Exclusive: County Derry Olympic gold medalist Hannah Scott on her historic achievement

“People say rowing is boring. Rowing is not boring” claimed Hannah Scott after she and her Women’s quadruple sculls (W4x) crew mates, Lauren Henry, Lola Anderson and Georgie Brayshaw won gold in the most dramatic of styles at the Vaires-sur-Marne Nautical Stadium in Paris. The Dutch crew had led from the start but a final sprint and photo finish saw Team GB cross the line by just 0.15 to top the podium.

 Speaking after winning Team GB’s first ever gold medal in the Women’s quad, Lauren said: “It was just amazing! I could feel that we were moving on the Dutch crew, so in bow one of my jobs is to call to the other girls, so I said ‘we’re going now. We need to go now!’ because I could sense we were coming back. Georgie and Lola in the stern really drove that finish and Hannah and I were with them the whole way. We started charging back and I could feel that ‘we’ve got this’. 

 “We have one hundred percent belief in the race and one hundred percent belief in each other and we just trust our plan and each other so much. We know that if we deliver our best then we know we could get an outcome like this, so it was heads in all the way.  We’re used to close racing but that was really tight, I felt we’d won it but it wasn’t until I looked over and saw ‘GBR 1’ that I let myself actually believe it and that moment was just ecstatic. We always thought during the race that we had a chance, we’ve come back from quite a long way before, and if we believe it’s over then it already is over. The moment we lose that belief we’ve lost the race so no matter how far behind we are in the race we’ll always have belief until we cross that finish line.” 

 Lola said: “I think everyone always wants to win as convincingly as possible. To be honest, there’s never a strict plan we look to follow exactly. Racing is always going to be fluid and dynamic and that’s part of what makes everyone here in this event Olympians, and the Olympic standard is the fact they know how to move with the race. If you’re down at the start it’s not over, if you’re down at the 1k, 500m or the 250m it’s not over, you’ve always got a chance to claw your way back. That’s what we have as a crew, we have unrelenting full trust knowing that if we commit we can move, and that’s what we did.” 

 Hannah said: “About ten strokes from the line we just said ‘we got this’, then we just came through. We really trust in ourselves. We did this at the World Champions as well so we like to give people a tight race. We’ve been training for this for three years for moments like that and we weren’t going to let it go. Tough strokes have been taken every day for that, so other people could see it as nerve wracking but we were all eyes in. Getting the medal from Princess Anne was amazing! She made a good speech for us at the embassy earlier in the week where she said to the three girls that it’s their first Games and to just enjoy it. It shows the talent with them that it’s their first round and they can get a gold medal. Turning it around from Tokyo, this is a really great surprise as well. But Princess Anne just said to enjoy it.” 

Picture Credit:(Steve McArthur for British Rowing)

 Georgie said: “I just had belief in what they were telling me behind me. They had belief and I just trust them so much. It’s just incredible. I have no words. It means so much but I didn’t think too much about that and I just got on with it and ended up here, it’s amazing!”

 Lola concluded: “Winning the first GB Olympic gold medal in the quad is amazing, there have been so many women who have come before us and so many women who have fed into this and gave us the belief. Fran Houghton has been a big part of our process, there have been so many people who have gone into this, Andrew Randell our coach, all the coaches, support staff and our families. The four of us got the medal but there’s so many more that have got it too and we are so grateful to them!”