Ben Taylor and Oli Welch came within 0.54 seconds of Olympic history on the final day of the World Cup regatta in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, with New Zealand’s five-medal haul underscoring a day when quick water and fast crews made for compelling racing.
The defending world champions in the Men’s Pair flew through the first half of their race with splits that had them tracking Hamish Bond and Eric Murray’s 2012 London Olympic record. They hit 500 metres in 1min 29.17sec, well inside the 1.31 the legendary pair posted fourteen years ago. At the 1000m mark, Taylor and Welch were still on pace, touching down in 3.01.76 against Bond and Murray’s 3.03. But the Plovdiv course toughened in the final stages. “It got a bit messy,” Welch said later. “The course definitely kind of slowed down and it got a little bit rough towards the end. We probably started getting a bit tired as well.” They didn’t realise how close they’d come until the interviews began. “We didn’t really know until they asked us how it felt to go one second outside the record,” Welch recalls. “We were like, ‘What? We didn’t know we did that’. It was quite a nice surprise.”
Finn Hamill and Ben Mason showed recovery in the Men’s Double Sculls after a sluggish opening. Two weeks earlier in Seville, the pair had found themselves in an unwanted C Final alongside Croatia’s Olympic-winning Sinkovic brothers, a race neither crew wanted to contest. Back on the A List here, conditions favoured fast times, and both crews made their move through the middle 1000 metres. The Croatians built decisively, running at a pace that nearly beat their own 2014 world best of 5.59.72. Hamill and Mason chased down China in the final 200 metres to claim silver in 6.05.36. “The transition onto our rhythm just didn’t really happen,” Hamill said. “We were three or four seconds slower in that second 500 than where we needed to be. It was pretty laboured and sluggish.” They made the adjustments and got their reward.
The Women’s Four of Ella Cossill, Kate Haines, Isla Blake and Alana Sherman analysed their preliminary race and identified exactly where they’d lost time. Their second 500 metres had been significantly slower than rivals, so they targeted that segment in the final. When Haines, the stroke, began calling out splits of 1.32 and 1.33 seconds, the crew knew they were in rhythm. “You don’t hear that all the time,” Cossill said. “They’re the kind of splits you’re aiming for in training, but to actually hear it throughout a race gets you going.” They closed a seven-second deficit from the heats to just over three seconds, finishing in 6.18.99 for silver behind the Americans.
The Women’s Quad of Olivia Hay, Stella Clayton-Greene, Beckie Leigh and Veronica Wall overturned a 12-second preliminary deficit to take silver in 6.17.27. Fred Vavasour, Campbell Crouch, Harry Fitzpatrick and Josh Vodanovich fell short by the narrowest margin in the Men’s Four, where Romania touched out New Zealand in the final 100 metres. Bronze represented a major step for a crew where only Crouch had raced at Elite level before this season. Coach Mike Rodger had spotted something workable in the heat. “Mike just kept us on trying to attack the race,” Fitzpatrick said, “and just be the fastest moving crew through that middle thousand. One thing we learned was that it’s not come out hot and settle. You just have to go out hard and keep sprinting.”
