“I am rowing solo and unsupported from mainland Europe to mainland South America, minimum rowing 15 hours a day, and it is expected to take me just under 90 days.”
Zara Lachlan says it so matter-of-factly she could be talking about a walk to the corner shop, yet the 21-year-old will be setting off from Portugal on the 3,600-nautical-mile row to French Guiana in the coming days, aiming to become both the first woman and youngest person to complete the feat.
What is even more remarkable is that Lachlan decided to embark on the challenge, which is raising money for the Women In Sport charity, only in April and had her first experience in an ocean rowing boat just two months ago. “It definitely is scary, but I feel like if you’re not a little bit apprehensive about it, you’ve not understood the scale of the challenge,” Lachlan says, adding with typical understatement: “Luckily, I quite like rowing.”
Given what Lachlan is attempting, she was the ideal guest for the first episode of the new series of the Telegraph Women’s Sport Podcast, which is hosted by Dame Laura Kenny and is released today. The episode theme? Inspiration.
Lachlan plays down the inspiring aspect of her endeavour, saying it is “underserved” because “I haven’t actually done my row yet”. But Kenny is quick to counter that by saying: “To even begin the row, I think, shows the kind of determination and courage that you actually have. And, for me, what you’re doing and showing how much courage you have, that is inspiration. That is inspiring the next generation.”
Kenny understands the responsibility female athletes have as role models, particularly as she was thrust into the spotlight after winning two Olympic gold medals at London 2012. The former cyclist is Great Britain’s joint most-decorated female Olympian with five golds and one silver medal.
“Stepping out onto an Olympic stage is one thing, then coming back after you’ve won and people saying, ‘Oh, you’ve inspired my daughter or my granddaughter to get involved in sport’, it did feel like a huge responsibility,” she says. “I went from Laura the bike rider to Laura, I guess, the public figure, and it was something that took a little bit of getting used to.
“It felt like a huge responsibility, because all of a sudden I was thinking, ‘Hang on, this really could be on me to help the next generation get into sport and then stay in sport. So, what do I want people to see me as? For me, it was always talking openly about absolutely anything that a female athlete could come up against.”
Carla Ward, the former Aston Villa Women’s manager, who was also part of Emma Hayes’s backroom team as the United States won Olympic gold in the summer, believes more can be done to help athletes adapt to becoming role models.
“Women’s football has developed at such a rate that some of these players are now global faces and are expected to inspire the next generation,” Ward says on the podcast. “A lot of them do, but there needs to then be a support mechanism to help them guide that next generation. They do want to inspire the next generation, but they are inundated. You almost have to adapt your terminology, the way you speak, the way you act, how you conduct yourself on social media. How do we educate them and guide them to be role models? It doesn’t come naturally to everybody.”
Recent research from Sky Sports found that 88 per cent of people agree that watching female athletes on TV inspires young women to participate in sports. Tennis icon Billie Jean King is among those to have espoused the “you have to see it to be it” idea for women’s sport and it is something that Sue Dorrington, who completes the guest line-up on the first episode, has seen in rugby.
Dorrington helped organise the first Women’s Rugby World Cup in 1991 and was part of the England team crowned world champions in 1994, but it is over the past couple of years that she has seen major shifts, with the record crowds at Twickenham for Red Roses Tests symbolic of the sport’s growth.
“When I was the commercial director of the Women’s Rugby World Cup committee in ’91, I was told one day by a corporate, ‘Sue, women’s rugby is a participation sport, it’s not a spectator sport’,” Dorrington says. “So, when I was in the stands at Twickenham with 42,000 people around me, oh my word, I think I sobbed the whole day. I was just so proud of everyone. The Red Roses and England, they’re a brand now.”
