THE best eight rowers in the world remain on course for London after fine-tuning their Olympic preparation in the wilds of Tasmania.
Australia's men's lightweight four and heavyweight quad crews, which both won gold at last year's world championships, continued their five-ring countdown by mixing it with their closest rivals at Lake Barrington last week.
They were joined by reigning Olympic double scull champions Scott Brennan and Dave Crawshay and the shadow squads for both weight divisions as the national rowing hierarchy continued their extensive process to select which rowers will make the flight to the English capital.
``It's fair to say if you're an Australian sculler and you weren't at that camp, you won't be going to the Olympics,'' explained Hobart's national heavyweight quad coach John Driessen.
``It was an official Olympic training camp and it went really well. We mixed them all up a bit to see if there was any potential for people to break into the boats but it appears that it's pretty much status quo in terms of the places in the boats at the moment.''
Having won their world championships, lightweights Anthony Edwards, of New Norfolk, and Lindisfarne's Sam Beltz plus Hobart-based West Australians Ben Cureton and Todd Skipworth and their heavyweight equivalents Daniel Noonan, of New South Wales, Victorian Karsten Forsterling and South Australians James McRae and Chris Morgan are in the box seats for the Olympics.
Brennan, of Lindisfarne, and Victorian Dave Crawshay are similarly well placed to defend their Olympic crown.
If Australia seeks to contest the lightweight double, Huon's Tom Gibson, Rod Chisholm, of NSW, and Tamar cousins Ali Foot and Blair Tunevitsch are among the candidates.
Driessen and fellow coaches Brett Crow and Rhett Ayliffe mixed up the crews under the guidance of head national coach Noel Donaldson and high performance director Andrew Matherson and even pitched the lightweights and heavyweights against each other.
``We race them against each other all the time and it's very beneficial,'' Driessen said.
``They train together a lot and there is only about 10 or 11 seconds difference between them over the course of a race so quite often we give the lightweights a two or three length start and see if we can catch them. It goes without saying the lightweights love it when they win.''
The world's best time for the heavyweights is the five minutes 36 seconds set by the Olympic crew including Tamar's Brendan Long in Beijing while the lightweight benchmark is 5.45.
Aside from an injury which hampered the Brennan-Crawshay crew, Driessen said the sport's bigwigs were satisfied with the progress made at Barrington.
``Everyone seemed happy with where the respective crews are at this stage. They all trained and tested well in what was a hard program and that gave us a good gauge of progress.
``Scott is in his first year back in competition and Crawsh is returning from rowing in the quad but they know they will have to be as good if not better than they were in Beijing at the Olympics because New Zealand has won the last two world champs, closely followed by the Poms, so that's a really tightly contested event.''
The heavyweight scullers have since returned to their respective states or the Australian Institute of Sport to continue training and plan to meet up again at the NSW championships in Penrith next week followed by the nationals in Western Australia.
Only after further trials in Penrith in March and world cup regattas in Lucerne and Munich (when Rowing Australia will decide which additional Olympic crews to contest) in June will the final selections be made.
Email a friend