After falling out of love with rowing, world champion Fiona Bourke is back on Lake Karapiro, but now as a coach. And she's collecting the wisdom of other coaches to guide the next generation of promising Kiwi rowers.
Fiona Bourke’s story has all the classic elements of a fairy tale.
Her story is of the late bloomer who worked hard to become a rowing world champion, then fell out of love with her sport and flew to the other side of the world - only to have that passion rekindled at one of the world’s leading universities.
There’s even a gruff and unpretentious hero in the storyline, who she now tries to emulate in helping other young rowers, as he once helped her.
Bourke will probably chuckle reading this. But the Olympian, who’s now working to forge a path for young New Zealand rowers, knows the next chapter in her story is only just beginning.
Flicking back to the beginning, growing up in Hawke's Bay and of Ngāti Kahungunu descent, Bourke wasn’t a rower. In fact, she wasn’t very athletic at all.
“I played social soccer and basketball at high school literally for the trip to the city for games so we could stop at McDonald’s,” she says. “I was a complete nerd.”
Bourke, who was dux at Central Hawke's Bay College, stresses she knows now it's "cool to be smart" and it's a message she tries to get across to young athletes.
It wasn’t until she moved to Dunedin - where she was top of chemistry for two years at Otago University - that she took up her first real sporting endeavour, rowing.
On the bedroom wall of her student flat, Bourke had a cardboard cut-out of her two rowing heroes – Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell.
In 2008, Bourke had just finished her novice year at the Otago University Rowing Club, and was sitting in the clubrooms watching on the big screen as the Kiwi twins won their second Olympic gold medal - by 1/100th of a second. “When they needed to be in front, they were in front,” Bourke says.
“I said to myself ‘I want to be like them one day. One day I want to be in the New Zealand rowing team and coached by Dick Tonks’.”
Bourke’s ambition came to be in 2010, when she first joined the New Zealand rowing team in the U23 women’s eight. Within two years, she rowed at the London Olympics in the quad. Tonks would coach her for six years – and have a lasting influence on her career, in and out of a boat.
In 2014, Bourke and Zoe Stevenson became world champions in the double scull – a year after they’d won silver. But the following season, Bourke's career suddenly changed course.
She still remembers the morning she woke up and realised her love for rowing was gone.
It was the day before the national trials for the 2016 Olympics. When Olympic single sculler Emma Twigg (now the reigning Olympic champion) had left to study overseas, Bourke had been moved into the single boat – as the next fastest sculler.
“I didn’t enjoy it, but I didn’t have the courage to say so,” she says. “It destroyed my love of the sport.”
Instead, she decided she’d had enough, and laid down her oars.
Bourke left for the United States to do something “completely different” – working with young girls at a summer camp in New Hampshire, as a 'waterfront director'. “It was awesome to be doing something totally removed from rowing – it was a different universe,” she says.
She could have been lost to the sport forever – but it wasn’t long before rowing was calling her again.
Bourke visited Boston to meet friends she made on the US women’s rowing team. She mentioned she wanted to get back into the sport somehow.
One of them told her of a coaching job at Harvard University, as the assistant heavyweight coach of the Radcliffe women’s rowing crew. “I was like ‘Heck no I don’t have the qualifications’. They wanted someone with five years’ coaching experience, and three years’ experience in the NCAA system,” Bourke says.
But they encouraged her to call, and her impressive rowing pedigree obviously helped her clinch the job. For three years she worked on the Charles River, coaching the successful Radcliffe crew.
“While I was working at Harvard-Radcliffe, it was the only women’s rowing programme in the country to have a full staff of women – head coach, assistants, volunteers and boatwomen,” Bourke says.
“It was amazing, and they put such value on athletes having an identity outside of sport; on being good people, not just athletes.”
Bourke helped recruit two young Kiwi rowers - Morgan Blind and Kayla Baker - to the college while she was there. “It’s cool how it will change their lives to be able to study at the highest level,” Bourke says.
It’s now Bourke’s role to help rowers like Blind and Baker return home and further their rowing careers.
Of course, that’s not easy right now. For the last two years, Bourke has coached the New Zealand U21 team – who unfortunately, halted by the global pandemic, have had nowhere to go.
But she also now has a fulltime role at Rowing New Zealand as a national pathway coach. That requires liaising with clubs around the country, helping to develop their athletes through the rowing system, and keeping in touch with Kiwis who have rowing scholarships at US colleges.
“We’re working on the seamless transition for when they have their degrees and want to row for New Zealand,” Bourke says. “In the past, we’ve lost some athletes when they’ve come back. We want to put a huge value on them getting an education - taking time to develop and grow as a person and an athlete – and then coming back to row again.”
While Bourke has plenty of personal experience and knowledge to call on, she also has the opportunity to grow in the second cohort of Te Hāpaitanga, a project created to expand New Zealand’s pool of female coaching talent.
“It can be hard in a high performance environment, particularly as a woman in a typically male-dominated space, not underselling yourself, standing up and having a voice,” she says.
While there are no female coaches at the high performance level in Rowing NZ, they are working to elevate women in the sport. Hannah Starnes, a national age-group coach who’s now head coach at the Waikato Rowing Club, was in the first Te Hāpaitanga intake of 12 coaches last year.
“For three female rowers of that era to have gone on to pursue coaching shows the importance of growing good people" - Fiona Bourke.
Bourke also applied in 2020 and missed out, but was so impressed by Starnes’ experience, she tried again and has made the cut of 16 women from a wide range of sports.
“It’s important we get someone into that high performance space in rowing,” Bourke says. “And it’s also important you’re not there just because you’re a woman. It’s making sure you are the best person for the job.”
Starnes says she’s learned so much on Te Hāpaitanga, a High Performance Sport NZ initiative, from up-and-coming female coaches in other sports codes.
“I’ve watched strong, powerful women soften after finally feeling like they have a safe space to show their emotions,” she says. “I’ve had cup of tea conversations with women about their kids, their marriages, the juggle and the sacrifice. I’ve stood in silence with empowered women who were about to do something they never thought they could do, seen the resulting empowerment afterwards.
“The power of potential and the support network within the group is something quite special and I feel privileged to have been part of it.”
Starnes also rowed for the Otago University club, with another Te Hāpaitanga coach and former professional cyclist, Elyse Fraser (below).
In fact, Fraser – now a coach with Cycling New Zealand – played an important role in Bourke’s rowing career.
“Elyse was a senior rower at Otago when I was a novice. She was one of the best athletes I’d seen, and I aspired to be as good as her,” Bourke says.
“We rowed together at our club, and one of the defining moments of my career was learning to race with Elyse on Lake Dunstan. Throughout the race she was telling me, 10 more, 10 more. And she didn’t stop asking me for 10 more throughout the race. I didn’t stop – and I was toasted afterwards. But she taught me to always give all you have.
“For three female rowers of that era to have gone on to pursue coaching shows the importance of growing good people.”
Tonks also had a huge influence on Bourke’s career - and continues to do so.
“What I learned from him was incredible. The first year I was terrible, but he took a chance on me, he saw something in me,” she says.
“Everyone was released for the Christmas holidays but I wanted to stay at Lake Karapiro and row, because I wanted to improve. On Christmas Eve, he was there on the water at 6am – and he didn’t need to be.
“He believes it’s not about you as a coach trying to get accolades; it's about helping the athlete to achieve anything. That resonated with me. I wanted to be able to give that back to other athletes.”
Bourke also hopes to finesse the skills of observation she picked up from Tonks. "He’s a man of very few words, but his observation skills are impeccable. He could tell from the way you carried your boat down to the water what you needed in that coaching session," she says.
“You can’t just rely on science, you need intuition and feel. It’s getting harder to develop those ‘human’ skills with so much technology and physiology in sport.
“But Te Hāpaitanga is helping to make [coaching] a lot more intuitive. And it gives you the courage to stand up and do something that’s different, because you believe in it.”
