Maddy Badcott’s swift rise to the top of Great Britain’s youth rowing team has taken her by surprise. And so it should.
The 17 year-old sculler from Holloway only started rowing competitively in September 2011 but just over a year later she was awarded the £2,000 Sporting Excellence Award by Islington Council to help fund her training camps, competition costs and equipment.
It is no wonder then, that Maddy is still adjusting to her lightning quick rise to the top.
“I was a little surprised by how good I was and I definitely took all my friends by surprise,” she says.
“I guess I’m starting to settle into it all this year. Last year it was all a bit scary and everything just got bigger and bigger and then by the end of the year I was racing in national competitions.”
When she won bronze at the National School Regatta last year she said she celebrated more than the first and second placed rowers, a sign of how unfamiliar she is with her newfound success.
“I don’t understand how I’ve done so well,” she says, looking back on her first season in competitive rowing.
Having won gold in the Under-18s sculls at the National Championships in July, Maddy has now set her sights on representing Great Britain at the World Junior Rowing Championships in Lithuania this summer, which would cap her incredible first two years in the sport.
“Rowing in the World Championships this summer would be really cool and unbelievable bearing in mind I only started the sport two years ago.”
It is easy to forget that Maddy is still at school studying full time towards her A levels. “It’s all about getting the balance right. But at the end of the day I’m just a normal person,” she says.
But Badcott is anything but normal. Not many 17 year olds wake up at 4.15 in the morning to take a night bus across London and she heads to Lea Rowing Club for 12 training sessions a week. Her coach puts her through her paces alongside nine others in the club’s Performance Squad.
As Badcott paces around the boathouse preparing for another training session, it is clear that her coaches and fellow rowers hold her in high esteem and everyone seems to be trying their hardest to help Maddy make her name in the sport.
Dan Cooper, the head coach, runs around busily ordering people about but he is more than happy to take a few minutes to share his excitement for the club’s star talent.
“I’ve been coaching for the last five years at the Lea Rowing Club and Maddy is the only athlete I’ve had down here that has the potential to be an Olympian,” he says, beaming with delight.
“As a coach it’s great, it’s one of those things as a job that you know you’re going to pass her on at some point to a coach in the GB team but she goes as far as she wants to go.
“As long as she keeps on enjoying it and keeps on winning, then I think she’ll continue and see how far she can get. It would be great to see her on BBC Sport at some point.”
But for all her talent and hard work, Maddy is surprisingly modest. As she talks about her plans to go to university to study English next year, it takes a coach eavesdropping in the background to reveal that she is on her way to Oxford University, the ideal place for her to follow her dream of rowing in the Olympics one day.
“It’s pretty surreal – I didn’t really expect that to happen either,” she says shyly. “It’s good for the rowing because they do have pretty good facilities there so if I could make it work it would be pretty good for me.
“It was about the English to start with – rowing has only been part of my life for a few years now but it’s just great that both of them have worked out like that.”
Standing at almost six-feet tall, Maddy has the physique of a rower, but as she says herself, it is hard work that will bring her success in the future.
“Rowing is about hard work – it’s not one of those sports where you have it or you don’t, you have to really work at it and you have to be motivated to do the daily training when you come out of school or before school.”
If Maddy needed any more motivation to succeed it came at Eton Dorney watching the Olympics last summer. As she sat cheering on the likes of Sophie Hosking and Katherine Copeland on their way to gold in the lightweight double sculls, she admitted that she has dreamed of finding herself in their place one day.
“That’s the ultimate goal,” she said. “The Olympics would be great, it would be amazing, but it’s such a big commitment, you have to really know that’s what you want to do and I’ve only just started out and I’d like to take it a bit further and see whether that’s a real goal.”
Before that, there are plenty more milestones to reach and accolades to win. In the spring of 2015, when Maddy will be in her second year at Oxford, women will race on the same day as the men in the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race for the first time in its 183-year history.
“It would be pretty cool,” she says as she ponders being part of the history making in two years time.
Video by Rob Grant
[…] edited this video interview with Maddy Badcott, an upcoming rower using Final Cut Pro. I started using iMovie, but I had real trouble exporting […]