After Racing They Said......

W1x
Roumiana Neykova, BUL, Gold medallist
?It is a little hard to come back especially after becoming a mother, it is hard to leave my son back there alone.
I am in very good shape now and I think that I can beat Ekaterina Karsten and I hope I can do something good in Seville?.

Katrin Rutschow Stomporowski, GER, Silver medallist
?Of course it would have been nice to defend my title here, but it didn’t work out. There’s still time, so there’s still hope.
I definitely need to do a lot more training, as you can see, but I think I did well here?

M1x
Marcel Hacker, GER, Gold medallist
?I trained hard during the winter, I trained efficiently, not more, but more efficiently, I had less setbacks, wasn’t off sick so much, and so I knew what I could do?

?I didn’t doubt one second, even while Spik was in front in the first 500 metres, I had no problems with that, but I knew, OK, he won’t make it.?

?You had to watch out a bit for Cop, Tufte and Chalupa, and I had my eye on them every now and again.?

W2+
Deborah Flood, GBR, gold medallist
?It’s been a great start to the world Cup. We won the World Cup in Hazewinkel, and another World Cup here. We’re learning from every race, so hopefully we’ll move on for the World Championships?

?Seville is our target this year, the training is going very well, we’ve still got a lot to come, a lot to improve on, so we’ll just keep moving on with the training again.?

On their race plan:
?Just to row a good solid row, be consistent, row our own race and not be phased by what is going on around us.?

W2-
Rika Geiser, RSA, silver medallist
On their race
“We were a little slow at the start, but we managed to catch up finish.?

?I’ve always raced against them [the USA crew] at university. So I have raced against them for the last four years?

?We are staying here after Lucerne to get used to our new boat, and we need to get used to it until Munich?

?They are all chasing Romania at this stage, Canada will be coming to Munich, and Ukraine is one of our big rivals too.?

M2-
James Tomkins, AUS, gold medallist
“We were pretty much just coming here to make sure that Drew [Ginn] was OK, it’s his first race for a couple of years, I took a year off last year, it was just good to get back in the boat. And of course two years ago that’s when Drew hurt himself and couldn’t continue on, so? I said to him on the start of the heat ?at least you’ve made it to the start this time?, we had a bit of a laugh.”

?We knew we were going well, but we knew these guys are pretty good as well, so we did really well, we didn’t really worry about anyone else in the race, we rowed, we just concentrated on crossing the finish line as fast as possible.?

?We go home tomorrow, we were just here for a week, we’ll go and play with the kids, we’ve both got two little babies, so go and play with them and we’ll come back a few weeks before the World Champs.?

James Cracknell, GBR, silver medallist
?The second half of the race was OK, we were disappointed we didn’t pass up to the position to be leading, which we know we can do. Maybe we backed off a bit in the first half to try and combat their third 5 (1000 to 1500), and in the end Croatia did what we should have done, and took the race by the scruff of the neck. And if we had done that, maybe we would have held on better. But credit to the Croatians they probably rowed the best race out of all out there, although they didn’t win they certainly upped their game far better than we did. Although Australia were very good, we probably let ourselves down in the first half, I think.?

LM4-

John Maddick, CAN, gold medallist
?I feel great right now! We selected the boat a month ago, in our national trials and we’ve been training for about two weeks and arrived in London to race Henley last Monday. We had two races there, did pretty well, we built on that when we came here. This is our first World Cup, it’s sort of the more important one.?

?We fly back to Canada tomorrow for a couple of days rest then we’ve got about six weeks to get ready and then we come over for Seville. We’re not coming over for Munich.We raced the Danes at Henley, they beat us, we just got a little bit behind off the start and then stuck with them, but I think we’ve cleaned it up a bit, so we’ll try and give them a better run anyway. Looking forward to Seville, it should be exciting.?

W8+
Lenka Wech, GER, gold medallist
?It was a pretty good race, we did what we wanted to do, just go out and make a place in front of the others. We were not expecting this, but hoping. We were pretty well prepared and so we were hoping to win.I am new in the crew, I have just returned from my internship in Australia, so for me it is great! I hope the same will happen in Munich. We’re going to St Moritz to do some altitude training, and we hope to improve there a bit, make up the condition, and hopefully be fit for Seville.?

Rodica Anghel (cox), ROM, silver medallist
?The race was great, we must work together much more until the World Championships, we are a young team.Our training up until the Champs will be much harder. We are training in Romania, on Lake Snagov. We go home tomorrow and back to training for the regatta in Munich, we hope to win!?