Doyle would not have been near the water had he not set off with a prestigious modelling job at an upmarket store in Dublin
Sports stars, mainly former sports stars mind you, have become the new supermodels. For the kind of fashion headlines that once belonged to such as Christie Brinkley, Claudia Schiffer, Iman, Linda Evangelista, Heidi Klum, Elle Macpherson and Naomi Campbell, the world is looking to sport The new supermodels, the ones that cost the most, are those such as David Beckham, Maria Sharapova, Gisele Bundchen, Cristiano Ronalso, Anna Kournikova, LeBron James, Coco Gauff… Meet Banbridge and Ireland’s Phillip Doyle; he used to be a budding supermodel before he ever touched an oar and started rowing. The man who swapped his bronzed tan for bronze Tokyo Olympics 2024 and 2025 World Championships medals – the latter won last weekend in Shanghai. Supermodel vs Sport star as a career? Well, you still get to travel the world, there is still a lot of time spent in the gym. There is just less variety in terms of workwear! Doyle’s latest sporting heroics came alongside Fintan McCarthy last weekend in the double sculls final at the World Championships, taking third place in the final and in what was only their fourth race together. It could have been one place better too as while Poland had pulled clear a long way out and won comfortable gold, Ireland were overhauled by Serbia with just 5090m to go to the line. A remarkable achievement for Doyle who would not have been anywhere next to near the water, an oar or a lightweight double scull if he had not set off with a prestigious modelling job at an upmarket store in Dublin – you couldn’t make his journey up! “The story,” he shrugs, “starts on Dame Street in Dublin actually, I was the fella standing at the front of the Abercrombie shop, there were two lads in Ireland who were chosen to do it, and I was one.
“We’d opened the shop with 30 lads from all over the world and myself and David Neale, who it turned out rowed for UCD boat club, were the Irish guys. “At this stage, I was 18/19 years old and the brief was that you had to be trim and have a six-pack chest. I didn’t know anything about rowing, I played hockey and I just trained hard in the gym and I was, like, in my mind if I train harder, I’ll look better. “And then David was like ‘I eat whatever I want but I can keep in shape because I row…’ and he was in good nick despite the fact I could see him eating burritos and all this and I was there eating chicken and pasta and broccoli and all this like you see on the internet. “So I’m saying to him how could you eat all that and be so strong and fit, can I train with you but I don’t know anything about rowing, I wouldn’t know where to start. “He said he knew the coach up at Queen’s University where I was going so I got a text message saying ‘Oh, I heard you were chatting to Dave, will you come down and give the rowing machine a go?
“When I got there I jumped on the rowing machine, ripped the time over 1000 meters, and then he said we should give this a go.” At that stage, rowing simply suited Doyle. He had been accepted into medicine and was playing hockey with Banbridge and, having been an Ireland under-age international, was on the fringe of the senior Ireland team. “Yet I’d always felt I had a ‘gap’ in my sport that I needed filled and I’d been filling it myself with fitness and squash and gym and all sorts of things and rowing just seemed to fit that hole nicely.
“It sure filled the hole as well, more than it probably should have, because rowing is hard work and then I found myself just getting deeper and deeper into it and starting to get more competitive with myself in it, and starting to really enjoy it and being out on the water. “This was 2014 when I started with this and the coach brought me to the 2015 European Universities Rowing Championships in Hanover and I was like, you can travel with this sport too, new experiences, new places! “I raced there, came eighth I think, and I’d only been rowing on a single scull for about two or three months and it just that gave me hunger to push forward in the sport. “There was a coach at the time who said to me when I was half joking ‘Sure I’ll be in Rio at the Olympics’ and he went ‘Well not Rio 2016 but you could definitely go to Tokyo 2020’. “I was thinking I’ll be finished my medical degree and at that stage long gone but he’s actually serious that he thinks I could be an Olympic level athlete and I’d had no idea. “Now from what I have learned, I think way more people than they think could be Olympic athletes but at that stage I was like there’s no way, there’s not a chance and then you slowly just work your way down the process.” Abercrombie was great fun – so trendy, so cool at the time, ultra-hip even – but something was going to have to give. “The guy who was the CEO, he built it into a brand but I think it may have over-expanded too quick. “We didn’t do (autumn/winter/summer/spring) sales. We don’t sell black, it was queue up over there and pay your money, it was all about creating this ethos. “I remember people were, like, going to New York and being begged to bring back Abercrombie hoodies and stuff, the brand was huge at that point. “It was a girl from Banbridge who approached me randomly at the Dublin Horse Show and asked me if I would like to come and work for Abercrombie and I told her no, I am not going folding T-shirts. “No, she says, we’re opening a new store in Dublin and I don’t want you to work in the shop. I want you to stand at the front of it – you are going to be our ‘Greeter’. And I’m like ‘What? Wise up!’, I told her.
“But she took my details anyway and then she called me and said to come down, I came down and they said they had to do photographs because you had to get approval from the office because they didn’t want to hire people who didn’t fit their clothes image and that kind of stuff.. “And then after all this, there were two of us approved as greeters, myself and David Neale.” Abercrombie ‘Greeters’ were encouraged to visit and work at the company’s retail outlets worldwide, sorta Howya, to Bienvenue, to Hey There, to G’Day mate depending on what continent you were on! “This Greeter thing in Dublin was part of a larger group which had 30 or 40 lads from all over the world, and we stood outside Dame Street for months or for a week. “You would get trips to America. If there was a store opening in Paris, they were, like, do you want to go there? I got to Washington once for a Black Friday weekend but I couldn’t go to almost all these because of University, I had started in Queens, they wouldn’t give me the time off. “I would get the bus down to Dublin to work all weekend and get the bus back up, it was an hour and 20 minutes travel from my house.” It was not the normal way to get an Olympic medal but as Doyle suggests: “I think way more people than they think, could be Olympic athletes.” He is living proof there are ways and means and just because you don’t live near water doesn’t mean the sport shouldn’t be considered. Just as you don’t have to have horses out the backyard at home to try for equestrian sports. Given his assertion about people who don’t think they could be Olympians could make it as Olympians his case makes for an interesting outlier. “There’s no rowing club in Banbridge, you need a body of water and while rowing in England is a very high fallutin’ sort of job, in Ireland it’s very much accessible if you just live near a rowing club. “There’s a bit of a river goes out the back of my house but you wouldn’t go rowing too much so the access that was closest to me would have been Portadown rowing club but I never would have thought to travel to it because Banbridge is such a huge hockey town and you just played hockey. “University is a great opportunity and a lot of people find it in university just because it’s very location dependent. “It’s such a great sport,” he adds, “it might not be for everyone but it is an incredibly challenging sport and, at the same time, there is such pleasure to be derived from it. You can do it on your own, as a part of a team as I have working with Fintan and besides there is all that water and scenery. “Much better than the catwalk runway for me for sure!”
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