Race Day - Heats

We were up bright and early today, having breakfast and then heading down to the course on the 8 a.m. bus. Our heat was at 10:20 a.m. so we put hands on the boat at just after 9:30 a.m. In our heat was us, Italy, Poland, Russia, France and the USA. We were situated in lane 4 between Poland on our left and Russia on our right.

After our warm up we were called on to the course and due to the very strong head wind they moved all the boats over one spot so we were now in lane 5. The official started calling out the names of the countries, so we sat ready and were then told to sit easy as there was a technical fault. A few seconds later he started saying the country names again, we sat forward, the lights came on and the buzzer went. We were off.

It probably wasn’t the best start we had ever had, but it certainly wasn’t bad! The Italians just took off with the most amazing start. Now let me clarify that all this info has come to me from Lisa our Cox because I did the right thing and kept my “eyes in the boat”. No other crew mattered except what we were doing together in our boat.

We got a great jump on the Polish and Russian teams and at about 250m Lisa told us that she was even with 3 seat of the Russian boat, then every 10-20 strokes she told us how we were moving away from them. At 500m the Italians and our boat had pulled past all the other boats in the field. I felt that we let ourselves down in the third 250 as the power in the boat dropped. Unfortunately this has been a problem for us in the past. At the 750m mark, Lisa yelled to “drive with the legs” to “get the power on and stay long in the wind”. The USA and the Russians had made up some ground on us, so working together we picked the boat speed up and drove through the wind. We were able to pull away a bit more and before we knew it we had crossed the finish line.

To be honest I had no idea where we had placed as I didn’t see any of the other boats other than Poland who had dropped back significantly. Lisa had to tell us that we were second to Italy. Really not too bad considering it was the first “ever” race we have done and we had just come second to the Paralympic Gold Medallists!

We rowed down past the grandstand and then on to our cool down. We had a number of people tell us from the side that we had done well and yelling “well done Aussie’s”, so that was really a good feeling. After our cool down we were back at the landing and pulling the boat out of the water.

We now have to race tomorrow morning in the Repechage. This will mean that we must come 1st or 2nd in our race to proceed to the A Final on Saturday. We are all feeling very confident that this will be possible, due to our race today.