Kathleen Noble embraces Olympic ideals ahead of Olympic swansong

Rower Kathleen Noble knows she will not be a medal contender when she competes for Uganda at the Paris Olympics, but the 29-year-old with Irish roots nonetheless embodies Olympic ideals.
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Noble will be competing in her second Games for the African nation in the women's single sculls and while she is not aiming for the podium, she is training diligently despite her amateur status to do the best she can.

"The goal for me is less performative in the sense of which position do I want to get to and more centred around how do I execute the best race that I can," she said.

"When we grew up in Uganda people asked where I was from and I'd say 'Ireland'. But then when I was on holiday in Ireland, people asked me where I was from and I'd say 'Uganda’."

Noble is a latecomer to the sport, rowing for only a decade after first representing Uganda at swimming.

She was born in Kampala to Irish missionaries, her father a doctor and mother a teacher who have lived in Uganda for the past 31 years.

"When we grew up in Uganda people asked where I was from and I'd say 'Ireland'. But then when I was on holiday in Ireland, people asked me where I was from and I’d say 'Uganda’."

Now she lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, juggling work as a software engineer with her Olympic training.

"Uganda is a lovely place to grow up and I miss it. Representing Uganda has had a key role in my identifying as Ugandan. That has kind of forced me to step up to the plate a little bit and be like, 'yes, this is my country', and I feel closer to it for it."

She broke Ugandan swimming records while at high school and went to the World Short Course Swimming Championships in Istanbul in 2012 as a 17-year-old.

"When I finished high school, I was kind of done with swimming and