No finish line
New Zealand rower Shaun Kirkham (pictured third from front) won gold in the men’s eight at the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics.
Olympic Rower
Across more than a decade in the New Zealand rowing team, Shaun Kirkham lived the full cycle of elite sport: early promise, a crushing performance slide, and last-chance qualification that led to gold in the men’s eight at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
In conversation with The 1v1 Project, Shaun shares how chasing success nearly broke him, how he’s learning to let go of old mindsets, and how life beyond the boat is redefining what strength looks like.
The finish line was 30 seconds away, and Shaun was spiralling. After a decade chasing Olympic gold – years of coming last, missing qualifications, and grinding through a global pandemic with no promise the Games would even happen – his mind flooded with every possible disaster.
“Something’s going to go wrong,” he thought in the final moments of the race. “There’s no way this is happening. We’re going to get disqualified. There’s going to be an issue somewhere.”
To the outside world, winning Olympic gold might have seemed like the flawless result of eight rowers moving as one. But for Shaun, it was also a deeply personal victory over the inner critic that had driven – and tormented – him throughout his rise to the top.
All or nothing
From the age of 14, Shaun had an overwhelming drive to excel in something at the highest level. Specifically, he wanted to find a sport that he could represent New Zealand in at the Olympics – and rowing proved to be the ideal fit.
“Rowing is a caveman sport; you won’t get far on natural talent alone,” Shaun explains. “You’re just pulling on an oar really hard and you’re doing that for a lot of years.
“So what I saw from the start was a sport that rewards effort over time, and I backed myself to give it everything. That’s always been a skill of mine.
“I joke with friends that I’ve got a personality which tends to latch on to things,” Shaun adds. “I’ve got this cult-like approach, where I just go all-in. I’m kind of all or nothing, and I was lucky to find a sport that rewarded my own particular traits.”
“What I saw from the start was a sport that rewards effort over time, and I backed myself to give it everything. That’s always been a skill of mine.”
Seven-year slide
It wasn’t long before that all-or-nothing approach was tested. After early success, his crew entered what he describes as a seven-year downward slide – a stretch where, despite putting in more effort than ever, their results steadily declined.
In 2018, they were the slowest eight on the field. In 2019, they missed Olympic qualification, finishing sixth when only the top five advanced.
“It was almost like we got a little bit worse each year,” acknowledges Shaun. “Our team culture slowly unravelled. One thing went wrong, then that same thing went wrong again the next year – plus a bunch of other things. Then the following year even more things went wrong. Everything was snowballing.”
“I spent seven years pouring everything into it, and I blamed myself. My confidence was badly beaten down.”
For a sport that’s meant to reward consistent effort, this was devastating: “I spent seven years pouring everything into it, and I blamed myself. My confidence was badly beaten down. I couldn’t see that there were other forces at play – that it wasn’t all on my shoulders.”
The psychological toll was immense, and most damaging for Shaun was realising how deeply his identity had become tied to his performance.
“Before Tokyo, I remember telling my partner that I’d trade decades of my life to make this eight go well. That I’d give anything to make sure this boat moves fast. It was all I cared about, and that was so upsetting for her to hear,” Shaun remembers.
“I look back now and think, ‘Wow, there’s a hell of a lot more to life.’ But that’s the mindset you end up in.”
Last-chance crew
Any other crew might have been crushed by so many setbacks.
And when Covid-19 hit in 2020, scattering the team into isolation, they were left to train alone in their homes – with no guarantee the Olympic Games scheduled for later that year would take place at all.
“All of a sudden we were loners, and we weren’t even qualified for the event we were training for. We didn’t even know if Tokyo would go ahead.”
Shaun calls this period “a pretty harsh razor and filter”, and it turned out to be the making of them. When the world reopened, they competed in a last-chance qualifying regatta – and won, booking their place in the rescheduled Tokyo Games in 2021.
“The whole experience bonded us as a crew; we had nothing to lose,” reflects Shaun.
“By the time we went over to Tokyo, we were like, ‘Shit, it’s crazy we’re even here. So let’s just see what the hell happens.’”
Shaun and his crew compete for gold at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games.
Next chapter
Winning Olympic gold was supposed to be the end of the story. For Shaun, though, it was the beginning of a new challenge: figuring out who he was beyond the sport that had defined him for over a decade.
“When you succeed, your emotions are overwhelming. You feel fantastic, unstoppable, validated. It’s a classic athlete thing. You wind your self-worth up in sport.
“But then you crash. It’s like, ‘Okay, the job’s done. Now what do I do?’ I couldn’t imagine life after that Olympic final finish line. It was just this massive void. You learn so much about yourself in that moment.”
Shaun discovered he had few immediately transferrable skills for the business world. “I was mentally cooked after Tokyo, and I hated that I only knew life as a high-performance athlete. I wanted a new perspective.
“When you succeed, your emotions are overwhelming. You feel fantastic, unstoppable, validated. It’s a classic athlete thing. You wind your self-worth up in sport.”
“But I naively thought I could walk into a really good job that would utilise my specific skill set. That just wasn’t the reality.”
He decided to start his own digital marketing company, SK DIGITAL, which allowed him to apply his high-performance mindset to a new domain.
“It quickly became clear that I could approach my business with the same intensity I brought to rowing,” Shaun explains. “The rewards, the hard work, the perseverance were the same; I still needed to be ready to learn as much as possible and take feedback on board.
“So as difficult a transition as it was, throwing myself into something from scratch was a good way for me to work through things. And what I thought would be a stopgap until I found a “real” job became so much more than that.”
Shaun stepped away from competitive rowing after Tokyo 2020 and went on to launch his own company, SK Digital.
Reshaping success
Shaun is still unpacking the mental habits that once powered his athletic success but take a toll on everyday life – patterns rooted in self-criticism and the constant pressure to be better.
What helped build an Olympic champion can be harmful in the slower, more enduring world of business.
“As athletes, we live in four-year cycles. We have to commit the absolute living shit out of those four years and be really brutal on ourselves. But in life, the equivalent cycle isn’t four years – it’s 40. No one can sustain that kind of intensity for decades.”
How he views success is evolving, too. Where once it was about results, now it’s about supporting others in achieving their goals. “Helping you move the needle” is his business philosophy.
“It’s not just a sports story. It’s a 10-year battle of failure, failure, failure, failure, followed by one really good result. That’s a process we can all empathise with.”
“I’m getting so much gratification out of making a genuine difference in people’s projects and helping them in a way they perhaps didn’t expect,” says Shaun. “I get heaps of satisfaction out of that, and that feeling is challenging my definition of success.”
That shift in mindset has shaped not only how he works, but how he connects. The resilience he developed through sport remains one of his strongest tools – it’s just channelled differently now.
“When I speak to corporate groups about my journey, I can see why it resonates. It’s not just a sports story. It’s a 10-year battle of failure, failure, failure, failure, followed by one really good result. That’s a process we can all empathise with.”
New kind of champion
Fatherhood on the horizon has prompted Shaun to reflect more deeply on the values he wants to pass on – and the identity he’s slowly stepping out of.
He’s beginning to see that, unlike in sport, there’s no finish line in life – just a chance to keep showing up, learning, and improving.
“Maybe my dad instincts are kicking in, but I want to start celebrating effort and giving it a good go more than any result,” reveals Shaun. “That’s a much healthier way of going about things.
“I sometimes remember conversations I had with my mum when I was competing. She had to talk me off a cliff a few times, and I understand now how heartbreaking it must have been for her to listen to the way I spoke about myself.
“No matter what I was going through, she always told me to be kinder to myself,” he adds. “She still reminds me of that today, and it all feels like it’s starting to click with me.”
Shaun Kirkham
FEATURED STORIES
