ROWING SERVICE SPECIAL COVERAGE OF THE WORLD CHAMPIONSHIPS 2006 AT DORNEY, ETON Knights to the rescue; races and faces WorldsBlog 2006 chapter 6: Thursday 24th August Thursday morning (RQ) My knight in shining armour has arrived: Trevor Chambers, long-time aide to the Rowing Service, emailed yesterday afternoon to say he could, after all, come to the Champs. A quick phone call back, two conversations with the press office, and a couple of texts later, and we're all set - he's driving over now. That will free me up, once I've done a bit more setting-up, to know that blog material is being written even if I have to go and interview athletes. Whoopee! And Trevor knows my way of working, so if all goes well we shall try and do live-written commentary of some of the bigger A finals. A very quick breakfast, then scramble in to Dorney to set up early today, with racing brought forward to 9am. The shuttle-bus volunteers still haven't broken their record - so far there has always been a shuttle waiting even before I open the door of my car after parking. Brilliant work. Wander through the boating area - I've reached the course at 8:20 just as all the crews are coming off the water. Floods of blue boxes everywhere, and just a few racers heading off under the island bridge, to go and warm up. The British women's eight paddles through the bridge - too far away to shout good luck, but I think it to them anyway. Press office buzzing, and of course it's filling up now for the semis. Earpiece radios are doled out - white ear-clipping objects which look like you're wearing half a pair of ear-muffs. We work out how to operate them, and get 'Siemens Championship Radio' loud and clear, a mixture of music, race-car commentary (useful when you want to hear exactly what's being said) and rather hit-and-miss discussion between races. Redgrave and Cracknell on TV being interviewed on BBC 1 morning TV, followed by something from Dan Snow and another historian, though I'm too far away from the screen to hear what he's doing - perhaps it's nothing to do with rowing at all but just a coincidence. FISA certainly knew what the forecast was yesterday - and the huge tailwind has delivered. It's leaning-into-the-wind strength if you try and walk towards the start. Definitely better conditions to decide who goes through in the big boats. Women's eights repechages - poor GB trail in quite a long way off Germany and Canada, with two going through. I'm sure they've tried their hardest, but sometimes reality is that you can do your best but it isn't anywhere close to good enough, as Annabel Vernon said to me last month. Miserable though - the first full-squad crew to be knocked out of the medal range. See Elise's mum (herself a former top oarswoman), who is being philosophical while herding spectators in the FISA Family Grandstand. Nice big gap for GB press since we have nobody in the C/D/E semis (amazing how much the bottom end of the squad has come on in recent years). Trev calls, and I bike round to the accreditation office to meet him. All goes smoothly, though I get accused of trying to join their team by the accreditation volunteers. Cora Zillich from Germany is here too, freelancing after yet another change in the GER press officer arrangements. Cora's great, with a wickedly sarcastic take rowing in general and the German squad in particular, so I'm looking forward to hearing all the gossip about Hacker, the GER M4- etc. Steve Kerr, of the FISA Rigging Survey team, says a lot of the athletes have had serious trouble fully extending their arms when asked. The survey group have been asking them to stand upright, and put both arms out horizontally to measure 'wingspan'. Some top rowers can't actually get both arms straight and horizontal, presumably due to over-tightened back/shoulder/upper arm muscles. No time to ask more, sadly, since I have to beetle off and show Trevor round the site. James Cracknell's arrived in the main media area, and we sort out who's doing what in the Telegraph pieces today. Get installed in the grandstand as racing restarts, see GBR LW1x Antonia van Deventer do her best but go to the B-final (no problem, she's had a really good regatta and wasn't expected to go through). Horrible conditions for the less experienced rowers: very bumpy erratic water, with crabs, near-crabs and wobbles extremely common. Zac Purchase puts GRE LM1x Elias Pappas to bed a bit earlier in the men's semifinal, making sure he has enough of a cushion to be able to concentrate on not messing up in the final 500m. The other semi is a hell of a race, but they're still 4 seconds slower than Zac. Later he comes up and admits he did tweak the water a couple of times on the run-in, but nothing bad. Because Japan was so far away, being besieged by a load of random regional press is new to him, but if he wants sponsorship he's going to have to get used to it. Thursday mid-racing (Trev) Hello everyone, 09:30: Feeling like a precision sky-diver having an unexpected landing, I appear to have arrived in a fully flowing regatta. That means I've missed all of the early teething troubles as the event got up to speed earlier in the week - if indeed there were any - and everything seems to be humming along nicely. Having driven through torrential rain to get here this morning, the weather is overcast and grey but dry, and more importantly as far as the rowing is concerned, the wind: it's a tail wind, and the flags down the side of the enclosures side are only just being filled. It's a bit lumpy though, with a hint of white horses on the waves. Can't see there being many record times, but judging from the monitors it looks much calmer down at the start. It's not very warm though! 10:30: I've been here about 90 minutes, and already have seen pretty much all of the usual suspects, ie the rowing correspondents and ex-international rowers now working for the media newspapers, and all the great, the good - and the rest. The morning's racing is reps and C/D semis/finals. It's refreshing to see so many nations not exactly known as rowing powerhouses represented here, and fighting it out for 13-24th in the world, and clearly benfitting the FISA efforts to promote rowing worldwide. It gets more serious from here on in though, with semi-finals and therefore places in the finals at stake. Unlike at say Henley Royal Regatta, there is no long luncheon or tea break here, and the races go off at 12 minute intervals with about 10 minutes gap after every two races, with the last race scheduled for 15:24. In the first lwt women's 1x semi, Weisshaupt from Switzerland has a peculiar white rubber ball on a stalk on the stern of her boat - I think it's a BBG - almost like a bow-ball on her stern. Never seen that before. James Cracknell guessed that it was so she could see how much bounce she was getting. It obviously worked - just - she won a very close race where a second separated the top 4, by 0.16s. In the second semi, Carow from Germany has a much easier time of it, winning by a couple of lengths, also in a BBG and also with the mysterious stern ball. Must try to find out more about what that is later. 11:26: Zac Purchase is in this first lwt 1x. The wind has dropped a bit, and Zac and Pappas from Greece are out in front at 1000m. Purchase has eased out to just over a length in front with 500 left, and is safe in front. Behind him the race is on for the 2nd and 3rd qualifying spots. The noise from the grandstands is more audible for a British winner, and as he sculls back up lane 0 on his warm down Zac has a slight grin for the applause. The grandstands are still quite empty, so the applause is a ripple of clapping and none of the organised cheerled chanting in evidence from yes you guessed it Australian supporters earleir on. In the other semi the Spaniard Guimerans is leading the way, more through grunt than guile. I wonder if he has a finish - the Ukranian Serdiuk is tracking him a length down and looks much classier. In fact Serdiuk dropped back to 5th, so Pislar from Slovenia who was only 4th with 500m left had a good push to the end. The Dutch supporters are the most vocal, and their man van der Linden squeezes through in third, sending former world champion Michal Vabrousek to the small final. Guimerans did win this one. This heat was nearly 3s slower than the first, and the top 3 were closer together, so looks good for the home interest. It's the women sculler's semis now, with the super-experienced Karsten- Khodotovitch the one to watch. She's a length up at 500m. She looks calmly in control throughout, and can watch the race unfold behind her. A stroke before the finish the do-or-die finish from Bascetti of Italy almost stole the last qualifying place from Guerette of the USA, but a crab stopped her on the line and she was 0.05s behind in the end. As befits a champion of Karsten's status, the applause for her on her warm down is the heaviest yet this morning. More semi-finals (RQ again) Trev takes my bike up to the start for Campbell's M1x race, while I watch on the monitors. Hacker sets about Mahe aggressively, and it seems to work for 750 metres, until the Drysdale mid-course power is piled on and makes everyone else look as if they're deliberately slowing down. There's no noticeable increase in Mahe's effort, he just carries on pushing hard all the way down the course, and it makes you realise the others are letting the foot off the pedal. Anyway, Hacker isn't having that, and it develops into a brilliant race to the finish which Mahe wins by more than a second. The story isn't finished though - from Mahe's pretty well even splits over the last 1500m, either that was the best-paced all-out effort of his life, or there's a lot more to come. Either way the final will be different. Alan gives us all a bit of a scare, by settling a bit too early and thus giving Tufte and Synek a chance to pull away in the middle thousand. I don't think he's going to crack his mid-course issues here, but he must do something about it before next year. This will be where Jurgen's help is crucial - he such an expert about how to get the best out of yourself physically. Time to watch some more races and start the merry-go-round of bagging athletes to talk to. I'm going to see the M2x and M4- by bike since it fits into the schedule pretty well. Trev's beetling away on his own laptop, so I'll let him take over for a while. Back from the towpath (Trev) 13:15: Bit of a break from typing, I've been following a few of the races by bike. Apart from seeing the whole race unfold, it's a great way to warm up, was quite cold in the grandstand. Down at the start the conditions are much better, with ripples rather than waves. A few of the scullers have quite large bulbous fairings, rather than mere "V" sections, which you don't see at domestic regattas. Everything is a bit bigger here! Synek, the Czech hwt sculler, has quite an elaborate spiders web dyed into his hair, and he isn't the only Czech squad member thus made up so it's obviously a squad thing. Campbell comes third in his heat, eventually, and for the first half looked a bit laboured, but maybe it was just low rating as he lay in wait for the second half, as he sharpened it up and picked it up throughout the second half. In the men's pairs, the British pair are up against the Australians Ginn and Free. Colin Smith at bow in the British boat, is playing it very cool at the start - despite being attached with over 6 mins to go, he never once looked round to glance down the course. I know he's rowed here hundreds of times but even so... The sun is out, but there is a stiff breeze blowing. The first three for the first half were Australia, Great Britain and Italy. With 500m left the GB push co-incided with a boat-stopping crab by the Italians as they came under pressure from the accelerating Canadians, which spurred the home nation on into second, ensuring that the Australians couldn't let up despite leading all the way. Well rowed guys, 2 months ago it didn't look like we had a pair that would get into the A final. The first women's 2x was a bit of an Antipodean affair, with the Kiwi Evers-Swindell sisters leading the AUstralians all the way, with Ukraine snapping at their heels. In the second semi Belarus led all the way, leading Germany and Great Brtain for the other two qualifying places. 14:00: a cracking first semi of M4-, result delayed whilst they try to sort out the very close finish, will need the photograph for that one...meanwhile in the second one, GBR pull out to 3/4 length lead at 500m, from Canada, the rest all together. They're a length up and doing it the way they have all season, leading from the front. It's GER, just, from CAN for the other 2 places. A close-up of the GB crew shows them looking calm, with no strain showing. Germany push in the last 250m, GB responding, half a length ahead now, though fast shrinking to a short canvas on the line. It was either a very controlled and judged race, or the Germans almost caught them napping. It looked a bit like they'd had to scramble for it right at the end to me. We now get the result of the first semi, confirmed as France, from the Netherlands, which wasn't in doubt, with the USA third, having got the same time as New Zealand in fourth. That's the end of the A/B semi-finals, we have some C/D and D/E semi's and some C and D finals left to come this afternoon in the next hour. 14:28: They are going to rerow the first semi of the men's 4- for the third qualifying spot...this was the race where USA and NZL dead-heated. FISA rule 75 (apparently!). The crews will need recovery time of course, so that race has been scheduled to follow the last race of the day, at 15:30. That's less than 2 hours recovery time, which doesn't sound very generous. I bet they'd both rather have a 7-boat final on saturday! Oh, that's now been changed to 17:15, which sounds a bit more like it. For the armchair multi-lane umpires amongst you (Andrew Blit, you know who you are), rule 75 reads:- When the order of finish between 2 or more crews cannot be determined, then the result is declared a dead heat between the crews involved. If there is a dead heat, the following procedure shall operate: 1. In a heat, a repechage or a semi-final if a dead-heat occurs between crews and if only one of the crews progresses into the next round, then there must be a re-row over the full course between the crews involved. The re-row must take place on the same day as the dead-heat and not less than 2 hours after the race in which the dead-heat occurred. If all the crews involved in the dead-heat progress anyway into the next round, there will be no re-row and their relative positions in the next round shall be decided by lot. 2. In a final, if a dead-heat occurs between crews, then they shall be given equal placing in the final order and the next placing(s) shall be left vacant. If the tied placing is for a medal position then the Organising Committee shall provide additional medals. Now that the important races are done, at least as far as sorting out the crews progressing to finals are concered, the journalists around me are a study of concentration, as they write up their eloquent copy (ready for the sub-editors back in the office to chop it all out again I bet) and try to interview the athletes. A bit about the abandoning of racing yesterday afternoon: all through the day the expected results are compared with the actual results and with wind measurements. All morning the races ran as expected with the results going as predicted, but they started going differently in the afternoon, which was the first hint of trouble, and what led to the decision to reschedule the remainder of the races to today. The weather forecast for Friday is for a cross-tail wind, at roughly half the strength of todays wind, so there should be fewer crabs in evidence tomorrow! A lot of the adaptive crews are now going out for a paddle. This is the first time your correspondent has seen adaptive crews close up, and until I actually noticed the stabilisers, I was thinking it all looked a bit precarious...I know some able bodied scullers who could benefit from a set too! They certainly add to the paraphenalia left on the landing stages when they're out paddling. 17:15: the rerow of the M4-. They're both in their original lanes, USA in 2 and NZL in 3, and come down the course in a near-rerun of the first attempt to get a result. Surely they aren't going to repeat that result? But no, it's the US crew who lead the way, a length ahead, and quite pleased to win. Their supporters provided almost as much noise for this race as the entire contents of the stands did for the original one, which I'm sure lifed both crews. Neither crew bothered with a warm down now, and that concludes another day of racing. I quite liked the FISA note from yesterday about the weight of boats:- Many boats today were found to be close to the minimum weight or even exactly at the minimum weight. This is acceptable in the rules, but dangerous for the crew if the boat loses weight. Fancy that, weighing in exactly on the limit. Who would have thought it? Interviews coming out of my ears (RQ) Just had to sit down with Sir Steve and do his diary piece, now got to beetle off and catch Alan, the four, the women's double and the men's pair. This is starting to get busy.....

Copyright the Rowing Service 2006. Special Worlds 2006 coverage courtesy of Rachel Quarrell, Paul Azzopardi and Trevor Chambers. Additional contributions from Hammer Smith Esq.