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There’s a distinctly slower, more deliberate pace as Olympic gold medallists Alicia Hoskin and Dame Lisa Carrington paddle across Lake Pupuke. Carrington is eight months pregnant and Hoskin is on a long road to recovery from major surgery to remove a rare cervical rib. “It feels so good,” says Hoskin. “Lisa and I can have this time together while our teammates are away preparing to race at the world championships in Europe.” It’s Hoskin’s dream to be back out on the start line at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. Six months into her recovery, the two-time Olympian is able to spend an hour at a time on the water – after weeks of struggling to hold her head up straight. She couldn’t smile or laugh. She’s had to relearn how to paddle with a broomstick in her lounge, retraining her brain to trust the motion again. These leisurely paddles with Carrington have been a godsend to Hoskin, 26, who thought she may never return to the lake after having a rib removed from her neck in February. The rib had been pressing on a nerve and restricting an artery, making it difficult for Hoskin to hold her paddle as her arm went weak and numb. It also left her in pain every day. When Hoskin was cleared to return to the boat in June, she messaged Carrington, Olivia Brett and Tara Vaughan — the women she won the K4 500m Olympic gold with two years ago in Paris. “I told the girls I remembered driving away from the club before my surgery wondering if I was ever going to drive back this way again,” she says. “So when I drove towards the club again with a boat on my roof, I cried all the way there. “I told them it felt like the feeling we had when we won gold at the Olympics, because it’s the journey you go on to get to a place like that. At the Olympics, we all knew the journey we’d gone on as a team and individually to get to that moment, and it felt just like that again.” The longest Hoskin has managed on the water since her surgery is an hour and a half – the longest she’s paddled in over a year. “I’ve only done that once, but I can consistently go out for an hour. As long as I start easy, I can normally stay out pretty comfortably,” she says. “But if I try to get too racy, it doesn’t end well. When my athlete brain comes back into play, I need to just calm down.” She still experiences some pain as the nerve continues to heal. “The weird thing is when I sneeze or cough or laugh, I get an electric shock down my arm; because I don’t have a rib there any more, my lung can extend and touch the nerve. Some things like that are really odd,” she laughs. “But I can already do more than I could pre-surgery, which is a massive win.” Hoskin has no idea whether she will reach those heights of her elite career again. “I have to keep reminding myself why I took on the surgery – for my quality of life, to have my arm function and not be in pain every day. When I stay aligned to that, I’m just so grateful for what my arm can do now.” ‘Boom, boom, boom’ Hoskin was nine when she found a lump on her shoulder, and was diagnosed with a rare congenital condition, where her ribs sit higher than normal. Eighteen months ago, the cervical rib connected to a vertebra in her neck began to cause her problems, and the symptoms of thoracic outlet syndrome affected her build-up to the world championships in Italy last August. She has no regrets that she decided to go ahead with the invasive surgery to remove the problem rib – but the first two months of her recovery were “pretty tough”. “It was all about pain management and learning to hold my head up straight. I couldn’t sit up for too long, and when my head got tired, it would just drift off to one side,” Hoskin recalls. “I couldn’t smile properly, I couldn’t laugh. Some words were hard to say because of the way it moved my neck muscles. “Then as I started to move again, I had so many endorphins. Even if I was just allowed 10 minutes on the bike or some rehab exercises with my physio. “I still remember the day I was driving to the gym for my first proper session. I had my favourite song playing and my heart rate was so high – boom, boom, boom. Getting back out on the lake has been the last part of my rehab.” Though her muscles and bone are now almost completely healed, the damage to her nerve is taking longer. “The nerve has a memory and it remembers the paddling motion that used to aggravate it the most,” she says. “So I’ve had to do a lot of psychological work with the sports psych to help retrain the neural pathways in my brain to let my arm know it’s actually a safe movement now. “I had to start paddling with a broomstick in my living room because that was a safe place, then I had to play games identifying left and right shoulders in different positions – to see the shoulders moving without having pain. They’re similar strategies to people who’ve lost a limb and have phantom pain.” So on the day Hoskin was given the all-clear to paddle again – her first time in a boat in seven months – her fiancé, Elliot Snedden, took her to the sea. “I’d been coaching down at the lake and called Elliot saying it was going to be too dark by the time I got home, and I was real gutted about it. He was like, ‘I don’t want to hear this all night, so I’m taking you to the beach’,” she laughs. “It was pitch black when we parked the car at Torbay, turned the headlights on, and I went for a paddle. At first I was like, ‘Oh this was a bad idea’, because I was super wobbly. But I was so excited I felt like I was going to levitate off the water.” Hoskin has been lifted up, too, by the support she’s had from her canoe racing team-mates, and the specialist staff at High Performance Sport New Zealand. “One of my first paddles back on Lake Pupuke, I was going really slow, and Olivia [Brett] jumped next to me. We’re going like 1km an hour, we’re barely moving. But I looked over and she’s pretty much crying because we can’t believe we’re paddling together again,” Hoskin says. “The physio, strength and conditioning, the coaching team are all helping me make those little decisions on how to get a little bit better each day or each week. It’s pretty cool to be part of a community like this because they’ve seen every part of the journey, and they understand why it’s such a big deal, too. “It’s been great to have company when I’m so used to being in a team environment. I’ve loved being in the gym with other athletes from different sports, then out on the water with Lisa. We’re both a bit removed from striving for performance – and just doing it for the enjoyment of it.” Alicia the Explorer The rest of the New Zealand canoe sprint team are competing in the world championships in Poznan, Poland, this week, but Hoskin doesn’t feel left behind. “The timing has been kind of good – I can’t do the sessions the girls have been doing, but I can stick to what I need to for my rehab. The hope is when they come back, I’ll be able to do bits with them and slowly integrate into the programme again,” she says. Although she’s able to do tasks around home – “I can now mow the lawns, I don’t have an excuse any more” – she and her team don’t yet know how much paddling her arm will be able to tolerate long-term. “The training load I’m at now is more than the average person, but it’s still a long way to what I’d require to win an Olympic gold medal,” she says. “I’m so stoked I feel strong, fit and confident in my body, which is such a win for life post-sport, but I’m just going to take one step at a time and see how much it can handle in the coming seasons. “If I have the opportunity to compete again, I would 100 percent take it. But at the same time, if this is as much as my arm can do, that’s still a massive win. I’ve talked to other people with thoracic outlet syndrome and have had the surgery, but there aren’t many stories of trying to go to an elite level. So I have to treat it like research or like an explorer. If this also helps someone else in the future, that would be pretty awesome too.”