GB Rowing Team set to open the season’s racing account
1st May 2012
Winter training is over and the GB Rowing Team, including Somerset's Cameron Nichol and Paul Mattick, travel to Belgrade this week to open its racing account for the Olympic season.
The 57-strong team (23 women and 34 men) will race in the opening of three 2011 World Cups from May 4-6th.
Since their training camp in Italy some final tweaks have been made to the Siemens sponsored and lottery funded crews who will race for Britain in a team which Performance Director David Tanner described as our “most ambitious yet to take to the water”.
Nichol, from Glastonbury now has a new partner in the second GB men's pair racing in Serbia with his crewmate from last year's men's eight, Nathaniel Reilly O'Donnell replacing the injured Dan Ritchie.
Frome's 2010 World Champion and 2011 World bronze medallist Paul Mattick is still set to race in the non-Olympic-class lightweight men's pair with Adam Freeman-Pask after Peter Chambers was selected ahead of him in the lightweight men's four for Belgrade.
Beijing Olympic gold medallist Andrew Triggs Hodge is looking forward to his first race back in the four in which he won his Olympic title and summed up the importance of the world cup season.
“The world cups are stepping stones but they are very significant stepping stones. There will be a lot of tactics and it will be hard to know what each nation is doing and what their objectives or targets are.
"It is the same game every year but the prize at the end of this year is the big one, the Olympics.”