Paris Olympics 2024: Australian rowing gold medal hopeful Tara Rigney opens up on one of the Games’ toughest events

Olympic rowing has never been a sport for the faint hearted, with even the fittest rowers living in a world of excruciating pain. But gold medal hopeful Tara Rigney is a glutton for punishment, writes Julian Linden.

Promising Paris-bound rower Tara Rigney struts her stuff on the water as she sets her sights on the Olympic Games.

Olympic rowing has never been a sport for the faint hearted.

The best competitors make everything look effortless because they just glide across the water so smoothly.

But that’s just one of the tricks of their trade.

The reality is that even the strongest and fittest rowers inhabit a world of excruciating pain that hurts like hell, burning the muscles in their legs and arms, sucking the air out of their lungs and causing their hearts to beat up to 200 times a minute.

Or as Tara Rigney, one of the rising stars of the strong Australian team gunning for gold at this year’s Paris Olympics, put it: “It feels like you’re dead.

“The burning starts pretty much straight away and never stops it so you need to be able to push through.

“It’s like a test of your will because you can be so close to almost passing out.

“Think of it like sprinting up a staircase for seven minutes without stopping.”

Like a lot of top rowers, Rigney is a glutton for punishment who also loves the torturous nature of her sport.

A singles sculler, where each competitor uses two oars, she races in arguably the toughest event on water, with no-one to help her.

Not only that, she also goes head to head against one of the toughest rivals in all of rowing, Karolien Florijn of the Netherlands.

Promising Paris-bound rower Tara Rigney struts her stuff on the water as she sets her sights on the Olympic Games

Blessed with the perfect genes for rowing (her father Ronald won two Olympic gold medals), Florijn has won the last two world titles in singles sculls, but Rigney has not been far behind, claiming the bronze medal on both occasions.

And rather than be intimidated by the challenge of catching the flying Dutchwoman, it’s helping spur Rigney on with the Paris Olympics now just six months away.

“From my perspective, I’m going in with nothing to lose whereas she’s the world champion,” Rigney said.

“Off the water, it’s fun and games, especially in the single scull. Everyone else has their crew mates whereas you’re usually by yourself.

“So everyone becomes friends but on the water, it’s war. Everyone’s out for blood all the time and there’s no mercy.”

At 24, Rigney is still young by rowing standards so her best is still ahead of her.

Most of the recent female singles sculls winners have been in their early 30s, including Australia’s Kim Brennan, who won the gold at Rio in 2016.

Brennan has been passing on tips to Rigney, a final year commerce student at Sydney University, who was a relative latecomer to the sport, but quickly making up for lost time.

A New South Wales state representative in athletics and netball, Rigney had her heart set on becoming a professional netballer when fate intervened.

Like a lot of top rowers, Tara Rigney is a glutton for punishment who also loves the torturous nature of her sport.

Still in high school but already catching the attention of national selectors, her ambitions in netball were shattered when she ruptured her ACL, not once but twice, forcing her to give up and find a new sport.

She had tried her hand at rowing when she was younger and one of her former coaches remembered her and reached out, asking whether she wanted to take it up again.

“Originally, I thought it was just a good way to keep fit without putting too much strain on my knee but once I started rowing I just absolutely loved it,” she said.

“I pretty much went in all guns blazing and my knee actually held up fine. But because rowing is training twice to three times a day, it was a big jump and I was so tired.

“I started falling asleep in my tutorials and sleeping in my car during my breaks at Uni and I got glandular fever pretty bad after about four months.”

A natural in the boat, Rigney was undeterred so kept pushing.

She put together some impressive times on the indoor rowing machines commonly known as ergs and made the Australian under 23s team for the 2019 world championships, competing in the coxless pairs.

A singles sculler, where each competitor uses two oars, she races in arguably the toughest event on water, with no-one to help her.

Then in 2021, she was selected for the Tokyo Olympics, teaming up with Amanda Bateman in the double sculls.

They didn’t win a medal but the experience of going to the biggest event in all sport has only fuelled her motivation to get on the podium in Paris, doing four hours of cardio training each day, plus 90 minutes of weightlifting.

“It’s insane how much you have to train for rowing,” she said.

“I reckon we would burn somewhere between 3000 and 4000 calories a day and we try to hit our peak heart rate multiple times in a week but never in a row.

“But that’s what we love about it.

“Rowing’s not a high publicity sport. You’re not in it for the money. You’re not in it for the fame.

”At the end of the day, you really just have a whole bunch of people that love the sport. The races and the training hurts, there’s some days I’m struggling to get up the slide but it’s also days when you’re incredibly mindful.

“But when you’re rowing well and everything clicks into place and you can make the boat do the work for you, there’s these little pockets of peacefulness which just makes me love it.”

Rigney’s incredible backstory has already made it to the screen, included in the NSWIS Lights Up documentary series.

The series features 20 World Champions, Olympians, and Paralympians from the New South Wales Institute of Sport in the lead up to this year’s Paris Games.

The first documentary, on high jumper Eleanor Patterson, was released this week with a new episode posted online each Monday.

Originally published as Paris Olympics 2024: Australian rowing gold medal hopeful Tara Rigney opens up on one of the Games’ toughest events