Small Wonder: Moroccan Olympic Single Sculler Majdouline El Allaoui

When Majdouline El Allaoui glided to the finish line in the second heat of the women’s single-scull heat in Paris, she didn’t feel like much of an Olympian. The 23-year-old finished 53 seconds—nearly a minute—behind the victorious Karolien Florijn of The Netherlands. The sympathy applause pained her.

“It was not easy at all,” she said that evening. “I’ll try to do better tomorrow.”

After the race, El Allaoui trained, had a massage, and met with her mental coach. Despite facing her repechage at 9:24 the next morning, she didn’t get around to an ice bath and dinner until after 11 p.m.

It was only her second time using a competition-standard rowing shell—a Filippi purchased after she was qualified by the Moroccan Olympic Committee. Despite being a six-time Moroccan champion, she lacked experience rowing at the top level, and it showed in her performance. Even the Parisian weather was a surprise.

“It was really cold,” she said. “I didn’t expect it.”

Florijn is nine inches taller and 36 pounds heavier than El Allaoui. And whereas Florijn is the daughter of two Olympic rowers, El Allaoui’s parents are divorced, a rare and difficult circumstance in conservative Morocco. Her father wasn’t around much after the split, and her mother couldn’t get a passport to watch her in Paris.

Given her circumstances, coming within a minute of the Dutch Olympic medalist was a triumph, one that warrants a celebration of El Allaoui’s defiant journey to the Games. In many ways, she epitomizes the creed of Baron Pierre de Coubertin, who is credited with launching the modern Olympics: “The important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part; the essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.”

Her accomplishment also should persuade the rowing community to protect and preserve the 32-field single-sculls event. As the only category with more than 16 boats competing, single sculls had a distinctly global feel, owing to the breadth of countries represented. The presence of athletes from emerging rowing nations reminded viewers that there are more than just medals at stake in the Olympics.

After all, on the start line, the two women didn’t look so different. From 2,000 meters away, they both looked like Olympians.

It was difficult to picture El Allaoui, as she sipped orange juice in a marina-side cafe in Salé, Morocco, two days before she left for Paris, lining up in an Olympic regatta.

“I’m a little bit stressed, to be honest,” El Allaoui sighed, smiling. “When you see the boats, you’ll say ‘How did you qualify!’”

She glanced down as she rearranged the ice cubes in her glass with a straw. Overhearing her talk, you’d be forgiven for wondering if it was an upcoming college exam that was weighing on her mind.

“I’m not actually thinking about the podium,” El Allaoui admitted. She was realistic about her chances against the likes of Florijn and her rowing hero, Emma Twigg. But she also recognized that showing well in Paris could make a big difference for Moroccan rowing.

“The little girls who train every day, expecting nothing,” she said. Her voice rose as she gestured to the rowing club where she trains. “I’m doing it for them.”

Club Royal Marine, the home of the Moroccan rowing team, consists of a trailer of singles, an inflatable dinghy, and a gazebo providing shade to seven rusting Concept2 ergs. Three curtains have been fashioned into changing rooms at the side of the gazebo, and a restroom is provided by a friendly cafe owner a hundred yards away. Only three of the shells are serviceable, two with the help of duct tape. The rest are kept in the hope, rather than expectation, that they might be repaired someday.

A mix of 10 to 15 junior and senior athletes turns out usually for national-team training sessions, which take place on the Bouregreg River, in the shadow of Salé’s middle-class marina and Rabat’s 17th-century Andalusian walls. The river reflects the emergence of modern Morocco, passing the newly constructed Mohammed VI tower, the third tallest building in Africa, before partitioning Rabat and Salé and emptying into the Atlantic.

Since the club has only three functional boats, half the rowers train on the ergs while the rest go out on the Zodiac with the coach, taking turns swapping in and out of the working shells.

This routine means practice takes three times as long as it should, but with five or six athletes huddling in the Zodiac, there’s plenty of joking around to pass the time. Comic relief sweetens the bitterness of equipment-caused frustrations.

When African competitions bring the group to the Tunisian Club Nautique, the so-called home of African rowing, the Moroccan team marvels at the facilities on Lake Tunis. Other African squads notice the Moroccans for their spirit.

“We just have fun together, laughing at each other,” El Allaoui said. “We are just like a little family.”

It was her parents’ divorce that turned El Allaoui into a sportswoman. Their separation forced her mother, Nawal Daoudi, to move back to Oujda, her ancestral home 300 miles away in eastern Morocco. Daoudi decided that her daughter would benefit from better schooling if she remained in Rabat, so from the age of five El Allaoui lived with Daoudi’s sister, Samia, in a suburb outside the capital. El Allaoui saw her mother only sporadically, when Daoudi could make the nine-hour train journey to the coast.

El Allaoui discovered athletics through school and found that sport distracted her from the loneliness and stigma of coming from a broken home. She showed potential in the 400-meter hurdles and tae kwon do.

“I did athletics as a way to not think,” she said. “I became obsessed with sport.”

It was Daoudi’s brother, Abdellatif, who brought El Allaoui to Club Royal Marine for the first time. Abdellatif was born in Oujda with his siblings but was adopted as a boy by a Belgian family as his family struggled to make ends meet. He grew up as Abel in Belgium before moving back to Morocco in 2013 and opening Abel Restaurant Belge, a Belgian restaurant in Salé Marina. He got to know the coaches at Club Royal Marine from living and working around the marina and brought his niece to the boat club for the first time in 2016 after a fight with some other girls left El Allaoui unable to continue with athletics.

Within a month, the 15-year-old was selected for the women’s national team, and within a year, El Allaoui was crowned Moroccan champion for the first time.

El Allaoui qualified for the Paris Olympics at the World Rowing African Olympic and Paralympic qualifier in Tunisia in October 2023, winning her B final with a two-kilometer time of 8:34:46. Her qualification depended on the disqualification of a faster athlete from the A final, Sarra Zameli of Tunisia, based on World Rowing rules.

Of the 502 rowers who competed at the Paris Olympic Games, 18 represented African countries. That amounted to 15 African boats, with 12 qualifying through the single-sculls category.

Among these African athletes, El Allaoui’s story isn’t unique. Akoko Komlanvi grew up around Lake Togo without training facilities or proper equipment. The Togolese athlete relocated to Tunisia to benefit from technical support, proper training, and international competition, with the assistance of an Olympic Solidarity Scholarship.

“When I was chosen for the Olympic Solidarity program, it was a great joy for me and my family,” Komlanvi told the International Olympic Committee. “My housing, recovery, travel, everything is paid for by the scholarship, and it has also allowed me to take part in many international competitions.”

Six of the 18 African athletes represented were white: three from South Africa, and three who rowed at colleges in the United States. Kathleen Noble, the daughter of Irish missionaries who was raised in Uganda, credited representing the country with consolidating her Ugandan identity. She first represented her country as a swimmer, before walking onto the Princeton rowing team as a sophomore.

“Why’d you show me this? Do you want me to cry?” El Allaoui teased when I showed her pictures of an Ivy League boathouse. A week before the Olympics, she had never heard of Henley Royal Regatta or the Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race.

“We don’t do that here,” she smiled, as she studied a photograph of the crew of a women’s eight at Henley hoisting oars above their blazers.

While rowing is a pathway to education for many athletes in the U.S., El Allaoui’s pursuit of the sport cost her a high-school diploma. After missing a month of her final year to attend an international competition in Tunisia, her high school prohibited her from taking the baccalaureate exam. So she dropped out and moved in with Abdellatif to live as close as possible to the rowing club and began training twice a day, every day, between coaching kids, working behind the desk at her gym, and waiting tables at her uncle’s restaurant.

She was awarded a stipend by the Moroccan Olympic Committee after qualifying, which enabled her to cut back hours and orient her time around training. It also funded the purchase of an NK SpeedCoach GPS, which remains an object of great fascination to her teammates.

There was nothing noteworthy about El Allaoui’s final practice before leaving for Paris, because her training had not been designed to build to the Olympics. The team begins each week with distance training on Monday. Wednesday is a blend of strong and long, and her final session was a 5 x 500-meter sprint, as it is most Fridays.

A good amount of time was wasted adjusting and readjusting foot stretchers. Dodging jet skis and commercial traffic created another distraction.

El Allaoui stopped after her fourth sprint, complaining of a mild cramp in her hamstring. She climbed out of the scull and displaced some teammates so she could stretch out across the width of the Zodiac.

“I feel good,” she said, flashing a smile that was betrayed by the concern in her eyes.

Only after everyone had their turn on the water and the Zodiac headed back to the marina did anyone mention the Olympics.

“We are so proud of her,” said Iliass Chafik, a 19-year-old on the men’s national team and El Allaoui’s cousin on her father’s side. “Because of her, rowing in Morocco will be famous.”

El Allaoui’s repechage race on July 28 played out almost identically to her heat the previous day. She broke ahead of the pack with a stroke rate of 48 in the initial moments, but the field caught up within 300 meters. By the halfway mark, she was 18 seconds behind the leader, Alejandra Alonso Alderete of Paraguay. Her inexperience was evident.

Her E/F semifinal, which featured three African scullers, was a similar story, with El Allaoui falling several lengths behind after 500 meters. At the halfway mark, she showed considerable grit by clawing back to within a length and a half of the third-place rower, Nicaraguan Evidelia Gonzalez Jarquin. But the gap reverted to three lengths by the time the pair reached the finish line.

“A lot of these women are racing normally at world championships—like El Allaoui, the Moroccan sculler—in the lightweight category,” said Olympic gold medalist Martin Cross as he called the race on Peacock for U.S. viewers. “They’re not big tall women you would expect to see in the quarterfinals going for places in the A and B semifinals.”

Cross was astute in making note of El Allaoui’s unusual size. At just under five feet, four inches, she is five inches shorter than the average female single sculler who competed at the Olympics and two inches shorter than the average lightweight women’s double sculler. While she has a suitable build for lightweight competition, she had neither the teammates nor access to double scull boats to train for the lightweight double sculls, the only Olympic category for lightweight rowers.

El Allaoui’s first thought after meeting Emma Twigg at the 2022 Coastal Championships in Saundersfoot, Wales, was to marvel at her stature.

“She’s a really big woman,” El Allaoui laughed, elongating the adverb as she rolled back her head.

After so many years at the top of Moroccan rowing, El Allaoui didn’t know whether she could get better. She entered the Welsh competition debating whether to try for LA 2028 if she should make it to Paris or whether she should give up on rowing and begin a new life.

Twigg’s career has been a model of longevity and passion for the sport. Witnessing her approach to rowing had a profound impact on El Allaoui.

“Why won’t I qualify two, three, four, or five times for the Olympic Games? Why won’t I someday bring home a medal?” she asked rhetorically. “That’s why I’m following this path. Her path.”

Despite practicing in coastal shells that are handmade in Morocco, El Allaoui and her mixed-doubles partner, Ibrahim Mraghi, posted the fastest Beach Sprint time in Africa at the 2023 African Beach Games. This qualified them for the canceled World Beach Games, which would have been held in Bali, Indonesia, that same year.

With the Beach Sprints making their debut at LA 2028, the pair hopes to recreate that performance next time out to secure a place.

“We are going to train hard for it,” El Allaoui said. “I’m pretty sure that we will qualify.”

Mraghi lives and trains in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. El Allaoui has come to accept, reluctantly, that her dreams require her to move abroad, too.

She has World Rowing coaching qualifications, which she hopes will land her a coaching job and a visa to support a professional training regimen. She also hopes to get her high-school diploma through Morocco’s free baccalaureate program, which is commonly used by prisoners to accelerate their rehabilitation by qualifying them for work and further study.

Discussing where to go next has become a favorite way to pass time on the Zodiac. Everyone shares their opinions about different countries, which, since English comprehension in Morocco is low, originate from French and Arabic media as well as personal experience.

“Poland is an amazing country,” El Allaoui asserted. “I was there, and it’s not expensive.”

The team’s chief perception of the United States is that it’s extremely pricey, and the Moroccans were unaware of rowing scholarships. Although El Allaoui is now an Olympic rower, she’s never been contacted by a U.S. college coach.

“France is expensive,” offered Chafik. “It’s a racist and very expensive country.”

El Allaoui lined up against Akoko Komlanvi, the Togolese recipient of the Olympic Solidarity Scholarship, on Aug. 2 in the Single Sculls Final F.

With only two boats in the race, the final made for an intimate contest. The pair knew each other well, since Moroccan training camps tend to take place at Lake Tunis, where Komlanvi is now based.

“She’s such a good athlete, and her muscles are so strong,” El Allaoui said. “If she can grow her confidence, she’ll be a champion.”

El Allaoui pulled into clear water early, settling into a rhythm of 30 strokes per minute. Komlanvi closed the gap to half a length in the second 500 meters, outstroking El Allaoui by five strokes a minute, but El Allaoui’s longer strokes took command of the race eventually, and she won the final convincingly, posting a time of 8:20:81, her fastest of the competition by almost 10 seconds.

Nevertheless, the result meant she finished 31 of the 32 female single scullers competing in Paris.

As she got off the water, she was deflated.

“I didn’t do well at all. I’m going to work so hard so that next time I do better,” she vowed. “I want to show that short girls can do it, that African girls can do it.”

The disappointment was exacerbated by comments on social media suggesting that she wasn’t worth sending to the Olympics and congratulating her sarcastically for managing not to capsize.

Criticism from within the sport she can shoulder; rarely is it more severe than the criticism to which she subjects herself. Negativity from outside the sport, however, can be a more bitter pill.

“They don’t know me,” she said, her voice rising for emphasis. “And they don’t know rowing.”

Many of the rowing enthusiasts in attendance towered over El Allaoui as she meandered behind the grandstand after her race. Fans nudged elbows and pointed discreetly as their heroes walked by, while El Allaoui went unnoticed.

Until a man ran up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I’m Moroccan. Would you mind taking a photo with me?”

She stood in stunned silence for a moment before posing for the picture.

“Wow,” she said afterward, her eyes widening. “I’ve never felt anything like that before.”

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