20 August 2026

By Tim Koch

Tim Koch hopes that Karl Marx is wrong about British Rowing.

If you go to the bio page of British Rowing’s website and click on “Louise Kingsley” expecting to find information on the GB Rowing Team’s Director of Performance since December 2021, you will get an Error 404 message and the line Oops! This link appears to be broken.

A statement from British Rowing explains: Louise Kingsley MBE has retired from her role as Director of Performance for British Rowing. Louise has been away from the team for the past few months while an independent investigation into a complaint was conducted. That investigation has now concluded, with it being agreed that no further action will be taken by British Rowing. Louise has taken the decision that now is the right time for her to retire.

Simon Briggs, writing in the Daily Telegraph of 14 August noted:

With only two years to go until the Los Angeles Olympics, these are significant blows to the stability of the performance team. There will now need to be a full recruitment process for Kingsley’s replacement, in line with UK Sport policy, which will leave her successor with only one full season and a couple of regattas before the LA Games begin…

I am not pretending that I have any deep understanding or inside knowledge of what is happening at The Priory andI have had to look up what the Director of Performance actually does. He or she is not a head coach, they are more involved with strategic leadership, culture and environment, coach and staff recruitment and management, financial and resource oversight and pathway development. 

The whole story is rather strange and certainly for Louise Kingsley to retire in her mid-50s, two years before the LA Olympics, is odd by any account.

British Rowing’s statement did not say what the complaint was nor did it publish the investigation’s findings. This can only lead to unhelpful speculation. Further, to “clear” someone by saying that no further action will be taken seems most unsatisfactory, it is reminiscent of Scottish law’s recently abolished “third verdict” of “not proven.”

Row360’s article on the situation included this:

The leadership change comes during a wider reorganisation at British Rowing. Former Olympian and lawyer Tom Solesbury became chief executive in March 2026, inheriting safeguarding disputes, financial pressure and questions about the governing body’s disciplinary systems.

Controversies at Leander Club and Oxford Brookes University, both important sources of international rowers, have tested those systems… The Brookes head coach and director of rowing faced permanent suspensions in September 2025, as announced by British Rowing…

Both suspensions were lifted in February 2026 after an independent professional risk assessor and a newly formed independent Case Management Group reviewed the cases…

In an April interview with The Telegraph, Solesbury accepted that the governing body’s processes required an overhaul.

“The regulations around safeguarding, discipline and dealing with club disputes are not good enough,” he said.

While all this is all very political and all very technical, I suppose it is an inescapable part of the zeitgeist. 

On 16 August, Mark Davies, Chair of British Rowing 2018-2025, put a remarkable 1,100-word post regarding Louise’s departure on his Substack titled, Retired? Really? He suggests that her departure was not a genuine retirement but the result of a breakdown in leadership relationships. Some edited highlights:

I recently posted on X that I found it extraordinary that British Rowing could really not find a single person in the organisation prepared to put their name to proper thanks to Louise Kingsley as she departs. Various people have come back asking questions which are too long to answer on X, so I am writing here instead…

While I was Chair of BR, an allegation which seemed to me quite obviously inaccurate was made about her… 

After I left British Rowing in November (2025), the person who made the allegation came back to make it again. If that allegation had come to me, knowing what I know, I would have had the five-minute conversation to get the background that could have put it to bed. But the decision appears to have been made that it warranted Louise being removed from the programme while it was investigated fully – perhaps an unsurprising decision given that a view seems to have taken hold at the top that the sport is somehow full of safeguarding and culture problems. 

Louise was sent home, everyone was told she had personal issues to deal with (The Telegraph reported that she was ill – TK) , and that is where we have been for the last eight months. If you’re concerned about culture and safeguarding, leaving someone at home without contact while an endlessly long investigation is drawn out seems a curious approach, but there you go…

The idea that – having been kept away from the programme for eight months – Louise sat at home ruminating, and independently concluded two years out from LA that now was the moment to “retire” is, frankly, for the birds. 

Presenting all this as a straightforward “retirement” conveniently sidesteps the rather more important question of accountability for the decisions that brought one of British sport’s most successful Performance Directors to this point. British Rowing needs to own the decisions it makes, and own the way it makes them. They should be hanging their heads in shame.

I am not sure if Mark’s piece clears or muddies the waters. Further, while he is now writing as an outsider, it should be remembered that as Chair, overseeing the governing body, he held an important and influential position in British Rowing for seven years. His full post is here. 

Many still wish to know the circumstances surrounding the equally opaque and equally seemingly inexplicable departure of Jurgen Grobler as Chief Coach in 2020, just before the Tokyo Olympics where GB won one silver and one bronze and was fourteenth in the medal table after coming top in 2008, 2012 and 2016. There is surely a danger that, in Karl Marx’s phrase, history will repeat itself, first as tragedy (Tokyo 2020), second as farce (Los Angeles 2028).