Reactions after the first day of European Championship finals

With the first of two days of finals at the 2022 European Rowing Championships completed, we heard the reactions from some of today’s medalists. There was a mixture of relief and disappointment with rowers thinking ahead to the 2022 World Rowing Championships and even the 2024 Olympic Games.

In the first final of the Championships, reigning Paralympic Champion, Roman Polianskyi was beaten by newcomer Giacomo Perini of Italy in the PR1 men’s single sculls. Reflecting after the race, Polianskyi said :

“The war made it difficult for us to have possibilities of good trainings before these European Championships. Training has been really hard for me. This is why this is the best result I could have in this competition.”

There was a similar reaction from Nataliya Dovgodko when Ukraine won bronze in the women’s quadruple sculls:

“It’s hard work for us, now when the war is in Ukraine. It’s really hard because most of us sportsmens we go out from Ukraine to camp before the war. The girls don’t see their parents. I come to Ukraine for 10 days and it was hard.”

Great Britain were perhaps favourites in the men’s pair after their performances in the World Rowing Cups this season, but it wasn’t their day when Romania got the better of them.  GB’s Ollie Wynne-Griffith was disappointed after the race, but was looking ahead:

“It is disappointing but if that is the lesson we need to learn to be better in six weeks’ time (at the World Championships), so be it. The lessons we learn from the races we lose are generally the harder ones but the more valuable ones to learn. It felt like we stayed pretty calm through the middle, but probably didn’t have the turn of pace in the second half. It’s really frustrating, it’s a championship race and it’s not a gold medal.”

After disappointment in the men’s pair, there was celebration for Great Britain as they take gold in the men’s four, Sam Nunn from the crew said:

“It is brilliant to become European champions and I’m really pleased with what we put out there. We aren’t the fastest starting crew, so we tried to find a new gear and we did that well. Then after the 500m mark, we try to find our rhythm and see where we are when we got to the final 500m and the final sprint.”

The win in the four was followed up later by gold in the men’s eight, after which cox Harry Brightmore commented on the support from the crowds;

“That was pretty special. It’s the first time I’ve been to a multisport games and we were going down in the last quarter of the race and I could just hear this wall of noise from my right hand side. I was trying to shout as loud as possible so the boys could hear me, it was epic.”

Reigning Olympic Champions in the the women’s double sculls, Romania took gold here in Munich, Simona Radis is already looking ahead to the next Olympic Games;

 “We didn’t see it like that on the water. It was a great race – a difficult one because of the wind, but we give it our best. We are happy with this result and we want to improve much more from this moment because the Olympics are very close, and we need to be in our best then.”

Meanwhile, Laila Youssifou, who was in the Netherlands double which took silver was content with their medal;

“Actually the strategy was just to cling onto the Romanians. We know that these girls are very good. So we just went to stick to them.”

In the last race of the day, while it was a dominating performance from Great Britain, the Netherlands was particularly impressive as they recovered from a boat-stopping crab in the early stages to come through the field and take silver.  Nicolas van Sprang described the incident after the race;

“We got off pretty well. I thought OK, this is nice, going well, going well. Then there was a split second when I thought hey, we’re hitting a little buoy, then it turned out to be a big buoy, then it turned out to be a crab. I just saw an oar parallel to the boat and the boat stopped and the field was gone. I was OK, that wasn’t quite the plan. Then just had to get back into the lane and went together, and kept going.

The nice thing is you always get a bit of extra adrenalin. Usually getting back up to speed is not the problem, the question is can you keep doing it the second half of the race. It went quite well. We very well got back to the rhythm we talked about last night, and after the first race two days ago which wasn’t quite what we wanted. We managed to get that back and not panic, just invest in how we want to row.”

The 2022 European Rowing Championships conclude tomorrow with racing starting at 09:30 CET, and the first medal race at 11:09. There will be more reactions here at www.worldrowing.com tomorrow.