KEY POINTS:
Super Saturday is nearly upon us. The fans have become edgy but will Saturday be a big day for medals at the Games for Kiwi athletes? David Leggat and Eugene Bingham in Beijing look at New Zealand's best chances for gold.
Mahe Drysdale
Rowing, single scull
David
Leggat: For the 29-year-old Aucklander tomorrow represents the end of a burning four-year ambition.
It began in 2005 when he moved into the single seat having been part of the coxless four which made the A final in Athens the year earlier.
He immediately had success, being one of the four gold medallists at the world championships in Gifu, Japan in the space of 45 minutes.
Drysdale backed that up by defending the world titles in each of the next two years. Experienced judges reckoned his performance in triumphing at Munich last year to bejust about the perfect exhibition ofsculling.
But his hopes of completing the set of four world and Olympic titles took a blow during the week when he was struck by a stomach bug.
Vomiting and diarrhoea severely debilitated him and he came within .45s of missing the final altogether in Wednesday's semifinals.
Leading at the 1500m mark, in a race when the first three automatically qualified for the final, Drysdale, in his words, "hit the Great Wall of China" about 400m from home. He had to dig deep to cling on.
He has always been a confident man on the water, and remains so, figuring that if he could row as well as he did for the first three-quarters of the semifinal in that physical condition, he should be right for the final, providing the bug has been seen off.
Drysdale believes he has one big plus going into the final.
None of his rivals has beaten him when it really mattered, in the biggest regatta of each of the past three years.
Tall and lean, Drysdale has a long, powerful stroke and possesses a strong finish.
Look for him to be at or near the frontby the 1000m mark. It will then be a case of withstanding any challengers, or, if he is behind, seeing if those in front of him canhold off his usually irresistible charges.
Rob Waddell won the Olympic gold in Sydney eight years ago. He was an outstanding champion; Drysdale has his heart and mind set on following suit.
A few weeks before heading to Beijing, Drysdale opined that, assuming he was on top of his game, he could cover all his leading rivals. But if there's one man he expected to be his toughest challenger it is Czech Republic sculler Ondrej Synek.
He won Wednesday's semifinal, was second to Drysdale in the world final in Munich last year, and looms as the biggest threat.
The rival:
Watch out for Athens Olympic champion Olaf Tufte of Norway. He is a two-time world champion, although at 32 his best years might be behind him.
Of the rest, the violin-playing Swede Lassi Karonen is no pickle and Briton Alan Campbell, a mate of Drysdale's, won the Munich World Cup regatta a few weeks ago and was fourth in the worlds last year.
But it's Synek who will occupy Drysdale's mind most in the next 24 hours.
Rob Waddell and Nathan Cohen
Rowing, double sculls
David Leggat: They look like an odd fit, but put tall, muscular Waddell in a boat behind the shorter, stocky Cohen and they make it work superbly.
When Waddell missed out on the single seat for Beijing to Mahe Drysdale, he was paired with former world under-23 silver medal-winning single sculler Cohen.
Both admit it didn't work overnight.
Plenty of fine tuning and tinkering was required. But by the time they arrived at the Lucerne regatta in June the kinks had been ironed out.
They won the final, and backed that up in Poznan, Poland, three weeks later.
So they arrived in Beijing as favourites for gold.
The heat was convincingly won last weekend, but then the ante was upped in the semifinal.
It turned out to be uncomfortably tight, the New Zealanders finishing third - the last available spot for the final - and only got there by .73s over Croatians Ante Kusurin and Mario Vekic. It means they will start in lane six, not the place winners usually come from.
But that could prove just the sharp reminder Waddell and Cohen need.
As the stakes get higher, so the real challengers come to the fore.
Should they win gold, it will be an outstanding achievement for both men, for different reasons.
In Waddell's case, it will come after a seven-year break from rowing while he turned his attention to grinding for Team New Zealand at two America's Cups.
Then he got the bug back and his progress has been substantial.
For Cohen, who had been in the double with Matthew Trott last year when they qualified the boat for Beijing, he's had a new partner with a vastly different physique, to get used to.
Victory tomorrow will be one in the eye for those who doubted Waddell, whose fame was based on his solo work, would be able to blend successfully with another rower.
It will be tight, but they can certainly do it.
The rivals:
Start with Australians David Crawshay and Scott Brennan, who won the semifinal in which Waddell and Cohen were third.
They finished third in the Munich and Lucerne regattas this year and were eighth at last year's worlds but look to be timing their run nicely.
Then there's old Slovenian hands Iztok Cop and Luka Spik, who won the gold in Sydney eight years ago and silver in Athens and were world champions last year.
French pair Jean-Baptiste Macquet and Adrien Hardy, the other semifinal winners, are not starting in the prime spot, lane four, for nothing.
And not to forget British pair Stephen Rowbotham and Matthew Wells.
They won the Munich World Cup this year, and were second at Lucerne to the New Zealanders.
Valerie Vili
Women's shot put
Eugene Bingham: One summer's day about nine years ago, a jandal-wearing, shy, tall 14-year-old stepped into the throwing circle at Massey Park, Papakura, picked up the shot put and hurled it. Stunned organisers of the Counties Manukau secondary school athletics championships watched the shot soar past the records.
"Who is that?" they asked. Soon afterwards, thankfully, someone had the sense to introduce this tall teenager to a coach named Kirsten Hellier. A winning combination was forged and a star was born.
That girl was Valerie Vili. She has come an awful long way but the raw ability and natural gifts remain, formidably, the same.
Her graduation from talented teenager to Olympic champion would crown a progression that Hellier and Vili have dreamed of almost since the day they met. Hellier went home the first night she met Vili and told her husband that this kid would be an Olympic champion one day.
For Vili, the dream took a little longer. As she watched the opening ceremony of the Sydney Olympics in a south Auckland hospice where she was nursing her mother, Vili decided that more than anything in the world, she wanted to go to the Games. The next day her mother died, but rather than extinguish her dream, it fired it and when she competed in Athens just four years later she dedicated her performance to her mother's memory.
Her experience in Athens was blighted by the fact that she missed the final because of a drug cheat. But no one could take away from her the fact that as a 19-year-old she had finished eighth at the Olympic Games.
The next year, 2005, she began a steady progression to the top of the world. Bronze at the world championships was followed by a Commonwealth Games gold in 2006.
Last year, she won the world title, and followed that up in March this year with the world indoor crown.
Field events require precision, finesse and explosive power. There are no guarantees that an athlete on a given day will win. But Vili and Hellier have prepared meticulously, ferreting themselves away in a camp in Queensland these past few weeks. Her opponents have been throwing the shot in competitions further than Vili's 20.54m best - but we have no way of knowing what Vili has been throwing away from the spotlight these past few months.
You can bet, though, that when she bursts back onto centre stage tomorrow there will be nothing that Vili and Hellier will have left undone in their golden quest.
The rivals:
Some of the best shot putters in the world come from Belarus. Foremost among them in the women's event is Nadzeya Ostapchuk, a 27-year-old who just missed a medal at the Athens Olympics.
During last year's world championships, she was leading the competition until Vili pushed her into second with a personal best throw. During the build-up to the Games, Ostapchuk has been in dominant form. She has the year's best throw, 20.98m, and has a personal best of 21.09m.
Ostapchuk's countrywoman Natallia Mikhnevich took a year off last year to have a baby and returned to competition in July with a throw of 20.70m. German Nadine Kleinert, with a season best of 19.89m, is another one to watch. Of the Chinese contenders, Lijiao Gong, has the best record this year.
Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell
Rowing, double sculls
David Leggat: Put the Hawkes Bay twins as gold medal fancies two months ago and you might be told to sit in a quiet corner a while.
Not that their qualities were in doubt, just their form.
They captivated the nation when they won the gold medal in Athens four years ago, and when they bagged the world title in Japan a year later all seemed set fair for an unfettered march to Beijing glory.
But they ran into problems during their European campaign midyear.
Georgina got some flu and they withdrew from the Lucerne regatta. And when they hit the water at Poznan a few weeks later it was a disaster.
They finished last in their heat, and in their repechage, demoting them to new territory, the B final, which they won.
Since then, they decamped to Lake Karapiro and got down to training.
Whatever they did it seemed to work. The effect was immediate when they started their heat on the Shunyi course on Saturday, winning in convincing fashion to advance straight to tomorrow's final.
They have fashioned a fine record, winning the world title in 2002, 2003 and 2005.
At 29, this could be their last chance for another tilt at gold.
It might be time for a change by the time London comes round in 2012.
Then again, victory here might decide them on going to the well once more.
A big race in more ways than one looms.
The rivals:
China's pair of Li Qin and Tian Liang shape as the largest threat among Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell's rivals tomorrow.
They were world champions last year, won two of this year's three World Cup titles, displaying a remorseless about their work.
They are viewed as China's best chance of gold on the waters of Shunyi.
National pride will be burning in their minds.
They will be formidable opposition, sitting in the next lane to the Kiwis.
British pair Anna Bebington and Elise Laverick won the Poznan World Cup title and Germans Annekatrin Thiele and Christiane Huth pushed the Chinese hard in Lucerne.
But ultimately it looks like China vs New Zealand.
