Rowing: Roaring success on and off the water

Crowds enjoy the sunshine at Lake Karapiro. Photo / Christine Cornege.

Rowing New Zealand will reflect this week with satisfaction on a world championship regatta which proved a roaring success.

Off the water, most boxes were ticked - the cumulative attendance was a championship record 66,771 - while on it, they proved to be the country's most successful worlds regatta.

Then again, it depends which criteria you use.

Purely in terms of medals won, the 10 New Zealand's 18 crews gathered - three gold, three silver and four bronze - are a record.

But if gold is the primary yardstick, the victories by Rebecca Scown and Juliette Haigh, and Eric Murray and Hamish Bond in the two coxless pair finals, and Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan in the double scull are one down on both the achievements of Gifu, Japan, in 2005 and in Poznan, Poland, last year.

On balance, the broader view is the one to take, the breadth of medals won delivering a statement of New Zealand's intent for the 2012 London Olympics.

Britain took the largest medal haul home. They collected six gold, five silver and a bronze.

Germany, who hadn't looked particularly flash earlier in the regatta, came home in a hurry, finishing with nine altogether.

The 81 medals across 27 events - 14 in the Olympic categories, eight non-Olympic and five adaptive - were shared among 24 nations.

But what should have officials feeling chipper was the identity and ages of some of those who performed above expectations.

James Lassche and Graham Oberlin-Brown, 21 and 22, won silver in the non-Olympic lightweight coxless pair; the bronze-medal winning coxless four - which is on the card for London's Olympics in 2012 - are all 23 or 22; while Julia Edward and Lucy Strack in the lightweight double scull and the men's eight both made finals with youth a key ingredient.

Emma Twigg, bronze winner in the single scull, is 23, and conceded 15 and six years to the scullers who crossed the finish line ahead of her; Nathan Cohen and Joseph Sullivan, who won the country's first world double sculling gold yesterday, are 24 and 23 respectively.

Then there was the men's eight, who showed there is renewed life for the most romantic of the sweep oar boats. They made the A final on the strength of just two rows together, giving the older generation, who remember the glory years in the early 1970s and 1980s, a rosy glow as they contemplate what might lie ahead.