Rowing: Twins at heart of Waikato clean sweep

The Hamilton Rowing Club, based around the brilliance of the Evers-Swindell twins, swept the six women's premier events at the national rowing championships on Lake Ruataniwha near Twizel on Saturday.

Hamilton won the women's single, the double, the eight, the coxless pair, the coxless four and the quad sculls in just under five hours' work.

There was an Evers-Swindell in every winning crew as Caroline and Georgina each claimed five titles to equal the feat of Waikato's Brenda Lawson in 1993.

While Caroline competed in the single, she gave up her seat in the double to Fiona Patterson, an under-23 world champion, ensuring the sisters would win five gold medals each.

Their effort was even more remarkable because the threat of high winds - which never eventuated - prompted organisers to shorten the programme.

Even the brief respite between races could not stop the Evers-Swindells but the others in the crews were outstanding.

Secondary school students Liz Jerrat and Rachael Arbuckle will long have tales of sharing an eight with the Olympic gold-medal-winning sisters.

The twins' coach, Dick Tonks, said the tight programme was initially of concern.

"But we sat down and worked through the changes and decided the clean sweep could still be done," he said.

Tonks admitted that the first three races, only 40 minutes apart, were tight.

"We ran them back to the start a couple of times in the car."

He said the hardest race for the twins was the coxless pair.

"They were unknown because they had only been in the boat a week, with five or six trainings," he said. "And they hadn't competed against [Olympic finalists] Juliette Haigh and Nicky Coles before."

But the Evers-Swindells won easily.

Tonks said the twins were working towards the world championships in Japan in August.

"They are going for the New Zealand record of four world titles, and I think they can do it."

A tired Caroline said after helping the eight to victory that "it was very hard". She added that it was "awesome" to win the coxless pair.

"We had not been in a pair for five years. It was really cool because we were up against classy opposition."

Tonks said the twins had not attempted to win every event for their club before.

Christchurch-based Canaviron, with three Olympians in its crew, took command of the men's premier coxed four after 500m and beat Wairau by 3.3 lengths in a time of 6m 28.38s.

It was the second year in a row that Olympians Eric Murray, Carl Meyer and Donald Leach had won the famous Boss Rooster trophy for the new Christchurch club. The other rower was Matthew Trott and the cox was Annie Robinson.

Murray and Leach held out a strong challenge from the Wairau coxless pair combination of Rob Hellstrom and Sean Neill to win by 2s in 6m 39.53s.

The Waikato crew of Bryce Mael and Glen Twining won the premier double scull, and Storm Uru (Canaviron) comfortably won the men's lightweight single sculls.

Canaviron finished strongly to win the men's eight title by three-quarters of a length.

The crew won five of the seven premier men's events.

- NZPA