Today, Olympic Champions Germany took off in the lead. The Germans, however, then faltered majorly and slipped right back in the field. The lead had been taken over by Estonia with Poland the next fastest. Where were the British?

A piece coming into the third 500m pushed Great Britain into second place behind Estonia and these two boats then held their own battle at the head of the field. Estonia has been improving through this season with a sixth-place finish at the European Rowing Championships and then a fifth at Aiguebelette. Was today their day to medal?

Great Britain then shifted gears and squeezed ahead of Estonia with the United States flying down the line just ahead of New Zealand and Poland. At the finish Great Britain scored gold, Estonia took the silver and a very happy American crew earned bronze.

Results: GBR, EST, USA, NZL, POL, GER

 

Gold – LAMBERT, Peter (GBR)

We knew we had the fastest semi-final time, but we stayed in our own boat. We remained confident about our last 1000m. We are happy and we hope to be selected for Amsterdam. There is to be a crew announcement on Thursday.

Silver – RAJA, Allar (EST)

This was one of the races where I didn’t know how we were doing, so I just kept focus on the strokes. By the finish we were surprised we came second. It was very good team work. Good decisions were made with the stroke work. We are keeping the same team for the Championships in Amsterdam. We all are very happy with today’s performance.

Bronze – DANN, Benjamin (USA)

It wasn’t pretty! We only see the race from our perspective. The other teams had a great sprint and we were just really lucky to hold them off. The theme of our weekend was to improve while we put more strokes in and we think we did exactly that.

B-Final

There is a lot of big names in Italian rowing in Italy’s boat. Agemennoni, Venier, Stefanini and Raineri was not the fastest out of the blocks, but they had soon powered into the lead and overtaken Canada. The Canadians held on but the stronger Italians kept their nose in front.

Results: ITA, CAN, AUS, CZE, NED, SLO