Heat WINNER!!

Part 1 of the Olympic journey is complete. We won our heat today in a time of 5:27.69. The margin to second place ended up being about 7 seconds to Poland. Convincing yes....but listen to this.

As you know we were delayed yesterday by a thunderstorm. Today, just before we went out onto the water it started to rain. Immediately I thought, "great, here we go, another delay", but there was no lightning so we continued and after 10 minutes the rain stopped anyway. Now, we get into the lane and the starting "boot" comes up from under the water to hold the bow of our boat in place and doesn't our little rubber bow ball get caught on it and breaks off! I called to the starter to tell him that we no longer had one as it is a safety issue and I didn't want to get a false start or DQ for something so dumb. The starter says it is ok and we will continue without it.
The race is off without incident and we start moving on the Australians getting just over a 3/4 boat length lead, then about 800m in the Aussie's all of a sudden start moving very hard into our lane. I tell the guys we need to go now to get out of the way! They responded well and got us the extra 5m that we needed to clear them or they would have run right into us!! Next thing you know they stop rowing and it is now a 3 horse battle! I was thinking this is nuts....aren't we at the Olympics??

Anyway....here are some details of the race.
Just before the starter announced that we were clear to race without a bowball, (major safety issue) a rower named James Tompkins looked across as me and said "does it really matter?" To which I responded...."Don't know". For all of you who don't know James, he is a 3-time Olympic Rowing Champion.....no small feat.
We were clear to go and the starter gave a pretty long pause which has been normal for this regatta so far. The start for me was eerily quiet. I don't know if I was in the moment and extremely focused or what but I couldn't hear anything except for our blades and my voice. I didn't hear the other coxwains which is odd because I always hear them. That being said we got off to a decent start and took a seat on the Aussie's. We held this for a bit and just before the 500m mark we were able to start moving on them which was a good thing because little did I know they were coming over to snuggle up to us in 300m!!
Once the Aussie's had rudder problems and bailed we had open water on Poland and the Dutch. The race was essentially over at that point and we just rowed it pretty clean to the finish executing the calls but not with the vigor you would if you had someone right beside you. The crowd wasn't as loud as I thought it would be but with the lead we had they didn't need to cheer too hard, we were clearly going to win.
At the finish line we were told to take our boat straight to the dock since without a bowball the cool-down area was off limits for us. That wasn't really a problem since we have 4 stationary bikes and 4 ergometers in our boat bay to cool down on.

I spoke with the Australian cox after all the media interviews were done and he looked pretty shocked. He said the rudder just got stuck to starboard and he couldn't get it off. The boat maufacturer was repairing it as he told me this. That being said, I use the same rudder/fin system....nearly the exact same boat!! I will be checking it over thoroughly tomorrow.

We now have to wait for the winner of the repachage tomorrow to know who will be in the final. The repachage will be a 6 boat race with the top 4 going through to the final.
Poland, Netherlands, USA, China, Australia & Germany will fight it out for the spots.

The winner of the other Heat was Great Britain. They did have a faster time than us by just under 2 seconds, but if you look at the time through 1000m we were ahead by 0.80 seconds. (1/3length) They have certainly put in some good work in the last 2 months since we last met them in Lucerne so I will be keeping my eyes on them for the final. Clearly they came here for a medal.

That's about it for now...I'll let you know tomorrow who we will be facing in the final.