Portugal’s young guns make a splash in Seville

Among the teams attending 2026 World Rowing Cup I in Seville, Portugal was one of the youngest. Lightweight women’s single sculler Ines Oliveira was the veteran of the squad at 27, while her four male teammates were aged between 18 and 20.

Despite that, Portugal came away with one gold medal, two seventh places and one ninth place – and a series of performances suggesting that the future is bright in Portuguese rowing.

“It’s been incredible. We push ourselves and each other to be better, and I think that this is the result,” says Tomas Neves, who stroked the men’s double sculls to a heat win over the Polish world champions, and to a B-final win over an experienced field including world championship medallists.

Seville lightweight men’s single sculls winner Joao Veloso reveals the group – including Neves’ doubles partner Pedro Rodrigues, and men’s single sculler Diogo Goncalves – have been neck-and-neck all season.

“Especially before the trials, everybody was side-by-side, nobody was left behind, everybody was pushing. One day one person won, the next it was another person,” Veloso says. “Even in the trials, the four of us were three seconds between the last and the first, so really competitive. I’m very proud of the results of the guys and how far we’ve come as a team.”

But rowing is far from Portugal’s national sport, and the team all broke into it a little by accident – encouraged by friends or family.

“We don’t have many rowers in Portugal. Our main sport is football, and rowing is not the main sport. I came to row because my friend pushed me to come rowing, and after that I started loving it and training hard. And here I am,” says Rodrigues.

He and Neves are about five or six years into their rowing journey; Veloso picked up the sport when he was 11; and Goncalves is 10 years into rowing, after realising he did not have the talent for football.

Now all of an age to compete in senior events, although they remain under-23 eligible, the group are united on and off the water.

“Most of us live in the same house. We all moved to a house in Coimbra and we all train together at Montemor, there’s a 2km river there. It’s very friendly,” explains Veloso. “Outside the water we’re all pretty good friends. We’re pretty open to talking about everything of our daily lives. That closeness that each and every one of us has got really propels the team forward.”

What they all showed in Seville was a maturity to race hard, even if the environment they found themselves in was pretty new. Neves, Rodrigues and Goncalves have all raced one World Rowing Cup previously, competing in the men’s quadruple sculls at 2025 World Rowing Cup I, and Oliveira also competed at the 2024 World Rowing Championships, but Seville was Veloso’s first international competition of any kind.

“I felt a bit suffocated in the middle of all of these really big people, giant people. At the beginning I was really stressed, even before the race – I’m sure everyone was a little bit stressed – I even felt a little bit ill,” Veloso admits.

“But after it started you just lock into the race, and you just do what you literally do every single day of the year. In the middle of the race I actually felt a lot more at peace than I did before the race.”

Similarly, Neves and Rodrigues said they were nervous before their heat, when they found themselves on the start against a field including Poland. Racing fearlessly, they took on the Poles and won, booking themselves into the A/B semifinals. In that race the result was flipped, with Portugal coming fourth and just missing the A-final.

“After the semifinal the world champions, the Polish, said thank you for opening our eyes in the heat. I think they were a bit mad for losing against us, and then they and the Serbians were faster than us. That’s rowing,” Rodrigues laughs.

But the results have given the squad confidence that they are on the right track.

“It’s very good for Portuguese rowing and we are proving that our training is working. We want to get Portuguese rowing out there, we want to prove ourselves and show that there is something in Portugal,” Neves says.

Goncalves agrees, adding: “I think it’s more training, more kilometres and a strong team, a great team. All of us push a little bit more and it’s great.”

The group are all eyeing the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games. Portugal have never won an Olympic rowing medal and have mostly featured in lightweight events, but they want to change this.

“We all are aiming towards the Olympics, at least. I think we just want to keep getting faster and see where that takes us. We’re a pretty young team, a pretty motivated team, and we’re starting to do more volume of training. And we’re keeping up,” points out Veloso.

“We want to develop our heavyweight team and show that Portugal has heavyweights too. We don’t know what are the plans for the future, but we will keep pushing ourselves and training so that whatever boat we are in is going faster,” concludes Rodrigues.