Dance class. Olympic podium. Your gym floor.

Jack Cleary was dancing from the moment he could walk. At his parents’ dance school, with every intention of turning it into a career. At thirteen, a broken knee ended that dream.

Nine months of rehab followed. Rowing was the activity recommended to rebuild his fitness and his confidence. Nobody was trying to build a champion. That’s the detail that matters here: rowing didn’t arrive in Cleary’s life as ambition. It arrived as recovery. That’s the same starting point Row Nation now builds its Foundations workshops around: gym floors, beginners who have never touched an oar.

Control, then freedom

He says the sport never won him over by winning. “A love for rowing didn’t spark from success. It came from giving me back my control and freedom.”

That love took its time to prove itself. By his own account, Cleary spent his first years on the erg “impressively bad”. He puts it at “three laps around the sun” before any degree of success in school. “Many more” before he represented the country. He wasn’t chasing results in those years. He was rebuilding fitness, pushing himself mentally, and finding self-belief one session at a time.

The numbers arrive

The results, when they came, arrived as numbers on a monitor. At seventeen, straight out of high school, Cleary posted 6:04 over 2000 metres. It was strong enough to win him a rowing scholarship to Cal Berkeley in the United States. Right after finishing college, he posted a 15:33 over 5000 metres. It’s the main reason national training centre coaches invited him to join the AIS.

The honours list

• Olympic bronze medallist
• Henley Royal Regatta Open division winner
• 13 years state representative
• 5-time national champion in the men’s quad scull
• 4-time US collegiate national championships medallist
• 2021 ACT sports team of the year

Bronze at the Tokyo Olympics was followed by a missed qualification for the Paris Games. In 2024, for the first time in almost a decade, Cleary stepped away from full-time rowing training and international competition to reconnect with his body. That break led him to the world of hybrid athletic performance. It also gave him a new 2000 metre personal best: 5:55.

He says the community he found there gave something back to his own athletic career: “My experience as an athlete was enhanced because of the knowledge they shared with me from their wealth of experiences.” That’s the favour he’s here to return: on an ordinary gym floor, with an ordinary RowErg, teaching people the first stroke that once gave him back control and freedom.

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