New Zealand’s champion single sculler has found a new lease of life in the abbreviated version of rowing. MARC HINTON reports
When rowing ironwoman Emma Twigg was forced to settle for silver at the Paris Olympics in 2024, to go with the emotional gold she won so brilliantly three years earlier in Tokyo, most, including the athlete herself, figured that was it on the ultimate sporting stage for the single sculling great.
Twigg, who was 37 in Paris, and a five-time Olympian, had pretty much ticked all the boxes by the end of that Games campaign. After consecutive fourth-place finishes in London (2012) and Rio (‘16), she had won that memorable gold in Tokyo’s delayed Olympiad, and pushed Dutch super sculler Karolien Florijn, unbeaten over the previous two years, to the limit in a fabulous battle for gold in Paris.
To go with a remarkable seven world championship medals, including gold in 2014, Twigg, by the end of the Paris regatta, figured she had given her all to the sport for a decade and a-half, and it was time to devote her time to wife Charlotte and their son, Tommy.
“What a way to finish my career. It’s amazing,” she told reporters at the Vaires-sur-Marne course in Paris. “This was always going to be the cherry on top.”
Turns out everyone, including the oar-some athlete herself, might have been wrong.
The now 38-year-old Twigg recently won a second world championship in the hybrid offshoot of coastal rowing, or beach sprint – think what T20 cricket is to the longer versions of the game – and admitted in the wake of her latest triumph in Turkey that the Los Angeles Games of 2028 now come into consideration.
The coastal event – a 500m row out and back through the surf, with short beach sprints at either end – makes its debut as part of the rowing package at the LA Olympics, and Twigg, who’s taken to the short-version sport like the proverbial duck to water, is the pre-eminent exponent less than three years from the Games.
“My commitment is that I’m going to keep going if I keep enjoying it and I keep winning,” reflected Twigg, with a hint of a smile, after her victory in Turkey. “LA seems like a long way away to me, especially at my age, but I’m loving it. I’m loving being part of the team. I’m loving the challenge of something different.
“I guess I’m staring down the barrel of another three years.”
A big part of the appeal for Twigg is the quite different requirements for essentially rowing 500m in the chop of the surf, including a buoy rounding component, as opposed to the 2000m gutbuster on the flatwater.
“It’s not for the faint-hearted. You can’t control everything, but it’s a hell of a lot of fun,” Twigg told Radio NZ. “It’s apples and oranges, even in the distances and the way the regatta is run (head-to-head knockout competition). It’s like the kayak cross version of whitewater slalom.”
But, surely, as 40 comes into sight, there have to be doubts about her ability to go the distance, so to speak?
“It’s a question I ask myself every day and what it comes down to is that I just love what I do.
“I love being fit and active in a rowing boat and on water. This presents a different challenge to what I have done for years and years, so I see it as an extension of my career.”
And with the newness of this newish version of the sport comes enough potential upside to really engage the sporting veteran.
“We’re just scratching the surface because the physiology is so different,” she says. “The skills are so different – the way you have to get around buoys and use different forces. It’s a challenge I’m enjoying trying to master.”
So LA, and a sixth Olympics, at age of, er, 41?
“I’m happy to be at the front of the pack and so long as I’m there, and enjoying it, why not give it a nudge?”
Why not indeed.