The iron will of Saudi Olympic rower Husein Alireza

Rower Husein Alireza was in first place in the men’s singles 2,000m race at the 2019 Asian Indoor Championships. His arms and legs pumping with piston-like consistency, each stroke timed with a surgeon’s precision – both combining to rocket his figurative boat through the first 1,900m towards a certain gold medal for Saudi Arabia. And then, out of nowhere, black.

Despite being only 100m from the finishing line, Alireza’s body shut down on him. “My body just collapsed. It’s like it overheated and it felt like I was paralyzed for four minutes,” explains Alireza.

Later in the ambulance while receiving oxygen and glucose, others around him were rightfully anxious and concerned. Alireza, however, was disappointed but strangely happy.

“I remember being really curious as to what was happening with me in that moment. I was in a hell of a lot of pain, but mentally, I was a bit like ‘wow, this is cool’. It was a new sensation. I had never pushed my body to a point of absolute collapse before. I think I was proud of myself.”

Like all professional athletes he had heard stories about what it was like to push into that “red zone”. But it was only by personally experiencing that he got a deeper sense of understanding his limits. “Only by going there did I realise the levels of what my body was capable of, and I believe that I unlocked an extra five percent in me. I now know that on a race day, I can go there if I need to.”

---

T.S. Eliot once wrote: “only those who risk going too far, can possibly find out how far they can go.” It is no surprise that it has become somewhat of a mantra for Alireza, one that has fueled his trailblazing rowing career where he became the first Saudi to compete in the sport at the Olympics. But more on that later, for Husein Alireza, his story is not as much a sporting one, as it is a human one.

---

Husein Alireza is a family guy. His inspiration is his mother. His hero is his father – Ali Husein Alireza. Having grown up in Jeddah, Alireza Sr. went to study in the UK at Charterhouse School, a highly respected public school just outside of London. He was a good student who excelled at squash, and after developing good a business acumen eventually took over the successful automotive dealership business set up by his great grandfather back home in Jeddah. It was there that Alireza Jr. was born, and essentially followed in his father’s footsteps. He too grew up in the Kingdom before going to boarding school at Charterhouse School. He too played squash and it was there that he first demonstrated signs of his athletic prowess by competing in the National Championships for his age group.

“I might be known for my rowing, but squash is actually my favourite sport,” laughs Alireza. “I love the intensity and the strategy makes it so much fun.” The truth is, becoming a rower was not a life- long dream or passion for Alireza. In fact, it wasn’t until he was studying for his postgraduate degree at Cambridge University that he even took up rowing as a hobby. His mother had admired the sport and the discipline it requires. She insisted that he tried it, if only to help pass the time and meet new people. “A lot of my base fitness levels were there because of squash, so I picked up rowing quite quickly and improved to the point where my coach told me that I should consider taking it more seriously.” And take it seriously he did.

Flashforward four years and Alireza is walking into the Japan National Stadium at the opening ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics, not only as captain of the Saudi rowing team, but as one of the flagbearers of the Kingdom’s Olympic contingent – one of the very highest honours in sport.

The act of simply being there was breaking new ground for Saudi rowers, while millions at home and around the world saw a modernizing face for the country on a sporting landscape. Half a decade earlier, no one in his family had as much as held an oar before, now Alireza was the poster boy of the sport in the country and playing a pivotal role in the creation of the Saudi Rowing Federation, where Alireza Sr. would become the Federation’s President.

As the son followed the father, the father now follows the son.

---

Remember that T.S. Eliot quote? Well, it is in the three years leading up to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics that Alireza begins to find his truth in those words.

Following the decision to take rowing seriously, Alireza hired one of the sport’s most respected coaches, Billy Barry. Together, himself and the former Olympic silver-medalist would dedicate the next three years to the goal of a Saudi rower competing at the Olympics. Despite the nearly 60-year age gap, the two would essentially become best friends. It was Barry who first told Alireza about the T.S. Eliot quote.

“Rowing is pain, and you have to be comfortable in that pain,” Alireza states bluntly. “I tried so many sports, and nothing comes close to how much rowing challenges you both mentally and physically.” Alireza’s mother proved right, the first thing the sport taught him was that you cannot get good at it without discipline. It was Barry who drilled into him the understanding that to compete on an Olympic level dedication and self-discipline would need to be paramount.

“I train three times a day, for six hours, burning around 5000-6000 calories, and basically only taking one day off every 2 weeks,” says Alireza.

“You have to be totally okay with the knowledge that you are going to get up early tomorrow morning, knowing that it is going to be cold and wet, and that pain is coming your way,” he says before conceding that the sport, and the mindset that it requires is also responsible for teaching him some of life’s most important lessons. “Without learning what it truly means to be resilient, I wouldn’t have been able to cope with other areas of my life where a deep inner strength was needed,” he says.

Several of Alireza’s darkest days indeed fell in that period. In 2018 his mother was diagnosed with multiple myeloma – a terminal bone marrow cancer – a battle that she would sadly lose in the summer of 2020. It was in that time that his perspective on life changed. Rowing seemed trivial, and the hours and weeks he was spending away at training camps felt like time wasted from what was most important, family.

It was his mother, however, who insisted he continue.

“To be honest, after the diagnosis, my motivation changed. It was no longer about the personal glory of being an Olympian, that all seemed irrelevant. I was doing it for the people around me,” he explains. “It didn’t matter that I was miserable and was hating the training camps and having to Facetime my mum from overseas, I had visualised the goal of being at the Olympics and anything else that happened in between didn’t matter. I was rowing for everyone else, I was rowing for her.”

With the global pandemic forcing a 12-month postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, Alireza was able to spend the last few months by his mother’s side. But, if the emotional weight of losing your mother was not enough, fate soon had another couple of cruel, literal, body blows for Alireza, again, testing the very limits of his mental fortitude.

The first curveball came on the day of his Olympic qualification race, where he sustained a bizarre stress fracture to a rib and subsequently a collapsed lung. Despite doctors advising him to withdraw from the race, he fought through the pain and qualified, miraculously. He returned to his training base in the UK for an operation, only to test positive for Covid-19. It was two weeks before his flight to Tokyo.

“I got it bad. All the symptoms, flu, fever, loss of breath, no sense of smell or taste,” he explains. “It was crazy, I had worked so hard and sacrificed so much to get to where I was and then, bam, Covid. Somehow, I passed a negative test just days before my flight to the Games, but I was in no state to compete with, literally, the best rowers in the world.”

Despite the miracle of getting there, fate had conspired to ensure that Alireza was in the worse possible physical condition to compete. He was worried about embarrassing himself. He thought about quitting and, as he so often had before, he turned to his family. “My dad said that he would support whatever decision I made, but deep down I knew that I had to swallow my pride, use the opportunity to bring others up with me. I knew what simply participating would mean to the Federation, for the sport back home in Saudi, and for people like the Minister of Sport, Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Faisal. It would be a massive platform on which to build on for the next four years.”

So, just as he had done before, he looked deep inside himself and knew exactly what he had to do.

For the record, he still reached the quarterfinals.

---

On the set of the Esquire Saudi photoshoot, Husein Alireza is hiding a secret. He has been in the UK for a month in a training camp with the other members of the Saudi national rowing team. Escaping the heat of the Middle East summer, they are in preparation for the upcoming 2022 World Rowing Championships in Prague. Only, Alireza won’t be competing. He is recovering from a dislocated shoulder. On set, no one notices.

“The injury is hugely frustrating, especially as it happened while I was playing a friendly game of Padel!” he says when we catch up on the phone a couple weeks later. “The timing of it means that I not only miss the World Championships, but also the upcoming Saudi Games where the prize money is SR1 million!” He is speaking from his hotel room in Prague where he has travelled,

irrespective of the injury, to campaign for a spot on the athletes’ committee for the sport’s governing body. Currently Asia represents 30 percent of competitors in professional rowing, and yet, remains proportionately underrepresented within the decision-making hierarchy of the sport. “Our region doesn’t have much of a voice in the sport,” he explains almost statesman-like, “so now interest and accessibility are starting to pick up, we are trying to change that. It would be good to have someone who can raise concerns that we have in the region to the governing body.”

To most of us Husein Alireza is Saudi Arabia’s best rower, having reached the quarterfinals of the Tokyo Olympics, but the chances are he will not be its most successful. The work he has done to individually create a blueprint for a new sport in a sports- obsessed nation is significantly more important than any individual racing accolade he might achieve. And the lessons that he has learnt along the way will leave a legacy far wider than any individual sport can. Because his story is not a sporting one. It is a human one.

---

Read the full story on Husein Alireza in Esquire Saudi’s Autumn issue, on newsstands next week

Talent: Hussein Alireza @huseinalireza 

Article: Matthew Baxter-Priest @mrpeaker 

Photographer: Charlie Gray @charliegraystudio 

Stylist: Adele Cany @adelecany 

Styling Assistants: Patricia Humm @patrishcahumm & My Olsson Parkin 

Grooming: Brady Lea @thebradylea 

DOP: Mars Washington @mrwashphoto 

Assistant: Joshua Hippolyte @myphotography1992 

Fashion Editor: Laura-Jane Brown @Laura.jane.brown 

Producer: Steff Hawker @steffhawker 

Watch by @Cartier 

Location: Twickenham Rowing Club @twicksrowing (with special thanks)