Not a new you. More of you.
People still ask me about one race. The truer story is everything around it, and I have learned that when I tell it honestly, people recognise something of their own. So that is my work now: telling stories, and listening to other people tell theirs.
- 4× Olympian 1984 · 1988 · 1992 · 1996
- 3 Olympic medals One silver, two bronze
- 3 International golds World title and two Pan Am
- 1999 Thomas Keller Medal Rowing’s highest career honour
Someone else’s story.
Your own life, seen differently.
Honest conversations with people who lived through real change and are willing to talk about it. Not advice. Not answers. Stories you might find yourself in. Produced with Archer & Co.
Guests include Hayley Wickenheiser, George Stroumboulopoulos, Amanda Lindhout, Colin Mochrie, Bif Naked, Michael Landsberg, Dan Hill, Stephan Moccio, Sharon and Bram, David Patchell-Evans, Madison Tevlin, Erica Ehm.
The race everyone remembers is not the whole story.
Seventy-three days before Barcelona, a men’s crew rammed her shell in a warm-up area in Essen and shattered her right leg. Five operations later she was told she would never row again. She walked to her boat with a cane and took bronze.
Audiences in government, finance, education, and the private sector know the version that ends at the medal. Silken tells the one that starts the morning after the accident, when nobody knew how it would turn out. The fear and the doubt stay in, because that is the part people recognise in themselves.
Unsinkable
The accident and the medal are the part everybody knows. The book is about everything underneath it: a childhood she does not romanticise, a marriage that ended, and the long work of telling the truth about both.
Unsinkable, the platform
A national mental health organisation built on the same idea as everything else here: that a story told honestly is a lifeline for the person who hears it. Youth programs, community champions, and workplace sessions across Canada.
Visit weareunsinkable.comOne story, once a week, from someone who has been through it.
A short letter about a moment that changed someone’s life, what it taught them, and a question you might carry into your own week. No course launches, no countdown timers.