Philip Doyle
Rowing
BIOGRAPHY
Philip Doyle won a bronze medal in the men’s double sculls alongside Daire Lynch at the 2024 Paris Olympic Games – Ireland’s first ever Olympic medal won by a heavyweight men’s rowing crew.
From Banbridge, County Down, and a member of Belfast Boat Club, Doyle took up rowing in 2014 while studying medicine at Queen’s University Belfast, graduating in 2018 and working as a junior doctor at Belfast City Hospital before committing full-time to his rowing career.
He won silver at the 2019 World Rowing Championships in Linz with Ronan Byrne, qualifying Ireland’s men’s double sculls for the Olympic Games for the first time, and the pair competed together at the Tokyo 2020 Games, finishing tenth. Doyle began competing with Daire Lynch in May 2023 and the partnership produced results immediately: bronze at the 2023 World Championships in Belgrade qualified their boat for Paris, and in 2024 they won bronze at World Cup I and gold at World Cup III – the first ever World Cup gold won by an Irish heavyweight men’s crew.
At Paris, they finished third behind Romania and the Netherlands in a race decided in the final 500 metres. Doyle dedicated the medal to his late father Eamon, a BBC Northern Ireland cameraman who died in 2015. In 2025 he partnered two-time Olympic champion Fintan McCarthy at the World Championships in Shanghai.
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