At the time, Lola Anderson had written it off as a cringeworthy adolescent whim. She was far from the only youngster to have been swept along by the endless summer of London 2012 and, watching Great Britain surge down Dorney Lake towards one of their four rowing golds, was struck by “this massive wave of inspiration”. Her love for the sport had been growing and, at 14, this was the moment to spell out a plan for the future.
She ran to find her diary and started writing. “My name is Lola Anderson and I think it would be my biggest dream in life to go to the Olympics and represent Team GB in rowing and, if possible, win a gold medal,” read the entry. But immediately self-consciousness set in. Looking back now it is easily diagnosable. “Teenage girls don’t necessarily have the most belief in ourselves and I got very embarrassed,” she says. “I kinda thought ‘That was a really cocky, arrogant thing to have written’. Back then, on a good day I wasn’t capsizing. I ripped the page out and threw it in the bin.”
It was not such a daft notion after all. Anderson is telling the story on a beautiful late spring afternoon in Kew Gardens, where she has posed for a group photograph with the rest of this year’s Olympic rowing team. Something must have gone pretty right and, sitting beside a rather more ornamental body of water, it becomes clear that was only half of the tale.
That scrawled wish had become a distant memory when, in October 2019, her father, Don, asked that she fetch his safety deposit box. “It went straight over my head, I did as I was told,” she said. “When I gave it back to him he then gave something back to me, which was that diary page. He’d obviously been cleaning out my little waste paper basket, seen this diary in the bin and decided he was going to give it back to me one day when it meant something, either as a silly joke or something with real meaning.”
Don had been ill for a number of years and two months later cancer would take him. He had introduced Lola to rowing, watching her gradually grow in affection and aptitude for a sport he adored too. Retaining the note and holding it back until she had won a world under-23 title in the quadruple sculls, the last of her races that he would ever watch, was the ultimate act of parental love and faith.
“He was a very positive man,” she says, pausing for a moment while emotions flood back. “It reflects to me how much he cared, invested and believed in me and my siblings, even when we couldn’t see it. There was nothing to show I had any talent when I first started rowing but he kept the note and chose to believe.
“As the years went by, when I was proving him right without realising it, he quietly sat on that knowledge and didn’t feel the need to boast or share it. He wanted to save it for the opportune moment. He was very selfless with that, and that’s why it means so much to me.”
How proud Don would feel if he could see Anderson on Saturday, when she will take part in the women’s quadruple sculls heats alongside Hannah Scott, Georgie Brayshaw and Lauren Henry. While Tokyo 2020 was almost barren for Team GB’s rowers, this summer promises a return to those golden days that so enthralled her. The quartet are world and European champions; the ultimate prize is clearly within reach and she has learned to master the self-doubt that accompanied her rise.
“I think last year was the first time I allowed myself to start thinking about myself within an Olympic project,” she says. “Winning the world championships in September was a pretty big moment. I’ve struggled quite a lot to see myself in certain arenas, there’ve been dreams and expectations that I kind of label as too big. When an achievement like that happens, it can feel like it’s just crept up on you from nowhere.
“But when you’re on that podium and they put that gold medal around your neck, you can’t help but feel the tears come. And you think of all the people that got you there.”
The Anderson family’s passion for rowing stems directly from Don, who was born and raised in Zimbabwe before taking it up at university in Durban. Initially Lola was cowed by the aptitude of her elder sister, Amber. “She started and was very, very good to begin with, almost off-puttingly so. Then my twin brother, Monty, took it up and that shook away the fear of ‘am I going to live up to my older sister?’ We had that rivalry to catapult each other a little bit.”
In the end it propelled her to the top while her siblings drifted away from the sport. The boat club at Surbiton high school, in south London, became a second home once she had overcome those initial struggles keeping out of the water. Later came the challenge of balancing her obvious talent with a degree in English literature at Newcastle university.
Anderson is unashamedly bookish and it proved a useful quality when inflamed discs in her back, a common problem for rowers, threatened to derail her season in 2023. She underwent two epidural procedures; dealing with the mental consequences, while straining at the leash to make the cut for Paris, was the biggest challenge.
The Mountains Sing by Nguyen Phan Que Mai brought distraction, as did Pachinko by Min Jin Lee. Both books wrestle with the challenges faced by women in holding on to their identities throughout times of intense trauma. “At the end of the day, what we do is only sport,” she says. “These women have gone through much worse and I can take a leaf out of their book. There’s something about seeing women take on a challenge that really inspires me, and there are countless female athletes I’ve taken inspiration from too.”
There had been times, not too long before the thrill of that under-23 win and the day Don handed her that precious note, when she thought about calling time on thoughts of a career in the boat. “I’d spent a good few years out of the trialling system, not really succeeding in the way I wanted to,” she says. “I was putting a lot of pressure on myself and struggling just to enjoy the day-to-day. I had a really hard conversation with myself about giving up on my dreams of representing Great Britain in order to save my love of sport.”
Nobody need question her capabilities anymore, even if she admits it is still a pinch-me moment to work in the same team as Helen Glover, one of those sporting inspirations but also “our mate, our training buddy”. Anderson is 90% sure Glover’s winning race in the women’s pair was the one that moved her to shoot for the stars a dozen years ago.
She will think back to that resolution, and Don’s inextricable connection with it, when she steps into the boat at Vaires-sur-Marne. In June 2021 she made her senior debut for Great Britain at a World Cup event in Sabaudia, Italy and the sense of a defining moment is similar.
“That race was hugely sentimental and emotional to me,” she says. “It brought up so many memories of that conversation with my dad, the trust and the magnitude of the promise I’d made to him and myself. It was really hard to go into that without him.
“But I’ve found a way to take that memory as something to enjoy and fill me with pride. Now it’s more that I feel him with me, rather than his absence.”
