Rowing: Double sculler makes right call after exclusion

The West Australian mining industry's loss is New Zealand rowing's gain when it comes to double sculler Matthew Trott.

He was the unlucky athlete to miss out in the fallout from the Rob Waddell-Mahe Drysdale single sculling drama ahead of last year's Beijing Olympics.

When 2000 Olympic champion Waddell missed out to Drysdale in their best-of-three showdown, he took Trott's spot in the double scull with Nathan Cohen. That relegated Trott to rowing's equivalent of 12th man for the Olympics. It stung, considering Cohen and Trott had finished sixth at the world championships.

For a time, Trott thought hard about jacking it in and heading west.

"Training over the winter almost finished me off," he said yesterday of the period when the Olympic crews had been confirmed but before heading for China.

He had done all the training those in the Olympic seats had, but knowing all the while there was no silver lining in the form of a seat at the regatta, barring injury, at the end, "and that's the whole reason you do the training".

So he looked around for something different.

"I was going to go to the mines. I've always loved machinery since I was a kid, but the economic downturn probably meant it was a good thing I didn't go."

He had eight weeks off and was back in Ashburton "chopping firewood for the old man" when he had a couple of calls from fellow rowers. One was Cohen. He's keeping mum on who the other one was. Whatever they said, it stoked the fires again.

And with Waddell out of rowing for the foreseeable future, a Cohen-Trott reunion was inked in. They stepped back in the boat for the first time again early in January and it did not take long to get the good vibrations going again.

"After 500 metres everything seemed to gel and we were back into it. It was awesome," Trott said.

In an elite squad which mixes familiar faces with new graduates to the top echelon, Cohen and Trott will arrive in Europe tipped to be among New Zealand's leading performers.

The fresh combinations include a women's quad scull; Hamish Bond and Eric Murray - half of last year's Olympic coxless four - in the coxless pair vacated by Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater - Rebecca Scown and Emma Feathery in the women's coxless pair and Paula Twining and Anna Reymer, who have won first dibs on the double scull positions occupied for the past eight years by double Olympic champions Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell.

Big shoes? Yes and no.

Twining, who rowed with the twins in a quad eight years ago, ignores the recent history of the boat.

"We can't do anything about it," she said. "We've got huge respect for them and what they've done and to see it can be achieved is probably the biggest thing for me. I don't find it daunting. It's a new challenge for us."

Head coach Dick Tonks likes what he's seeing across the squad too.

"We did look a bit light on the ground for a while but I think the team that's going away has really come on quite strongly. For the start of the [Olympic] four-year cycle, it's probably stronger than it's ever been."