Olivia’s big race
Grovelands has agreed to sponsor Olivia Carnegie-Brown during 2010/11 to help Olivia further her International Rowing Career. Olivia has already had considerable success – she won gold in the women’s coxless four and bronze in the coxless pair at the Sydney Youth Olympic Festival in 2009. She also recently won a silver medal in the Junior World Championships in Lincolnshire. We are massively excited for the year ahead!
Olivia says:
“Hi Grovelands!”
“A few weeks ago was the big race up in London on the tideway – Women’s Head of the River. We raced from Chiswick to Putney, which is the opposite to what the boat race was last weekend, but exactly the same distance. We had previously been rowing with a few girls from other rowing clubs who train alone but race with us in the 8+.
“However we decided to race a full Oxford Brookes crew because we thought that we had a strong enough core to have a competitive University crew. Despite the coaches not agreeing with us, we went ahead and raced as an Oxford Brookes University crew (which means every member of the 8+ has to be enrolled as a Brookes student). We were set at 16th which is where they finished last year out of 303 other crews.
“We went off behind a club called Molesey, from London and ahead of Cambridge who were our main competition to try and win the University category. The whole way down we were on Molesey’s tail. We had caught up with them, but just didnt have enough to overtake which was annoying, but we also had Cambridge in our sights behind us, and the whole way down the gap stayed very consistent.
“We raced a really good, solid race. Every member of the crew was 100% switched on and the crew responded so well to the calls from the cox! By the end of the day the results finally came out and we had come 7th out of 303, and won the University Pennant (category) to Cambridge by 8 seconds! We were only 2 seconds away from 5th place. The crews ahead of us that had won the whole thing and the elite Pennant all had Olympic athletes in them and were a good margin ahead of the rest of us but 7th was a fantastic achievement for us! There is a presentation/sit down meal this Thursday to be awarded with medals and photographs!”
“More news to come next week!”
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