Kathleen Noble won’t win a medal at the Olympics this summer. She will go and she will row and she will leave everything she has on the water at Vaires-sur-Marne, 30km to the east of Paris. But she won’t be in podium contention, nor even in the running for a spot in a final.
And yet, when she rows, she’ll likely be watched by more people in her home country than any Irish athlete at the games.
You won’t see her face in any ad campaigns. No sponsor is going to make bank on her image. Whoever is cheering for her in the crowd on the day, there won’t be enough of them for her to hear them. When it’s over, she will have her husband and her family and her coach and that will more or less be that.
And yet, in years to come, she will be remembered as a unique figure in the Olympic history of her country.
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She has no training partner. She works out alone in Tennessee, doing two-hour “erg” sessions three times a week. In college, when she started rowing, she at least made friends out of it. She at least had other women to row against that she could try to beat on the water and go for a bite with afterwards. She has recently started getting out on the river with a local junior team, purely for the social aspect of it.
And yet, despite it all, she gets in her boat and she picks up her oars and she empties herself. She does it as Uganda’s first – and so far only – Olympic rower. She does it as Uganda’s first – and so far only – white Olympian in any sport. She does it to try and leave something after her.
“I think about it a lot,” she says. “With rowing, you can’t have a goal of time. So the only metric that I know of for how to gauge myself is how I feel at the end of the race. Do I feel like I did the very best that I could do? Which is not super-measurable, but it is a feeling. I have raced enough to know when I feel it.
“In terms of actual positions, I’ll be somewhere between 20th and 30th, depending on how some of the people ahead of me do on the day. I’m not trying to be faster than them. I don’t think I could be, even if I dedicated my whole life to it.
“For me, it’s more about using this opportunity as a vehicle to advocate for rowing in Uganda and to promote the sport and create connections. We do have a vision of creating a regional high-performance centre in Uganda. We have made a lot of progress recently towards that.”
Let’s go back to the start. Kathleen Noble is the daughter of Gerry and Moira Noble, Irish missionaries who moved to Uganda in the 1990s. Gerry is a doctor from Enniskillen and Moira is a teacher from Monaghan. Kathleen was born in Kampala in 1994 and has dual citizenship. She and her siblings spent months every year as kids in Ireland – her brother lives in Dublin now.
“Ireland was the place that we considered ourselves to be from. It was kind of interesting – when we grew up in Uganda and people asked where I was from, I was always from Ireland. But then when I was in Ireland and people asked where I was from, I was from Uganda. And now that I live in the States and people ask, I’m like, ‘Huh, I’m not really sure!’”
Look, I know this sounds crazy but I’m going to the Olympic qualifiers in four months. Can I borrow a boat and train with you guys?
The GPS of her sporting life has more ups and downs than a polygraph. Noble grew up dreaming of swimming in the Olympics and was good enough at it to represent Uganda at the World Championships in Turkey when she was 17. She went to Princeton on an international student scholarship and took up rowing on a whim. Though she was starting from scratch, her athleticism and competitiveness won her a spot on the varsity rowing team.
By 2016, she was rowing for Uganda in the World Under-23 Championships. The East African nation has no history in the sport – it is a soccer country first and foremost, with distance running and boxing making up the totality of their Olympic medal count – so Noble has essentially been a one-woman sporting explorer ever since.
Nothing about it has been easy. Or linear, for that matter. For a start, she had no plans to row in the Olympics. Nor indeed to row at all after she left Princeton.
“I moved out to Utah after university,” she says. “I was working as a wilderness therapy field instructor, which is a bit of an odd job in a way, but something that had been my dream job ever since I first heard about it a few years earlier.
“It’s working with teenagers who have a whole host of social and behavioural issues. I joke that it’s kind of halfway between summer camp and jail. They get sent off into the wilderness for three months to sort themselves out and learn how to be independent and socialise with other people.
“So while I was living in Utah, the Ugandan head coach reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in going to the Olympic qualifiers. This was in 2018, 2019. I had not really been training for the previous year at that point, ever since I had graduated. The qualifiers were about four months later or something ridiculous like that. And I didn’t even know if there was rowing in Utah because there’s not a lot of water.
“I looked around and found that there was a high school team that was training every day quite competitively. I reached out to their head coaches and basically told them, ‘Look, I know this sounds crazy but I’m going to the Olympic qualifiers in four months. Can I borrow a boat and train with you guys?’
“And they were just fabulous. They adopted me and let me come to their practices and use their boats. I continued to train with that high school team throughout Covid, throughout my entire time until Tokyo.”
Thing is, Tokyo was no ordinary Olympics. And Kathleen Noble was no ordinary Olympian. Uganda is a country of almost 50 million people and the first time virtually any of them knew that a white woman was representing them was the opening ceremony. When she walked out into the empty stadium in the small group of athletes and officials behind the flag, most Ugandans presumed she was a coach of some sort, if they considered her at all. But once she started competing, it was big news.
“You are always going to be an outsider to a certain extent because you’re white in Uganda. And that’s okay. I think, interestingly, sport has been the way I have felt most connected to being Ugandan. It was very interesting when I was in Tokyo because that was the first time a white person had represented Uganda at the Olympics. Also, the rowing was a first. We had some very good runners, but they weren’t competing until the second week so I had a lot of media focus on me the first week.
“So the online controversy around that – which I absolutely avoided while I was there but kind of looked at a little bit afterwards and heard about from other people – that surprised me a bit. I think what I was surprised at and touched by personally was the number of people who came to my defence. I was really expecting a backlash against it, much more so than there was. I have felt very included and supported by the Ugandan Olympic Committee and by my teammates.
“You always get the haters online. That’s always going to happen. But then there were other people who were excited to have someone choosing to represent the country. Because I have dual citizenship and I chose to represent Uganda.”
She came fifth in her heat when the time came, 45 seconds behind Ireland’s Sanita Puspure. She went to the repechage and missed out on the quarter-finals by one place. Her final ranking was 26th out of 32 competitors overall.
And that, she presumed, was that. She had done it. Granted, it was all a bit ramshackle and disjointed, but she had become an Olympian. Though she couldn’t but feel a little shortchanged by the experience – it was the Covid Olympics, there was nobody in the grandstands, the vibe was a little fretful and cautious around the place – she was happy to mark it down and get on with her life.
“When I first came back from Tokyo, my overriding thought was, ‘Okay, I’m done.’ I had put so much time into it, I had postponed pursuing a career. So I was really not expecting to even think about trying to get to Paris.
“Mostly, I was really hoping that it would be someone else’s time. During the run-up to Tokyo and for a long time after it, I had been doing a lot of advocating for Ugandan rowing and trying to promote the sport in Uganda, with a view to developing a sufficiently competitive rowing community there to send somebody else to the qualifiers for Paris. That was really what my hope was. But that didn’t happen.”
Ultimately, that’s her broader aim. She wants rowing in Uganda to use her presence at the Olympics as a launch point. To get some investment in coaching and structures and talent ID and all the stuff that is taken for granted in other countries. To find someone to come after her. To find a whole lot of someones to come after her.
“One of the questions I’ve asked myself a lot is, ‘What does it mean to be an Olympian?’ You get the people who win medals, but obviously most of us don’t. Take the boxers – half of them are eliminated after their first match. All those years of training and then half of you are out. Same thing swimming – you train for years and you’re gone after one 30-second swim.
“So I have asked this question about what it means. And I think it is still something. It’s a symbol in the world. The conclusion I have come to is that if I can’t be one of the fastest people at the Olympics, I want to be someone who lives out the value of that symbol. And someone who uses that title or platform or whatever you want to call it to do something good.
“It’s a bit like that verse: ‘To those to whom much is given, much is expected.’ I have been given an awful lot in life, just even to get this opportunity. So how do you honour that? You can only do it by making something of that opportunity that serves other people.”
Medals are one way of measuring an Olympic life. Others are available.
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