‘There are photos of me that make me want to cry’

Caragh McMurtry loves rowing. She hates it. She doesn#39;t know quite how to reflect on rowing, she says. It has taken her to the biggest stage in sport and into the inner workings of herself.

She says: “I am doing everything I can to make things right and still being misunderstood” As a teenager, she would feel disconnected from others. She would clown around and join in the high jinks, but, emotionally, she was always one step removed. But she knows she doesn#39;t want any other athlete to endure the pain that came with the pleasure she found in sport. McMurtry found rowing when a local club in Southampton brought some stationary rowing machines into her secondary school.

The mix of working in close harmony, but entirely individually, chimed with McMurtry. As a 17-year-old, she was part of the Great Britain four who won silver at the World Junior Championships in 2009. McMurtry grew up on a council estate. Her home clubhouse wasn#39;t attached to a private school or located in a leafy London suburb.

She rowed for Coalporters in Southampton - a club established by workers delivering coke to ships and more used to racing in choppy coastal waters, than pristine boating lakes. In 2014, as her mental health suffered and frustrations with the Great Britain set-up intensified, McMurtry was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. She was proscribed lithium, lamotrigine and quetiapine, a potent mix of anti-psychotic and mood-stabilising drugs. 34;I was the only kid from a state school at those World Junior Championships and I felt it,’ she says.

McMurtry spent five years medicated; training hard, feeling bad and struggling for selection. A new performance director - Brendan Purcell - revisited her diagnosis. McMurtry did not have bipolar disorder. She was, is, and always has been autistic.

Her brain didn#39;t need to be fixed or tweaked, just understood. The team nutritionist was asked to provide McMurtry with bland food. The coaches were asked to avoid asking her open-ended questions in the morning and to provide a sum-up at the end of team briefings. The Covid pandemic then freed up her team-mates to oversee their own training, working on ergo machines and weights in isolation.

McMurtry, now 32, retired from rowing immediately after the Tokyo Games. But she is still making waves. She has founded Neurodiverse Sport, a group that educates athletes, teams and sporting bodies about environments that are welcoming and fulfilling, regardless of how your brain works. British Rowing is one of the organisations looking to improve.

The organisation has launched a free web-based app for athletes to find self-support strategies and define how they best communicate and absorb information. It is aware that Caragh looks back on her time in the sport with less positive reflections than we would hope. Neurodiverse Sport will host a panel discussion featuring former Premier League footballer Greg Halford and former British number one tennis player Sam Smith. It is designed for both the neurodiverse and neurotypical - emphasising that the two categories are not binary, but part of the same spectrum.

Caragh McMurtry is at peace with rowing.