Sometimes backing away from the problem is exactly what a rower needs to do. Ben Taylor and Oli Welch figured that out just before the final day of the World Cup regatta in Seville, Spain, and it paid off with gold in the Men’s Pair.
The pair had been struggling to find their rhythm in the lead-up to the race. They weren’t connecting the way they had back home in New Zealand, despite the data and their feel for the boat suggesting they were on the right track. On the eve of the final, they made a deliberate choice to stop chasing that feeling and trust their abilities instead.
“We just kind of said let’s stop trying to search for that feeling and just back ourselves,” Taylor explains. “I think just trying to simplify our rowing a bit and simplify the mindset brought us together.”
The approach worked. They led Romania by 1.63 seconds at the 1000-metre mark and stretched that to nearly three seconds by the 1500m. Romania made one last push in the final 200 metres, lifting to 45 strokes per minute and briefly closing the gap, but the New Zealand boat stayed composed and crossed in 6:26.86. Romania finished second in 6:29.46. Taylor and Welch remain the world’s number one Men’s Pair.
The women’s four of Kate Haines, Ella Cossill, Isla Blake and Alana Sherman also found their way to the podium with a bronze medal, finishing in 6:43.24 behind gold medallists the Netherlands (6:34.92) and silver medallists Australia.
For Haines and Cossill, the medal held special weight. Haines had been chasing a gold at this level for nearly seven years. After the race, she and Cossill immediately acknowledged the moment together. “The first thing Ella and I said to each other after the race was, ‘Oh my God, we finally got a medal!'” Haines says.
Haines took a substantial break after the Paris Olympics, spending roughly two months in minimal training before stepping back further. She felt burnt out and had lost her drive. A season of club rowing at Molesey in England changed her perspective entirely. “I just found the love for the sport again through being somewhere else, not training as hard, doing it for fun,” she says. “It was huge. I found my purpose again.”
Back to back, these gold and bronze medals show what New Zealand rowing can deliver when it gets out of its own way. The squad now heads to a training camp in Varese, Italy, before the second World Cup event in Plovdiv, Bulgaria in a fortnight.
