After racing they said......

LW2- Leonie BARRON, GBR , Gold Medallist

“We went out thinking that we’re not going to aim confidently at anything apart from having a really good row. If we row our best we should be able to win it, so, we went out with that in mind rather than thinking 'how fast are they all?' and all that.”

 

LW2- Naomi ASHCROFT, GBR, Gold Medallist

“Yeah, just focusing on the rhythm really and letting the boat do the work, and hopefully, that would be enough.”

LW2- Leonie BARRON, GBR, Gold Medallist

“if we rowed well, we would win, that’s what we hoped”

LW2- Naomi ASHCROFT, GBR, Gold Medallist

“Well, surprisingly, we thought that Hungary might push us off the start because they finished second to us in Munich, but at the end of the day, they finished fourth, so, really, we just had to focus on our own rowing, and let that do the talking really.”

LW2- Leonie BARRON

“We had raced them before, but, we all knew that the race that we had before was right at the beginning of all of our seasons [in Munich], really, and we had no idea how much anyone had improved.

That was in Munich, but they hadn’t had pairs at any of the other regattas, so we all went along to the first pairs race, and we came away thinking, yeah, we beat them there, but they’ve got a few weeks to pull it together.”

LM4- DEN Gold Medallists

How does it feel to win back the title?

 

LM4- Thomas EBERT, DEN 2002 World Champion

 

“The last 300 metres I was singing a national kids song over and over in my head because of the pain, you see the boats coming, and I kept this song just rolling in my head to hold the pain away.

We did all we could in the beginning to gain an advantage, and be in front, and just hope that we hold it till the finish line.”

“We had quite a good race, and everything was as we had talked about, the tactics and the technique and the will and the power, it was almost perfect, so it was quite a good feeling.

We did everything that we could to have a good start, and to be in front again, although all the crews are getting faster and faster too, they know what we are doing, so, we’ll have to find something new for next year I think!”

On the new line-up:

“It has been fantastic with Stephan [Moelvig], he’s been around us for three or four years, rowing in the lightweight men’s eight, and we were also a little lucky that his technique just fit in. You also need a little luck and we had that too.

For the last two years we had some bad luck, at the Sydney Olympics, and last year when we had to replace Thomas Poulsen with Thor [Kristensen], so we had two seasons where we were unlucky, this year was a bit better.”

Will this be the line-up from now on?

“Luckily I’m not the one to decide, our coach has to find out now what he will do, but I think that he has something to think about now, because now he has three very good people to row on this side, so I’m happy not to be the coach to decide that!”

M4x Rene BERTRAM, GER Gold Medallist

“It was a very hard race, I would say, because Poland pushed very hard at the 1500 metre mark and it was our only chance to go against them and it was a very good final. I would say it went very easily, because the boat flowed very well, and we had a fast race, a fast beginning, and so it was a very hard fight in the end.

This was my first World Championships title, and I hope that many others will follow!”

W8+ Kate JOHNSON (bow), USA, Gold Medallist

“We’re elated!!! Completely and utterly elated! Finally we got what we really wanted and what we put our heads to all year!

Selection took a while this summer and we raced a little bit up in Canada, and that was good, it made some decisive impacts on our boats and our final line-ups. We did a time trial that helped and put us in the right place.

It was a tough race, and we knew that Germany would kind of react to what we did in the heats, get a faster start, and our job was just to row our own race, stay internal, and counter all the moves they tried to make, while making our own.”