Stepping stone for Helen on the road to further Olympic medal success

Double Olympic champion Helen Glover hopes the upcoming European Rowing Championships is just another stepping stone on the road to a third Olympic gold medal.

Glover, who is based near Cookham, kicked off the season in style with World Rowing Cup victory in Varese as part of the women’s four alongside Esme Booth, Samantha Redgrave and Rebecca Shorten.

The quartet edged out fellow Brits Heidi Long, Rowan McKellar, Holly Dunford and Emily Ford for first place but the experienced Glover is not getting carried away just yet and insisted there is still plenty of work to do before Paris.

“It’s the best way to start the season,” she said. “We very much came here with-it part of our training run up to the [Olympic] Games so to come out and do that 2km within that is just really big practice.

“We are in a training flow so we will go back home into training almost as if we haven’t missed a step to flow into the Europeans. It is important to keep the consistency now, so we are not peaking for this, we are peaking for 100 days’ time. We haven’t been together that long so finding out where we are and what we need to work on is definitely step one.”

Glover’s quartet now head to Hungary for the European Championships (April 25-28), where they will hope to lay down another marker with just three months left until the Games.

They will bid for gold in the women’s four following a heartbreaking fourthplace finish in Tokyo, but showed they are in a good place to make the step onto the podium with their comfortable victory, as they led home their compatriots by over four seconds in Italy.

W British Rowing is the governing body for the sport and is responsible for the development of rowing in England and the training and selection of rowers to represent Great Britain. The GB Rowing Team is supported by the National Lottery Sports Fund. To find out more, and to follow the team, head to https://britishrowing.org/