Erin Kennedy pressed “send” on the WhatsApp message to her teammates without hesitation. “This is what I want you to know,” it read. “I still come out to race. Don’t ask me if I’m okay – and no excessive hugging.”
Instead of flying the team to Belgrade two months ago for the first World Cup of the season, the British rowing helmsman was called to an impromptu hospital appointment and was told the worst: she had breast cancer.
“You hear that and you hear red sirens,” said Kennedy, 29, in her first interview since her diagnosis. “Then you suddenly find yourself in this fast-paced world. It was a very strange moment when your life suddenly took a different direction.”
Kennedy doesn’t want to hide the graphic details in her story because, she says, it could save someone’s life. She was in the shower when she discovered a lump at the top of her left breast two months ago during an intensive training camp in Italy and suspected that something was wrong.
“I thought I’d check again in a few days because your breasts can change around your period,” she explains. “I checked again in a few days and I was like, ‘S—, that’s a lump.’ “I could feel it and it wasn’t tissue at all. It was pretty firm. I could see it when I pulled on my skin because it’s pretty close to the surface.”
Still in her late 20s, Kennedy—a double world champion, European champion and world record holder in the coxed four who earned an MBE this year for services to rowing—falls into the four percent of breast cancers found in British women. under 39 years old.
“I felt so annoyed,” she says of her diagnosis. “That was the predominant emotion, rather than despair or sadness. Really, one of the first things I thought of when they told me was, ‘What about rowing?’ That is the athlete’s response.
“It wasn’t, ‘Am I going to die.’ It was: ‘Can I go to the European Championships in August?’ That’s a whole reformulation that I’m honestly still working on.”