Helen Glover targeting European glory en route to third Olympic gold

By James Reid

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.

Truro’s Glover 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 fourth-place 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.

The European Championships are another chance to iron out any issues before the second World Rowing Cup in May, and Redgrave believes they have already found a strong formula for success.

She said: “We have been doing well in training, the World Cup was a good run and I think we have got that little bit of magic gel together which is really nice to have this early on. There is still some more to come I’m sure, we have a big training block coming up.”

Shorten added: “It has been a good stepping stone, each race we have learned some more. It has been a good start.”

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/