COVER FEATURE
Unfinished Business
Lauren Rowles
Words: Tom Ransley / Photography: Benedict Tufnell
At 13 Lauren Rowles suffered a lifechanging illness; five years later, she made her Paralympic debut in the most emphatic of ways, winning gold. “Sport was my therapy. My way of battling the demons,” she says. Adolescence is never easy, but Rowles’s route through teenagerhood surpasses the typical hormone-fuelled rollercoaster most mere-mortals ride.
When we meet, Rowles is excited. Who can blame her? Eight years on from her debut she’s now one win shy of making history. The Brummie sculler is dead set on delivering gold in Paris. If successful, she’ll become the first Para rower to ever be crowned Paralympic champion at three consecutive Games, but this isn’t why Rowles is excited. She’s days away from becoming a mum for the first time.
“After Tokyo I went through a tough time with my mental health. I was in a very suicidal place.”
“I’m trying to cash in on all the sessions that I can before the baby comes at the end of the week,” says Rowles. Her heavily pregnant fiancée, Jude Hamer, is a triple Paralympian wheelchair basketball player and the pair’s relationship started in lockdown before the pandemic-postponed Tokyo Games.
“It was never our plan for it to happen this way,” says Rowles of the timing of their firstborn. “We feel lucky to be in this position and having the baby. When you are a same sex couple you obviously must go through the clinics and stuff. We have seen so many people who have struggled to have children. I see it in a different way now. It isn’t as easy as people make out.”
“Our lives are massively going to change. It is going to be the hardest thing that we’ve ever done. Doing it in this year isn’t an easy thing to do. I’m not walking into it blindly. I just must have good management of it all.”