" alt="Sally Kehoe and UTS student Genevieve Horton train for the Rio Games" title="Sally Kehoe and UTS student Genevieve Horton train for the Rio Games">
UTS Business School student Genevieve Horton is on her way back from a successful Olympics, having challenged some of the world’s best in the rowing at the Rio Games.
Genevieve, 21, who partnered with three-time Olympian Sally Kehoe in the women’s double scull, was the youngest member of Australia’s rowing squad.
The pair took second place in their heat, to book a place in the semi-finals, where they just missed out on a spot in the finals by one place.
Commentators described it as a tough semi-final, including as it did reigning Olympic champions Great Britain as well as world champions Poland.
Britain and Poland went into the finals with France, who just pipped the Australians at the post.
As an elite athlete, Genevieve combined part-time study for a Bachelor of Management, majoring in event management, with her training schedule in the lead-up to the Games.
Genevieve says her first, hazy, Olympic memory was going to watch the athletics at the Sydney 2000 Games, at the age of five. “I was so little and had no idea what was really going on,” she notes in her Olympic profile.
Like everyone on the Australian team, she had to work “incredibly hard” to make the squad, she says.
Horton made her international debut for Australia in 2013, becoming a Junior World Champion that year when she won gold in the Junior Women’s Pair.
Five other members of the UTS family realised their hard-fought dreams to earn the title of “Olympian” this year.
Visual communications student Isobel Bishop represented Australia in the water polo and Law/Journalism alumnus Hayder Shkara competed in taekwondo, while UTS club members Georgina Morgan and Mariah Williams were in the hockey squad and Nikki Laird represented in beach volleyball.