11 Jul 2025
Life after Rowing (5/5) - Roman Roeoesli
At the end of every Olympic cycle, following the Olympic Games, there’s a flurry of retirements from rowing. After the Paris Olympics it was no different. Over this week World Rowing is highlighting five retirements. They all have different reasons; they all have their own story.
Switzerland’s Roman Roeoesli retired on the same day as his pairs partner Andrin Gulich, announcing he was stepping away from rowing in early February 2025 – six months after they won bronze at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games in the men’s pair.
The retirement brought to an end an 18-year career, which started when Roeoesli was just 14.

“From the beginning I fell in love with this sport. I tried many different sports before – running, soccer, climbing, and also tennis – but everything with a ball was horrible,” he remembers.
He started the sport after being encouraged by a friend, and then persuading his parents to nag the coach until he got a seat in a boat.
“From there on I spent almost every free minute in my home club, in Seeclub Sempach, because we also became really good friends. This friendship is until today really important for my life. It gives you so much,” he says.
Roeoesli represented Switzerland for the first time at the Coupe de la Jeunesse in 2010 in Hazelwinkel, going to the World Rowing Under 19 Championships the following year.
“In the beginning I never thought that I could become a world champion or anything like that, I thought it’s probably impossible, we’re too small in Switzerland.
“I kept working on it and just took little goals, and the goals became bigger and bigger, and at some point I really wanted to achieve that and I started working really hard for that,” says Roeoesli. “It was a really long time, 18 years of rowing, but I wouldn’t miss any days. I would do the exact same thing again.”
He says rowing was the best life school possible, teaching him how to work in a team and the power of positivity.
“What I also learned is that if you put more effort in something you get most of the time all the more out of it. That’s really important for me, and that helped me a lot already in the rest of my life.
“I went to the Olympics three times and only the last time it worked out with the medal. That’s again an answer for me that it’s really worth to have dreams and to believe in them and to work really hard for them. At some point you will be able to achieve them.”
Rowing also gave Roeoesli friendships around the world – from training with the Australian national team in 2018, to those he made when rowing for Oxford University in 2021/22.
And although Roeoesli and Gulich missed out on Olympic gold, he says he is content with what they achieved – Olympic bronze, and world and European gold in 2023. Roeoesli also picked up two European silver medals and three bronzes, plus silver at the 2018 World Rowing Championships in the men’s double sculls.
“We gave everything we had and I can say I didn’t have more to give. For me that’s the optimal case and that’s why I’m really really happy with that and I can say I achieved my goal even though it’s not gold,” Roeoesli says, of Paris.
Having stepped away from rowing, Roeoesli is now working to become an organic farmer. He says he dreamed of being a farmer as a child, and the insights he gained into soil and water studying water science, policy and management at Oxford led him to want to make a difference through farming. Although Switzerland has fairly clean water, it still suffers from challenges with pesticides and resistance to antibiotics, which risk the water supply and food production of the wider region. Climate change is another challenge where Roeoesli wants to make an impact.
He is halfway through a two-year course, and then he wants to buy a farm and use what he has learned in practice.
“The farming school is taking a lot of time. I’m working 10 to 11 hours a day. Besides that I have to do my own stuff with my office stuff and finding a farm and then networking, so I don’t have enough time for training which makes me a bit sad,” Roeoesli says, admitting he is yet to find the right work-life balance post-rowing. He also recently got married.

But he says rowing will remain part of his life. After taking part in an erg race against Gulich in Lucerne at the end of June, alongside the 2025 World Rowing Cup Lucerne, the duo went out for a paddle on Lake Lucerne.
“We went out early morning and I loved it. We did just 12k but the boat was stable, we were like really sending it, and we did some sprints, and we said it’s still really cool,” Roeoesli says.
“I will keep rowing for sure, and just take all these good memories always with me from the whole career.”