Aiden McLaughlin for LockerRoom
After the disappointment of Paris, Aimee Fisher has picked up her paddle once again, in a place where she knows she is surrounded by love.
Fisher has been back on the water at the North Shore Canoe Club for a couple of weeks now. Even though, she admits, there was a part of her that was reluctant to return home.
She thought it might take a few months after her Olympic campaign to start training again, but now back in her Auckland home, the alarm is once again set for 5am – although she’s not too hard on herself if the snooze button gets pressed a few times.
“It takes me a little bit longer to get out of bed at the moment than it normally does,” Fisher says.
“I wasn’t expecting to get back on the water so early, but I just felt like I needed to go out and be with people on the water, exercise and get some endorphins, and just have a little bit of routine.
“Now I’m paddling because I’m enjoying it. I’m certainly not working hard. So far I’ve completed two sessions and prior to that I was just hopping off when I’d had enough.
“She’s yet to decide whether she will aim for her third Olympics – and redemption – at the Los Angeles Games in 2028. “There will be some things that will need to change if I’m going to go for another four years.”
It’s been six weeks since Fisher lined up in the K1-500 final in Paris. For many New Zealanders, it was the most anticipated event of the entire Olympics – Fisher going head-to-head with Dame Lisa Carrington in what was expected to be a showdown for the ages. Carrington collected her third gold medal of the Games, with a heartbroken Fisher finishing fourth.
“It’s good being able to reflect on some of those things because in the moment, you think, ‘I failed’. The last eight years is captured in one race and I failed. That’s where your perspective is in the moment, you just can’t see it,” Fisher, 29, says.
“There was a lot of hurt and a lot of heartbreak and you would have seen that in the emotion [of the post-race interview]. It was almost like a bit of a grief process that I’m probably still working through.
“It hurt and there was a part of me that didn’t want to come home and face everyone. There was a bit of shame there in coming back.”
At the same time, Fisher really just wanted to return to be with her people and her community. She’d been in Europe for four months and when she got home, people were quick to come up to her and tell her how proud they were, and how much she had impacted them.
“So [despite] that fear of judgment and feeling like I’d failed, I experienced unconditional love and acceptance,” she says.
“It was so good for my heart and for healing and walking through some of the low mood, the confusion, the heartbreak, the feeling a bit lost. All these people had so much courage to stop me on the street and to speak so much life and love into my heart.”
Fisher was the kid who, by her own admission, was the one who shouldn’t have made it – lacking the tenacity, courage or mental toughness to convert her potential. But little by little, step by step, she overcame her fears and found her way.
Paddling wasn’t the path Fisher originally set out on. As a kid at Mahora Primary School in Hastings, her dad bought her a couple of sit-on-top kayaks to paddle around in. But at Karamu High School, it was canoe polo that initially appealed to her.
“I dreamt of being the best canoe polo player in the world and representing my country in a sport that I was in love with at the time, until I got in a kayak,” she says. “From the age of 10, I had this dream to be the best in the world at something. I wanted to be the next Michael Phelps or Irene van Dyk.”
When she joined the Hawkes Bay Kayak Club, her talent became ever more obvious to those around her. But she was full of self-doubt and more often than not, she felt afraid. She recalls one of the Hawkes Bay coaches, Ben Bennett, telling her these things could be overcome.
“The fear and anxiety that I got around racing was quite an obstacle to the dreams I had of being the best in the world and I went on this journey to take it on,” Fisher says. “I wanted to be able to race at the Olympics one day and perform, so I went through this process of trying to volunteer to face things that made me afraid.
“Even at school, I remember that whenever I’d do speeches or exams, or anything that made me nervous, I thought, ‘Okay, this is practice for the Olympics, the junior world championships, World Cups, even races in New Zealand’. It was always, ‘this is practice’.
“I was trying to better myself every day, just by 1%, just get a little bit more courageous, a little bit braver at training each day.”
Fisher burst onto the international scene at the 2013 Australian Youth Olympics, winning gold in the K2-200 and silver in the K2-500. At 21, she was in the K4-500 boat at the 2016 Rio Olympics, where the team finished fifth.
“We only just qualified and the goal was to go there and experience the Olympics because there really is nothing like it. You race at world championships, which are nerve-wracking and very hard, but the Olympics are on a whole different scale,” she says.
“The enormousness of the event was pretty overwhelming, but for me at that age, being in a team and going out there in a K4 with three other incredible women made that so much more doable.”
Fisher grew up believing in God, but it was in the years following Rio that she found herself back in church for the first time in 20 years, something that has become a very important part of her life.
“It’s a big part of the reason why I came to line up at the Olympics [in Paris] with so much peace and so much trust,” she says.
“I was the kid who people thought would never make it because I’d paddle to the start line crying and I was just so fearful. I had all the physicality in the world, but I was just so afraid. I hated working hard and hated the big events and racing.
“And now I just walk in this grace and this love.”
In the eight years between Rio and Paris, Fisher went through some “incredibly difficult times – with a lot of sacrifice and conflict”.
As the delayed Tokyo Olympics approached, Fisher and other paddlers left the Canoe Racing New Zealand (CRNZ) centralised programme due to deep concerns over athlete welfare.
Fisher needed to be part of the programme to be eligible for selection. While CRNZ denied accusations of a culture of bullying or harassment – and other athletes said they were well-supported and didn’t experience what was being alleged – Fisher stood tall and stayed away, despite it costing her a place at her second Olympics.
“During that time, people just came round me, so I didn’t have to stand alone. People sacrificed so much to make sure I made it through,” Fisher says. “When I raced, I raced for more than just myself. I raced for everyone that stood with me, that represented me, that walked me through that time.”
She got to do that when she became the K1-500 world champion in Copenhagen in September 2021.
Although Fisher reached a compromise with CRNZ to be selected for Paris, it’s far from certain her future will be geared towards a third Olympics at Los Angeles 2028.
“I feel like there’s still more that needs to be done in the integration in that space,” Fisher says.”There are other things that I could be doing with my life that I really enjoy. So I’m reflecting on that and going to have some conversations with Canoe Racing New Zealand about what that could look like.”
Whether or not she ends up at the Olympics, Fisher still has ambitions in the sport. She is the current K1-500 world record-holder, having set a time of 1m 46.19s in Szeged, Hungary, earlier this year.
“I still have fire burning in me to achieve that 1 minute 45 seconds. That’s always been one of my dreams, trying to set a new world record, so I would like to keep pursuing that,” Fisher says.
“I still feel like there’s more for me and so hopefully we can create an environment where I do really thrive and have my best shot at achieving that.”
When Fisher does decide to hang up her competitive paddle, a role supporting young sportswomen appeals to her.
“I see myself in that space. I’m not sure in what capacity but a big part of that is making sure there’s a really good environment and system set up for when they arrive,” she says.
“I just want to pave the way for them and I want them to have positive experiences in sport and just see people grow.”
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.