The Women’s Eight (W8+) was one of the ‘races of the day,’ with cox Henry Fieldman (Blue 2013) and his crew taking the gold medal thanks to a sprint finish in the final seconds. Says Lauren Irwin, “Henry was just calling ‘Go now, go now!’ and we trusted every word that he said. Inching back, inching back, trusting in the process that we would come through in the end. It’s a great feeling.”
The Men’s Four (M4-) final was a thrilling race with the GBR1 crew, stroked by Freddie Davidson (Blue 17,18,19,20) continuing their winning streak with another commanding victory. Freddie says, “We’re all looking forward to the Worlds,” adding, “We have a lot of training to do before then, training camps and hard work, so it goes back to square one for us. It’s the end of the World Cup season, we’re happy with the results and now it’s back to square one to find out if we can get some more speed before Worlds.”
A dominant row and clear water win gave Imogen Grant (Blondie, LW 2016, Blue 17, 18, 22) and her partner Emily Craig their second 2023 World Rowing Cup gold in the Lightweight women’s double sculls (LW2x). Imogen said: “It’s amazing. It’s the first time we’ve had the opportunity to wear the yellow as World Cup leaders and it felt pretty good to cross that line first. Over the world cup season we’ve raced most of the combinations, and it’s been good to see crews from Romania and New Zealand come back in. We had a great race with the US double too in the Varese World Cup so we feel like we’ve got a good sense of the field. But, no one ever sits on their laurels when they’re trying to win races so we’ll go back to 2 months of hard training and see if we can get every single thing that we can out of this double.”
It was a second 2023 World Cup gold for Ollie Wynne-Griffith and Tom George (Both Blues 22) in the Men’s pair (M2-) after a thrilling tussle with the Romanians which saw the GB pair cross the line 0.34 ahead. Ollie said: “I think we’ve been learning a lot throughout the week, certainly yesterday we raced very differently from how we did today. We were trying things out, so it’s nice to see them pay off. Romania are a top quality crew, we’re under no illusions and they’re doing about 85 races this weekend doubling up those two lads and they do strange things, crazy things at the line, so we didn’t immediately know we had won it when we crossed the line.”
Tom added: “It’s one of those weird races where now I’m thinking it’s one of the hardest ones I’ve done. At the time it was very internal, we had our race plan – Ollie was really calm, I was probably less calm but he kept me honest and focused which was great. I’m happy with it. It’s nice to win today but we’ll go back to the drawing board next week and see if we can get a couple more seconds because the field is very tight. Everyone is going to go away and get faster, so we’ll have to go away and get faster.”
Story by British Rowing