athlete to row at the Olympics.
After attending Princeton University on a scholarship, she only fell into rowing after her roommate suggested taking it up.
“I made the transition in university,” she continued. “I was at Princeton and my roommate was a recruit to the lightweight women’s rowing team and I had done very competitive swimming to a high level for Uganda and then I was kind of retired from swimming, in my mind, and I thought I was retired from doing high-level sport because there’s so many other things I’m interested in.
“But then when I got to university, I found that I really missed doing sport, doing training, the exercise. My roommate was on the rowing team and she loved it and recommended that I try it out, so, in my second year, I joined the team.”
The journey to the Olympics in Tokyo wasn’t a typical one in comparison with other athletes as Kathleen explained she moved to Utah and wasn’t even sure if there was a rowing club nearby whenever she received the call about the qualifiers.
“Honestly, it was like three months before the qualifiers,” Kathleen added.
“I had moved to Salt Lake City, I wasn’t really rowing anymore and then the Ugandan national team coach reached out to me and was like, ‘Hey, the qualifiers are coming up, do you want to go?’
“I was like, ‘I don’t even know if they have rowing in Utah but I guess I can go and ask around, so, I reached out to a local secondary school team that was competing there and they adopted me and I trained the whole way through to Tokyo. I think it was really just very fortunate that I managed to qualify for the first one.”
While thrilled to take part in her first Olympics, due to the pandemic, Kathleen’s experience of the historic tournament was limited with restrictions still in place along with regular testing and social distancing for all athletes.
“It had a huge effect,” Kathleen noted about the pandemic in Tokyo.
“It definitely did. Very restricted, you just went from your bedroom to the dining hall, to the racecourse, to the dining hall, to your bedroom.
“There wasn’t really any socialising between athletes because you’re being tested every day and if anyone tests positive then that’s the end of your Olympic dream, so everyone was staying away from each other.
“There was obviously no one in the stands so it was very quiet, especially the opening ceremony was really weird you know, because everyone is all dressed up and there’s such fanfare but then you come out to the stadium and it’s just completely empty so, I think Paris is going to be completely different and I’m really looking forward to it.”
In Tokyo, Kathleen finished fifth in the women’s single sculls heat two and then narrowly missed out on a place in the quarter-finals with a third-place finish in the repêchage.
A quarter-final appearance is now the target for Kathleen this summer in Paris: “I think my goal is to try and make it into the quarter-final. I think that’s kind of a good goal for me.”
Despite competing in the tournament for the second time, Kathleen revealed she does not yet have the famous Olympic rings tattoo that so many athletes have tatted after competing.
“I do not, I’m too indecisive to have anything permanently on my body, maybe I’ll get one of those temporary tattoos, the stick-on ones, and I’ll warm up to it over a while. But for now, no. I’m tattoo-free,” she laughed.
When asked about how the support has been since representing Uganda, she replied: “Really good, I felt really supported by the Olympic committee, by the other athletes in Uganda, and that was actually a bit of a surprise for me – I wasn’t necessarily expecting that whole support but they’ve been behind me 100 per cent and everywhere I go people support me.
“I come here, they let me row, I go to Italy and people support me – so it’s been really fabulous.”