| Lucerne World Cup, May 2008 |
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I am sure there is not a single sportsman in the world that enjoys losing. There are probably only a handful who don’t mind losing. For me, the toughest thing to take is the feeling that you were not good enough or you under-performed.
Although we had found some good speed in training and raced right on the red line, we just couldn’t find enough to make the A final, missing out by just 0.2 seconds to the World Champions, New Zealand. In the B final the next day, I have no doubt that we all put our heart and soul into the race again to prove to ourselves that we could race against the best times of the A final. We just didn’t have enough speed, efficiency and power after the flat out racing to finish the race off – ending up a disappointing 8th overall. Having been back in the UK for a week I am pleased to say that things are back on track with Hodge and TJ and I’m already looking forward to the next chance to set the record straight. |
This disappointing and irritating feeling has stayed with me this last week since our defeat in Lucerne. At this second World Cup, we raced without our selected stroke-man (Andrew Triggs Hodge) and bow-man (Tom James). They were both on a recovery programme with back injuries so we decided to race the coxless four as planned with 2 ‘substitutes’ onboard. I use inverted commas here because it is not right to call these guys subs: Colin Smith (at stroke) and Tom Lucy (bow seat) have so many strengths. They are both world bronze medallists from 2007 in the coxless pair and eight respectively. | < Prev | Next > |
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