Born to canoe: Nigeria’s Ayomide Emmanuel Bello on finding peace and power on the water

Ayomide Emmanuel Bello plunges her paddle into the water.

The blade splits open the surface. She pulls against its weight before repeating the motion again with increasing vigour and strain.

The 20-year-old throws more and more power into her strokes. The boat responds, lurching faster and further forwards. Small waves begin to form out of the back of the boat disrupting the once tranquil water. But Bello pays no heed. She and her flatwater canoe are now at full speed, and she is in her element.

“When the water is calm, nothing is disturbing your strokes and you kind of follow the movements - I love it,” Bello says with sincerity and a smile.

The young Nigerian is speaking to Olympics.com as part of a new original series ‘Playing Fields', available to stream now on Olympics.com for free, and she is describing her favourite moments when she is canoeing.

As she answers, she unconsciously begins to act out the rhythmic motion canoeists do as they drive their boats through the water. The movement comes so naturally, Bello hardly notices she’s doing it, though it's revealing that she does.

Unlike most athletes who discover their niche either by introduction or by happy accident, canoeing was a part of Bello’s world from the day she was born.

“My parents were doing it [canoeing] to catch fish while I was in my tummy before they gave birth to me,” the Nigerian begins.

“I was born in a canoe, and I started paddling when I was young. So, when I got to the age of eight or nine, I started following them to catch fish, paddle the boat for them, set the net.”

Ayomide Emmanuel Bello: How tragedy impacted her life

As the head of the family, Bello’s father was responsible for cultivating the fish as well as selling the ones they had harvested. She sometimes helped him out in between going to school.

However, Bello’s childhood idyll shattered at the age of nine, when her father fell tragically ill:

“He was sick for several months and then we just lost him. It was hard for my mom. She had to take over the business to help me and my siblings.”

The work Bello’s mother took on was too much for just one person. It meant she had to ask her daughter to give up school to guarantee the survival of the family business:

“I had to always be in the boat with her, to assist her, to paddle for her, to surf the net and hold it. When I was younger, she was taking me along while my colleagues were going to school, and it was kind of hard because I love going to school. But I didn’t have a choice; I had to assist my mum.”

Remembering, even now, watching her friends go to school while she went out to the water remains some of the toughest memories for Bello, who becomes emotional reflecting back on how her father’s death impacted her life.

But in between her tears she also insists she is grateful for the adversity. Not just for how it has shaped her, but also how it provided her with a whole new world to flourish in.

For though she was missing out on a normal childhood with her friends, by working every day Bello was becoming increasingly stronger in canoe. And it was, by being out on the water fishing, that she saw the national canoe team for the first time and decided she too could be like them.

Ayomide Emmanuel Bello: Nigeria's first-ever female Olympic canoeist

 The competitor in Bello is fierce.

That much is clear when she talks about when she first laid eyes on the Nigeria national canoeing team.

“When I saw the national boat, I was like, it’s not far from what I grew up doing. I believed I could do it better – to the top: to the Olympic level and to the world record level.”

The aspirations that were born the day she saw the elite canoers, have now taken Bello exactly to those places.

An appearance at the Buenos Aires 2018 Youth Olympic Games opened the door to other international competitions which she has seized with both hands.

In 2019 she competed at the African Games where she won four gold medals in the C-1 200m, C-1 500m, C-2 200m and C-2 500m events. Her efforts not only helped her lift Nigeria to a second-place finish in the canoeing medal table, but it also guaranteed her a spot at the Tokyo 2020 Olympics where she became Nigeria’s first-ever female Olympic canoeist.

“Being the first female Nigerian canoeing Olympian means a lot to me because this is something I wasn’t planning to get to the top of because I wasn’t even aware of the international level. All my life I was just paddling in a local boat.

“It really means a lot to me because this is what I said would come to pass, so it is a big achievement.”

Though happy for Olympic experience, Bello is already fixed on applying the technical learnings she made while competing at the Games. She says she intends to use them to come back bigger and stronger for Paris 2024:

“My best memory from the Tokyo Olympics was competing against the world record holder and world champions. I was able to compete with them and go along with them. That really showed me that I can do it better because I was so close.

“My dream for the Nigerian canoeing team is for them to be world-class and be winning gold medals in all their races and setting records like athletics – like Tobi Amusan, you know? I want them to get to the top.

“I believe my return is going to be great because I am already working towards it. My return is going to be fantastic. I really, really hope to work hard and do it better to be an Olympic medallist."

“When the gun fires, I just pick up. And everything that is in my brain just flies out in that moment. I just focus on the finishing and how to beat my time,” Bello says, imagining her processes at the starting gate.

While she has her competitors to look out for, she knows that when it comes to improving her true rivalry is with herself.

Being better to deliver those big results means that the young Nigerian is on the water at least six days a week practicing with her coach Ebenezer Ukwunna, the director of the Nigerian Rowing, Canoe and Sailing Federation.

With its demand for explosive movement and gruelling endurance, her training is tough, even when her coach does his best to crack a few jokes to lift her spirit. The necessary grit is just one of the reasons why, when she isn’t testing her lactate threshold, she has a world away from the water that she escapes to.

For Bello that is the local church choir:

“I started to sing in the choir because music makes me happy. Whenever I’m sad thinking about my other friends going to school I just listen to music and calm down.”

The sanctuary of sound provided by the choir also helps Bello navigate some of the pressures she puts on herself to succeed which, after the death of her father, can weigh heavy on her shoulders.

Still, with her canoe spraypainted gold, and the world record time etched into the wood, she takes that pain and uses it to stay focused on the thing that matters more than anything to her in this world:

“I want to use this moment to appreciate my mum. I want to promise that I’m going to get to the top and win an Olympic medal so that she will be proud of me.

"I need to dedicate an Olympic gold medal to her, so it won’t all be in vain.”