When Lisa Roman speaks, people listen. How could you not?
The Olympic gold medalist from Surrey didn’t grow up on the water as one might expect — she grew up in the rink, on the ice. Her mother, Elizabeth Roman, was a competitive figure skating coach, and after spending so much time in different rinks throughout her youth, Roman found a passion for the sport as well.
15 years later, Roman had peaked within the sport of figure skating and found herself at a crossroads. It was then when she decided to pick up the oar with UFV’s walk-on rowing program and the rest, one might say, is history.
The rowing team looked quite similar back then to what it does now, with between 10 to 20 UFV students taking part in the club. However, there was no infrastructure in place. The club didn’t even have a boathouse when Roman arrived.
“We used to carry a motor down every single day, put it on the boat, and get the boat out,” said Roman. “It was just such a task. And now, we have people that like to complain about pushing a boat out of the boathouse. I’m like, you guys have no idea what this was like when I did this. So, I sometimes sit back and laugh at what we have now versus what we had then.”
There were just enough walk-on athletes to practice rowing in pairs, as opposed to the eight person boats Roman would make her career on. The club’s coach at the time was Cascades Hall of Famer, Liz Chisholm, who identified Roman’s strength and power and investigated how that could be used to her advantage as a rower. Roman moved quickly through the program up to varsity before heading to Washington State University on a scholarship and catching the eye of Team Canada’s national training program.
Roman began regularly competing for Canada at the National Rowing Championships (NRCs) in 2013 against the top rowers in the sport, putting her on the path to compete at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio. Canada went into the games with large expectations after winning two bronze medals and a silver at the NRCs from 2013-15, respectively — ultimately falling short of a medal in Rio.
Roman described that falling short in Rio only fueled her fire even more to return to the biggest stage in sports. With Canada’s disappointing results came sweeping changes for the rowing program. There was a new coach on board, and a bevy of unknowns. Canada would head into the next Olympic games in Tokyo with just one silver medal at the NRCs in 2017, lowering the expectations from the previous games in Rio. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the sports landscape was altered, and somewhat levelled by the fact that no athletes across the world were able to race competitively in the games’ build-up.
“To be able to come out and do what we had done in practice — which was that we wanted to be the Olympic champions — we dreamed like that, and then for us to go do it was pretty amazing.”
With the pandemic restrictions in place at the time, Roman was back home within 48 hours of standing on the podium. After conquering the games as a rower with an Olympic gold, Roman’s focus shifted to coaching and raising a family. Leading her back to where it all started, UFV.
Roman was surprised to find out that the rowing program was basically dormant. Boats hadn’t been rowed since just after the pandemic, and there were few athletes involved with the club. Her original plan was to just help part-time, but that changed when she found out there was no coach, and essentially no rowing program.
She felt for those people who needed a space to do more, just like who the young Lisa Roman was first stepping foot onto the boat dock. Rowing is an unglamorous sport. There’s a lot of early mornings, and not a lot of resources. But the bond between teammates is what Roman hopes to inspire.
“I think rowing is one of those sports that is very much a later in life sport. If you start when you’re 17-18, it doesn’t matter if you want to go to the Olympics. There’s opportunity for that, whereas something like, I don’t know, gymnastics … Obviously you have to do that your entire life to be successful. I found opportunity in rowing that I didn’t think was possible.”
If you’re looking to do more athletically, contact UFV Rowing at ufvrowingcoaches@gmail.com
