Olympic medallist Philip Doyle embraces rowing identity after 12 years, and eyes Cork move

Doyle is ready to give rowing a "proper go" and end his "bronze extravaganza". 

Has Philip Doyle been selected for a six-year emergency medicine consultancy scheme, chances are he'd now be an ex-rower rather than one planning for the 2028 Olympics Games in LA. Pic: ©INPHO/Dan Sheridan

Identity is a funny thing. The picture we hold of ourselves doesn’t always chime with how others see us.

Philip Doyle has won an Olympic medal and three more at various World Championships. He is a dozen years down the road in his journey as an elite sportsman, a face and a name we have come to know and associate from his world-class performances on the water.

It’s interesting, then, to sit down with the 33-year-old this week and listen as he explains how, for the last seven years, he has been in “denial” that he is in fact a rower at all. It’s something he ascribes to his dual life as athlete and doctor.

Doyle has juggled these two pursuits and passions ever since first picking up an oar while a student at Queen’s University back in 2013. So much so that he seems to have had one foot metaphorically rooted to dry land throughout his most successful period in the boat.

This dual purpose has seen him park the medical side of his brain for long spells leading up to two Olympics, but the plan after Paris last year, where he won bronze with Daire Lynch, was to once and for all prioritise the medical career.

He was either going to park the sport for a year, or for good.

The aim was to get into a six-year emergency medicine consultancy scheme up north and he is straight up in admitting that he would likely be an ex-rower now had that application been accepted. Problem was there were 2,300 applicants and only 12 available places.

“Well, the BBC did me dirty by saying ‘NHS rejection leads Philip to come back to rowing’,” he laughs. “A couple of my colleagues rang me up and were like, ‘are you stuck for a job?’ I was like, ‘no, the job is not the issue’.

“I didn't get selected. There's a lot of gaps in my CV [with] the rowing. Once that happened you can't apply until the following year. Actually, applications are at the end of this month, they close, so I still need to decide whether I apply again.

“But I think at this stage, LA is on the cards and I'll be pushing forward for that. I think that'll delay application to that scheme again. There was a fork in the road and someone closed that fork. So it just made that direction, just coming back, easier.” 

So this is it, this is him, for now.

He has come to terms with the fact that rowing will continue to be a part of his life for the next three years. All in all, this is the earliest in an Olympic cycle that he has committed so completely to that idea. He is leaving dry land behind this time.

And the prospects are tantalising.

Doyle’s third World Championship medal was won only last month, in Shanghai alongside Fintan McCarthy in the men’s doubles, and there is a depth of talent in the Irish programme jostling for seats in that boat and others in the seasons to come.

He is one of the elder lemons now and he speaks with assurance of the need for the senior athletes to be allowed to lead in a High-Performance system that has just been presented with a new director in the form of Niall O’Carroll.

For Doyle, the renewed commitment comes with practical consequences. For years he has been dividing his time between his home place of Banbridge and Belfast up north and the National Rowing Centre in Inniscarra in Cork.

He has worked in a variety of hospitals in Ulster, and in the CUH in Cork, held tax discs and motor insurance in both jurisdictions. Currently living and working near home, the time will come for another shift down south before LA28.

“I'm going to try and relocate the life down to Cork, set myself up properly and finally admit that I'm a rower. And give it a proper go. Try and break this bronze extravaganza that I've been on since 2023. It's been hounding me: third, third, third.” He’s well set to try it.

Rowing is a sport that lends itself to longevity. Sanita Puspure was winning World Championships medals for Ireland into her late-30s. That’s not a rare phenomenon and Doyle has plenty more in the tank.

He was last but one in a national trial post-Paris, part of a quad that didn’t go great in Bulgaria, and the medal he won with McCarthy came on the back of next to no time together as a partnership up to that point. An odd season, really.

If there were different reasons for him getting back on the water – that consultancy roadblock, the knowledge that funding could be affected by a year away, the absence of a European medal so far – then the clincher was the fact that the hunger hasn’t dimmed.

Without that, everything else would have been irrelevant.

“To be honest, until I kind of did that first trial in the first race, I wasn't sure. I was always, ‘if it's not there you'll know it's time to walk’. The last thing you want to do is to be told to move on.

“When I got there, and the competitiveness was still there, and it hurt me to come last so much, I was like, ‘right, this is still there, there's still hunger there, and I can use that to get back into training’.”