SA rowers through to men’s pair A-final
ROWERS Lawrence Brittain and Shaun Keeling hope to entertain as they seek glory tomorrow in the A-final of the men’s pair at the Rio Olympics.
Brittain, a cancer survivor, and Keeling, a veteran of Beijing 2008, ended third in their semifinal to advance to tomorrow’s A-final.
The men’s four of David Hunt, Jonty Smith, Vince Breet and Jake Green won the repechage to reach their semifinal today.
Brittain and Keeling had been second for most of the 2 000m race behind New Zealand pair Eric Murray and Hamish Bond, unbeaten in every race since 2009, before being overhauled by Great Britain over the final quarter.
“We had a really good first three-quarters of the race to the 1 500m,” Keeling, who ended fifth with Ramon Di Clemente eight years ago, said.
“We actually executed probably the best 1 500m we’ve done and then we just need to tweak it a bit for Thursday in the last little bit to make sure we can be in the mix to win a medal.”
Their 6min 27.59sec effort in the second semifinal of the day made them the slowest boat of the six qualifiers.
But their 4:48.48 at 1 500m was the second-fastest behind the Kiwis.
“It’s about momentum,” Keeling said. “We had really good momentum there . . . I think we can make that tweak.”
Brittain said there had been no need to push too hard at the end yesterday.
“We needed to have a big sprint there to beat those other crews there . . . so a big sprint at the end will hopefully put us back in the mix.
“We could have stepped up a little bit more,” Brittain, who was diagnosed with lymph node cancer in late 2014, said.
He returned to training for the first time after chemotherapy in February last year.
“We didn’t feel we needed to have the big sprint today. We’ll have to see what we can produce on Thursday for that.
“The stressful day was today. You don’t want to put in four years of work and then have a B-final.
“You can see the guys who didn’t make it through today are gutted, that’s really tough. We’ve done all the work and we’re in the A-final, it’s bonus time from here.”
“It’s going to be tough,” Keeling said, then added with his trademark smile: “Hope to entertain.”
The women’s pair, lightweight women’s double sculls and lightweight men’s sculls compete in semifinals today.
Meanwhile, the Blitzboks opened their Olympic sevens campaign with a workmanlike, solid 24-0 win over Spain yesterday .
Cecil Afrika scored twice and almost had a hat-trick and was joined on the scoreboard by Seabelo Senatla and Phillip Snyman as the Blitzboks opened their campaign well.
In their next match, South Africa beat France 26-0.