Category: Press

“THE DAY HAD been already challenging enough.

Christmas had just passed and Damian Browne’s morning began with a bang; his head against the wall of his cabin and ‘that familiar warm trickle’ of blood he felt so often on a rugby field.

Later a curious, but unpredictable, adolescent whale would come to call, circling his craft to set nerves jangling.

Browne is out here in the middle of the Atlantic because he wanted a test. Though he could have happily waited a while more for this hurdle came to meet him.”

“Professional rugby is all about survival,” Damian Browne tells me on the eve of the Atlantic Challenge, a 4800km ocean row across the North Atlantic ocean.
“It’s like the crucible. Every day, every hour, every minute you’re just trying to survive in that environment because there’s a hell of a lot of pressures from a lot of different angles.

“I played 16 years professionally and you just adapt quite organically to that.”

Two friends will be taking on the extreme challenge of rowing across the Atlantic Ocean from New York City to Galway in an attempt to break a world record.

Damian Browne and Fergus Farrell met almost 20 years when they both played for Galwegians RFC, and now they are taking on a challenge even more dangerous than senior rugby.