Claire Burley: the power of difference in sport

On Sunday 21 September, Claire Burley made her World Rowing Championships debut – racing the preliminary race in the lightweight women’s double sculls with her partner Leung Wing Wun. In a close race, the Hong Kong, China duo finished fifth, giving them a target to improve for the final.

Burley is one of 304 first-time competitors at the World Rowing Championships. Her journey to the national team has come alongside a new phase in her life, in which she has embraced an ADHD diagnosis to give herself new confidence.

After growing up in Hong Kong, Burley moved to the UK aged 16 to study acting. She took up rowing at university, but gave the sport up to focus on her career.

“A year and a half ago if you’d told me that I was going to be here today I’d have thought you were joking,” she says, after her heat in Shanghai.

Burley says she got “slowly sucked back” into rowing when living in Hackney, East London, through making connections with groups including the True Athlete Project, which aims to prioritise mindfulness in sport and improve culture and mental health, and Neurodiverse Sport, an organisation aiming to make neuroinclusive practice standard across the sporting world.

“Meeting all of them and learning about their values with sports, and taking a much more compassionate and mindful approach to sport, dragged me back into rowing,” explains Burley.

She joined Lea Rowing Club, a competitive but community-focused club in East London, and raced with them at Henley Women’s Regatta and Henley Royal Regatta. Burley says rowing and the club were crucial when she was trying to manage the stresses of being an actor, and she sees parallels between rowing and acting.

“They kind of go hand-in-hand because you learn a lot about resilience in acting, and a lot about bringing confidence to yourself and playing to your strengths.

“Acting is such a hard career, and at the time I was living in London. At the moment London is getting so expensive, and I was constantly stressed out because it was about ‘when am I going to get my next job? When am I going to get paid?’ The only thing that really held me together at the time was rowing, which was why I went back into rowing full force.”

She credits her coaches at Lea for building confidence in her abilities, showing her that she could still achieve against taller, heavier athletes, and giving her the push to want to represent Hong Kong. So she went back home, and made the squad, followed by several months out to recover from a bout of fibromyalgia caused by stress and mental health problems.

She was back in training in March, and adds: “Within a few weeks of coming back I got the worst 2k score I’d had in a long time, but also it taught me so much about myself. I came back and did the 2k and I wasn’t angry, whereas before I would have been frustrated and sad.

“Instead I looked at the bigger picture and I was like ‘I’ve literally only been training properly for a month, it’s not the best 2k, it’s fine, I’ll get fitter, I’ll get stronger’. Two months after that, I PBed.”

Burley credits this new-found mental strength to understanding herself better since her diagnosis of ADHD with autistic traits, known as AuDHD, last year.

“It’s been a big learning curve doing what we call ‘unmasking’,” she says. “Learning who I am and being kind of proud of who I am and proud of my differences and my quirks. Before, I’ve been told that everyone feels this way, everyone does this, but now I know a lot of my feelings are very unique to being neurodiverse.”

Burley adds that rowing has been the perfect outlet for her, with long steady state sessions helping her focus and channel pent-up energy. She wants to share the freedom she has found through sport as a neurodiverse athlete with others, and has started a charity called ‘Attention, Go!’ to help others.

“It’s very much in its grassroots stage at the moment but sports for me has given me a lot of freedom and it’s taught me so much about myself and it’s helped me so much as a neurodiverse person, it’s the one place next to performing where I can feel truly free and feel like I can take risks and not be afraid to be myself.

“I want to be able to use sport as a way for people to be able to advocate for themselves within neurodiversity, but also for a way for neurodiverse people to be able to find that sense of freedom for themselves as well.”

Burley is keen for others to get involved and says the charity can be reached through its Instagram page, @attention.go.charity.