Rowing: 'New' pair lean on years of experience

Juliette Haigh and Rebecca Scown. Photo / Christine Cornege

One of New Zealand's newest crews on the water at next week's world rowing championships is also paradoxically one of the most experienced.

Rebecca Scown and Juliette Haigh will have had little more than six months together to build an understanding in the women's pair before they take on the world's best at Lake Karapiro next week, but between them have 24 years of accumulated knowledge in the sport.

Haigh, 28, started rowing as a 14-year-old while Scown is only slightly less experienced, having spent the last 10 of her 27 years in competitive rowing. Both, however, have equally impressive credentials.

Haigh picked up a gold medal with Nicky Coles at the 2005 world championships in Japan, and a silver the following year in England. However, disappointment hit at the Beijing Olympics, when the pair could manage only sixth.

Coles retired, and Haigh took a year out of the sport, unsure whether or not her motivation levels were up to continuing the huge training loads required at the elite level.

In the interim, Scown and Emma Feathery - competing next week in the double sculls with Fiona Paterson - picked up a bronze at last year's world championships in Poland. The United States combination of Zsuzsanna Francia and Erin Cafaro took gold, with Romanians Carmelia Lupascu and Nicoleta Albu were second

Haigh's post-Beijing busman's holiday in London - despite her best intentions and efforts, she just couldn't stop training - convinced her that returning to the sport was what she wanted.

Some time on the water with Scown over the summer proved fruitful, and the pair were selected in March to test themselves at the World Cup regattas in Munich and Lucerne over the New Zealand winter.

Despite limited time in the boat, they picked up two comfortable wins and returned, encouraged, to New Zealand to get stuck into their world championships build-up.

"Time in the boat can make a difference, because you learn to row together," Scown explained. "But I think it was a pretty natural pairing - it did gel pretty quickly."

And while their World Cup wins were comfortable - five seconds plus - both women are wary of taking too much encouragement from the results.

"The Canadian pair is always strong, and the United States and Romania," Scown said, with Haig chipping in: "Then there's the crews that you never know that might come out - definitely the Chinese, you can't discount them."

It hasn't been all plain sailing for the pair: Scown was hit with tendonitis in her forearm on their return from their World Cup campaign, and a usually straightforward operation followed by a rapid return to the water was derailed when infection set in.

The timing was, both Haigh and Scown admit, not great. They had just started to build a bit of momentum from their abbreviated World Cup campaign, and were looking forward to working on base fitness for the world championships.

"Scown was out of the boat for about five weeks with her arm, so we didn't get back on the water until about the beginning of September," Haigh said. "There was good water when we first got home, but that was when Scown was out of the boat.

"When she came back, we had two or three weeks of really rough water, massive extremes of waves over our heads and huge winds. It was quite frustrating, but it has calmed down, and now we're loving going out and rowing on the flat water."

But as the pair has built up more time in the boat, the more they are looking forward to testing themselves against the best the rowing world has to offer.

Scown: "I think we're confident in what we're doing in our race, but you do use the other crews to make yourself go faster."

Haigh: "We've got the wins from both World Cup meetings - basically, you take what you can from that, which is mainly as a confidence booster and knowing we're on the right track.. Obviously we've got the boat speed, but things can change."

The pair share a level-headed approach to their campaign for world championships gold, Scown nodding in agreement as Haigh summarises: "We definitely don't think `Oh, we've won' and kind of sit back.

"It's completely the opposite. You think `Now they're out to get us'!"

- NZPA