Agosto 26, 2009
Worlds preview-ready to race
Since the world cup in Lucerne we have been based in Aegeri in Switzerland training and preparing for the World Champs that start on the 23rd of August.
Aergeri is a very pretty Swiss town on a lake that is about 5K long and upto 2K wide. The first week or so wasn’t the best with a few storms coming through and a lot of boat traffic in the afternoons making it tough conditions to row on. We soon adjusted and trained twice in the mornings and as the weather sorted itself out we got much better water and our training was again unhindered and we got on with trying to continue to improve so we could stay ahead of the competition going into the world champs.
We had a little bit of excitement during our stay with two big storms coming through. The first one was hail, I have never seen anything like it as suddenly the whole place looked like we had had snow, thankfully it disappeared fairly quickly. It was an impressive storm and left its mark on a few of the rowing boats that have been dented quite severely and likely to be written off, thankfully mine was under cover and unaffected. The second storm was just about as ferocious but this time only rain lifting the lake level and flooding everything around us.
Our Under 23 crews raced at their world champs in early August, they performed very well picking up 3 gold medals including the men’s coxless four, this meant that the men’s four was invited to come and join the Elite team for the world champs completing a full complement of boats for the first day of finals. The atmosphere in the team has been brilliant; everyone has knuckled down and worked hard over the past 6 weeks, we all get on really well, while at the same time the competitiveness, confidence and team spirit has continued to grow and has been the best team environment I have been involved in since I started in the New Zealand Rowing team in 2001. I am pretty excited about starting to race and I am quietly confident that this team is capable of producing some pretty special results at this world champs.
While it is always hard to predict how we will all go, I think most crews have improved since we raced in Lucerne. Personally I am very happy with how I’m rowing and my speed. I look forward to getting the racing underway so we can see how our competitors stand and get racing again. Seeing how everyone is going I would expect most crews to make the A finals, It would be an awesome effort to get all the crews through and all going to plan that is definitely a possibility. As for medals I would be disappointed if we didn’t come away with at least 4 medals from the worlds, It is never easy to medal but we have a very strong squad this year and this is realistic, again with a few outstanding performances, this count could be taken to 5 or 6 but that would be an absolutely exceptional result.
We have been in Poland for almost a week now, conditions have been different everyday with winds from all directions so we will have to be ready for anything. I think Aergeri has prepared us well for that. I will be back to update you after all the crews have raced heats.
Mahe
