World Rowing Championships, Milan. Sunday 31st August 2003
After 10 days in Milan preparing for our race, we were eager to finally get on the start line and face our opposition. Unfortunately this didn't stop us being 4 seconds late onto the stakeboats and receiving an official warning (equivalent to a false start)! We didn't let this panic us, and had a decent start and found our usual mid-race rhythm with a stroke-rate which never dipped below 36. We expected Romania and USA to be our main rivals, but because they had both been given the outside lanes it was difficult to get a good feel for how well we were doing against them during the race. Both Romania and ourselves rowed even-paced races, with Romania's pace just being that little bit quicker than ours; we had a final push in the last 500m to try and draw them in but failed to pull anything back so finished a very proud second, with Greece in 3rd place.
Most of the successful GB crews raced on the Saturday not the Sunday, which resulted in us receiving more than our fair share of media coverage on the BBC and in Monday's newspapers which added to the excitement.
Since the event has attracted six or fewer entrants for three consecutive years, it will now be dropped from the World Championship programme. So soon I guess I will be back into my single and training for next year with the aim of making it into the sculling squad!
See the news on BBC Sport and FISA World Rowing site.
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