It’s 50 years since Nuala Lupton became the first Skibbereen rower to compete internationally – she was on the Irish women’s coxed four that raced at the 1975 Senior World Championships in Nottingham
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NUALA Lupton was the only non-Commercial member on the Irish team. Tina Kavanagh, Olive Middleton, Gerri McCaffrey, Brigid Conway and cox Mary Hutchings had rowed together for years. They knew each other inside out. They had already represented Ireland three times.
Together the Commercial women were unbeatable. That’s why they weren’t keen on Nuala joining their team. They didn’t open their arms to her after she earned her place on the team. In their eyes their boat wasn’t broken, so why fix it?
‘We did have it pretty much all to ourselves,’ Gerri McCaffrey says. ‘When the IARU decided that they were going to send a crew to the Worlds we were thrilled. Then there was talk that they would open it up and make a squad. That put our noses out of joint. We thought, what’s wrong with us, we’ve been rowing together for the last four years.’
But Nuala was as good as any of them. She improved that boat. She was the only woman in Ireland who could make it go better and she did. The World Championships were beckoning. This meant a six-week training camp in Blessington that summer ahead of the event. But Nuala was in a bind. She had three young kids and nobody to mind them. Her husband Fintan, who was now the treasurer of Skibbereen Rowing Club in his spare time, couldn’t get the time off work as a garda.
Her father was also dying. Nuala, the youngest of her family, looked after her parents as they got older. Solutions were found on all fronts. It took a dinner with Fintan and Frank Durkin at The Lord Edward on Westmoreland Street in Dublin to persuade her that the impossible was possible. They told Nuala she had to go, that this was a chance that she couldn’t refuse and that very few ever get an opportunity like this. Nuala knew they were right.
Her siblings all came home for two weeks each to mind her father. They would all say after how much they loved their time with him. He passed away from cancer that October. That was two months after his youngest daughter became the first person from Skibbereen Rowing Club to compete at World Championship level. Better again it was Senior, the highest rank.
Nuala ended up taking her three kids with her on the training camp. There was no other option. The Commercial crew could head back to their Dublin homes at the end of each day. That was a luxury not available to Nuala, so she bought a caravan from an advert she spotted in a newspaper. She didn’t have time to view it. Instead the deal was struck over the phone. She had to take the seller’s word that it was in good shape.
Fintan towed it from Courtown in Wexford to the lakeside in Blessington. It became home for Nuala and Liam, Caroline and Fionn – eight, seven and six years old. The caravan was yellow and white, and full of fun. Where the table and seats were by day transformed into three single beds at night, while Nuala had a fully sprung mattress for her double, a surprise comfort in a field in Blessington beside the lake. They were isolated. This was just a field with a caravan and trestles that the boats were kept on overnight.
Her kids loved it. They wanted to go back the following year for their holidays. They had the lake on their doorstep. They spent hours swimming and fishing for crabs. They were never bored. It also became HQ for the crew. There was nothing better than a hot cup of tea in the caravan after a training session.
Twice a day for two hours in each session, the women’s four trained.
It was gruelling stuff. The entire Irish squad for the Worlds trained at Blessington, over half an hour outside Dublin, including the Garda Boat Club eight. Seeing as Nuala is a garda’s wife, there was no shortage of babysitters and helpers to keep an eye on the three when she was on the water.
Their coach was Anne Noonan, the wife of Commercial international sculler Sean Noonan, and they rowed thirty miles a day in those six weeks. The thinking was that they needed a lot of time in the boat; seeing as Nuala was new to the crew, they would need to get used to one another and get the timings exact. Practice, practice and practice was the only way. In the morning they’d row to the Poulaphouca Dam and back again. They repeated it in the evenings.
The Commercial crew already had an understanding built on years together in the boat, but there was a different feel now with Nuala in it. She had earned her place after fighting hard. Brigid was the sub. Different combinations were trialled to get the balance right. But time was against them with the Worlds closing in. The boat needed work. Fast.
Gerri, the lightest, moved from the stroke seat to the bow. Nuala and Olive sat in the middle, seats two and three, two powerhouses, the engines. Tina, ambidextrous and able to row either side, went the opposite way to Gerri, from the bow to the stroke, and she set the rhythm for others to follow.
Nuala found it all challenging, especially on the water. She’d only ever had one coach: Frank. Even after he left Bantry, to go working in Cork city, he remained her coach. She’d travel to Cork to train with Frank, using his single scull on the Lee and competing in the Cork Sculling Ladder against men as her training. She held her own there too.
Nuala felt sick from the intensity of the training. She was pushing herself, maybe too hard. Maybe being the only non-Commercial rower coming from a new club with no clubhouse and very little equipment in a small town in the country meant she had something to prove to everyone else, that she deserved her place and that she was good enough. Because she was.
Those six weeks in Blessington, juggling her kids and rowing, were especially tough on the only mother in the crew. She was also the oldest, at twenty-eight; Mary was twenty-two, the rest all twenty-one.
‘It hit me more, I think, because they were used to training with each other and I was trying to put in that extra effort. Sometimes it felt like I couldn’t go on,’ Nuala says.
All rowers have been there, gone to the well and felt there was nothing left inside to give. Then they look again, find that bit extra and power on. It’s winning the battle in the mind. Nuala did that. She earned her place in that boat and, off the back of that training camp, they travelled to Nottingham for the fifth World Rowing Championships in optimistic form.
But the result on the water was not what they wanted. Ireland finished eleventh overall. They’d expected better. But still, they were eleventh in the world at their first attempt. Also, they’d broken the glass ceiling and put Irish women’s rowing on the international map.
Nuala would also go from being Skibbereen’s first competitor at a Senior World Championships to winning the club’s first national title. She opened the door for others to follow.
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This is an edited extract from Something in the Water, by Kieran McCarthy, which tells the story of how Skibbereen Rowing Club conquered the world.
