Lisa Carrington: The five-time Olympic gold medallist on the sacrifices she’s made for success

Lisa Carrington

In 2021, after Lisa Carrington won three gold medals at her third Olympics - taking her total gold tally to five and making her our most successful non-Paralympic Olympian - almost everyone expected her to walk away. She considered it, she says, not because it was what she wanted, but because she knew it was what so many people expected.

So next year, in Paris, age 35, she will again get into the kayak and attempt to add yet more gold to her record. She has a hunger to keep going in the sport, and a hunger to keep making the boat go faster. Winning a stream of gold medals hasn’t changed that. The gold medals don’t even seem to be the most important part of the equation for her. While she’s proud of what she’s done, she says she doesn’t know whether her astonishing Olympic achievements will ever really sink in.

“I guess everyone’s going to experience it really differently. I don’t know that it’s a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. I think that’s what you’ve got to stay away from. It’s not this magic thing that will save you for the rest of your life. It’s just a moment of achievement and hard work.”

She knows there is only a small window when she will have the conditioning and form to compete at the top level, and she wants to make the most of it while she still can

“I understand that it’s not a forever career and a lot of athletes will win a gold medal and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s me, that’s all I wanted to do, I’m done now.’ But I guess for me, I’m in a really different, unique situation, where I’m able to still make a living. I get a lot from what I do. I’m hugely supported to be able to achieve. I’ve got a great team and I don’t know that everyone is as fortunate to have that.”

Lisa Carrington with her gold medal from the K1 200m at Tokyo 2020.

A big part of the reason she has stayed at it, in spite of the sacrifices, is because of the challenge it has provided.

“Just because I’ve achieved something,” she says, “doesn’t mean that I deserve to be released from the challenge.”

The better you get, she says, the harder it is to keep improving.

“It’s like a diamond in the rough. It’s pretty shiny already. How do you make it better? That’s really what challenges me.

She says it is about more than just getting in the boat or the gym and working hard. It’s about constant innovation, and about understanding what needs improvement and how to improve it.

“It’s not as easy as just picking up a book and finding the answer. It takes a bit of work to be able to do that.”

How long can you keep going at a level that is better than anyone else in the world? Carrington was 22 when she won her first Olympic gold medal, and by then she had already been putting her body through intense training for many years.

Three of her five Olympic gold medals have come in the K1 200m, an event she has never lost in at Olympic level and presumably never will, because the event has been scrapped for the next Olympics, a decision she describes as political, and made without consulting the competing countries’ sporting organisations.

“It’s really frustrating and it made me so much more aware that people in those high positions can have so much control over your future,” she says. “And I think of how, if I never got the opportunity to race the 200, I wouldn’t be where I am now. So I think I feel sad for athletes who won’t get that opportunity at the Olympics. It just makes me think, man, if you want to really want to support sport, you’ve got to go to those really high positions to make sure that the right things happen.”

The K1500m and K2 500m, in which she won her two other golds in Tokyo two years ago, will again be raced in Paris, and at last year’s World Champs, she finished first and fourth in those events respectively. Still, it’s a long way away and there’s a chance she could walk away from her final Olympics with nothing.

“I’d be incredibly disappointed,” she says. “But I think you’ve kind of got to take stock of the work that you put in, the people you did it with and what it took to get there. You’ve got to take a lot of pride in that. So the journey is really important as well.”

Asked about the pressure she feels to succeed on behalf of an expectant country, she says: “I guess I don’t want to be a slave to it. I don’t want to be needing to always be – or have the expectation of needing to be – perfect. It’s making sure that I don’t do things because I’m afraid of failing or being imperfect and also doing something because it’s freeing of expectation.

Carrington with husband Michael Buck.

“There’s definitely a huge awareness for me around that. I guess it’s just maintaining that thing of trying to be a learner, always using strategies to not think that I know everything, that I’m the boss or I’m the best or whatever. I don’t know that that type of thinking is helpful.”

Our interview had been scheduled for 9am but had to be pushed back an hour because she had been out on the water at Lake Pupuke, and we had to finish after 45 minutes because she had to get to the gym. She is a notoriously hard trainer and famously hasn’t missed a session in 13 years: “You have to make the most of that moment, otherwise it’s gone.”

The interview took place at a North Shore cafe and on our table, serendipitously, was a book titled Silver Fern: 150 Years of New Zealand Sport. The book was published in 1990, the year after Carrington was born, and the cover image was a photo montage featuring six iconic New Zealand sportsmen and only one woman – 1952 Olympic long jump gold medallist Yvette Williams.

Carrington says though things are changing, she is concerned about the continuing lack of representation of women in sports coverage. In particular she’s noticed an explosion in the number of sports documentaries on television streaming services lately, overwhelmingly focused on men.

“Imagine being a young girl and only ever seeing documentaries on male athletes. Would you be more interested in sport if you saw more girls, more females? Because I think you can understand, when you get to see someone awesome, someone that’s like you, that looks like you, on the screen or wherever… I don’t know that for me, growing up, there weren’t that many. There was Sarah Ulmer and probably the Silver Ferns. So I think there’s a bit more room for us females.”

She met her now-husband Michael Buck in 2010, the year before she won her first world championship, but it wasn’t until the London Olympics the following year that she – and, by extension, he – were catapulted into the national consciousness: “Because kayaking is such a small sport here, there’s not much hype around it, so winning at the worlds didn’t really change things for us.” Winning gold at the Olympics is a different story and when she did that, “Partner of Lisa Carrington” became the title New Zealanders attached to Buck, and continued to attach for many years.

Though she says that has been difficult for him at times, and that the dedication and commitment required to sustain her performance at the top level has sometimes made it difficult for her to focus on the relationship in the way she would like, it’s not all struggle: “There are definitely advantages for him as well. He gets to travel a lot with me, and see parts of the world he otherwise wouldn’t, but yeah, I’ve definitely put kayaking first, and that’s something he’s had to deal with.” The fact he’s been happy to deal with it is evidenced by the fact that they were married last year, after 11 years together.

Carrington and Buck in New York.

She says Buck has been incredibly supportive and understanding, but it hasn’t just been a one-way street. He also has a successful career in financial services that occupies a lot of his time and energy, and she has been there for him through all of it. “Relationships are all about give and take,” she says, “and there will come a point when my career is over and it won’t be like this anymore, and he knows that.”

She has talked openly in the past about wanting to have children, but has decided to wait until after her career is over, a decision she has not taken lightly. “I think what really helped was thinking about career women, and how more and more people are now having children later in life - that it is a possibility.”

She says she feels societal expectations and pressures but she’s not worried about that right now: “I think I’m kind of lucky enough to be around people that aren’t pushing me with those kinds of expectations or pressures, and that there is time.”

Whenever the end to her incredible career comes, she expects she’ll be very sad.

“It’s been such a huge part of my life, and as difficult as it is to turn up and race, I think there’s nothing else like it. Not that I’ve experienced heaps of life yet, but to generate and create those situations for yourself where you have to perform under immense pressure, I’d say that there are probably not many that I would put my hand up and choose to go into. Performing and being in sport and those high-pressure situations, it’s my choice to do it. And in that moment, it’s the only thing that matters in the world.”

Main photo / Dean Purcell. Make-up / Claudia Rodrigues. Styling / Courtney Joe. Necklace is stylist’s own.