Sophie Souwer: a new nation, family, and rowing career

It’s just a few minutes since Sophie Souwer came off the water after her heat of the women’s single sculls at the 2025 World Rowing Cup in Varese. Sitting in the shade talking to World Rowing, she is interrupted by husband Martino Goretti bringing her their 14-month-old son for a cuddle and a feed.

“It was my first night without him. Now he gives me a long big hug,” Souwer says, as her son snuggles in.

Life is a bit different these days for the 37-year-old. Varese was her first event on flat water in four years, after she finished seventh at the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games – also in the single. Since then, Souwer has only raced internationally once, competing with friends and compatriots from the Netherlands and Italy at the 2024 World Rowing Coastal Championships.

As a rower for the Netherlands, Souwer won a series of World Rowing Cup medals, plus World Championship gold in 2017 and bronze in 2018 and 2019 in the women’s quadruple sculls. She is a two-time Olympian, with an appearance in the women’s eight at Rio 2016 to add to her Tokyo 2020 single sculls outing.

After Tokyo, Souwer felt mentally and physically “empty”, she says.

“I’ve done the preparation to Tokyo Olympics working after Covid, so that year was very stressful,” she explains. “I got a hernia, got back into the boat in the single, had a very short preparation, had to squeeze everything in three months to prepare myself for the Olympics with just one preparation race back then.”

After the Olympics she “left the door open” but decided to let rowing go. “So for three, four years I barely touched an oar – just once in a while for fun I did a race out of nothing,” she says.

But then came Paris 2024. Souwer went to the Olympic regatta at Vaires-sur-Marne to support her good friend Karolien Florijn and the rest of the Dutch team, and found herself unexpectedly moved by their huge success.

“It was hurting. I had tears in my eyes: one fact I was so happy for the girls that they’d done so well, the other thing was like ‘hmm, there’s something not right, why am I feeling like this?’” she says. “Then I talked to my husband, to Martino, and he said ‘I feel there’s something there that you can only solve by trying again’.”

Souwer had only recently given birth, in April 2024, but she decided to get fit again through rowing.

“I was feeling better than I was expecting, rowing was going better than I had expected, and so things started to roll,” she explains.

Souwer knew racing for the Netherlands was going to be difficult, now that she had relocated to Italy to be with Goretti and their son, so she spoke to the Italian team about switching nationalities. They were enthusiastic, and everything then moved rapidly. Varese is her first appearance in the blue kit of Italy, but Souwer is still juggling rowing with other commitments.

“I am still working four days a week – I have to, because who’s going to pay the bills, we cannot rely fully on the job of my husband,” she says.

She and Goretti are also sharing the care of their son, who is “always with me or Martino”.

“So then I have to squeeze in the training, it’s going to be in the living room, or on the Tacx (indoor bike) in the kitchen,” Souwer explains. “Martino’s working for a rowing club, so in the end the surrounding is there, I have a boat. So I squeeze it in.”

Souwer says she has been inspired by the likes of New Zealand’s Olympic champions Brooke Francis and Lucy Spoors, who both returned to rowing after giving birth and shared the women’s double sculls podium in Paris with fellow mum Mathilda Hodgkins Byrne of Great Britain.

“They put down an example that it’s really possible. You need the resources, you need the support, the background, probably also the finance. I cannot leave my job yet. Or we find a good sponsor, we hope, so I can liberate some hours,” she says.

The couple are also supported by Goretti’s mother, who helps with babysitting.

But Souwer acknowledges the challenges with juggling the different aspects of her life.

“You need the passion and the willingness to do it and having fun out of it. Without the fun you don’t make it, because you’re tired all the time and you have to deal with other sensations than if you’re full-time focusing on the sport and having to recover, you cannot.”

Luckily, she says she enjoyed her first race back.

“I was nervous, but somehow also quite confident. I was thinking ‘I know this, I know this situation’. I’ve done worse in the way of stress and tension and expectations, and I didn’t have any expectations,” she says.

“I said ‘go into it like it’s your first race, you just have to see where you are and have fun, and do your thing’. At the end, I cannot be unsatisfied.

“The fun is I know it can go better, I can do better already, I just have to get the strokes going.”

With a 11th place finish at the end of the regatta, there is clearly lots for Souwer – and her family – to look forward to in this new phase of her career.