Going fast on and off the water
Winning the lightweight men’s single by nine
seconds ahead of three-time World Champion
Duncan Grant (NZL), Stephansen finished off
the season in style.
hard I’d worked for it and
were happy I’d finally
succeeded. I liked Bled
too – a nice place with
great landscape
and a beautiful
lake.”
Stephansen looks back to 2000, when he
was just 12, and says: “I wanted to begin
a sport and first started rowing socially.
I had a good group of friends at the club
I was at. Soon I realised I was good and
could be fast. I changed clubs to row
more competitively and seriously and
slowly got better and better.”
Henrik Stephansen of
Denmark racing in the
lightweight men’s single
sculls at the 2011 Samsung
World Rowing Cup in
Hamburg, Germany.
Stephansen already enjoyed success on the water,
being a World Champion at both the junior and
under- 23 levels, but until the 2011 season, he
had yet to make his mark on the senior stage.
At the Samsung World Rowing Cup in Munich
this year, his lightweight men’s double finished
a disappointing eighteenth in a tough field. In
Hamburg, Stephansen was on his own in the
lightweight men’s single event, and won gold
at both the Hamburg and Lucerne World Cups
before descending on Lake Bled for the climax
of the season.
“I had a very good feeling in my scull all year,”
Stephansen recalls. “I knew I had it in me
and training had gone well. Becoming World
Champion felt really great. My family and
friends were happy for me. They know how
Five years later, Stephansen broke
the indoor rowing world record
for 17-year-olds, recording a
score of 6: 15 over 2,000m.
Stephansen then broke
the 18-year-old record,
as he lowered his time
by an astonishing
10 seconds to 6:05.5. At
the 2008 C.R.A.S.H.B
Sprints in Boston, USA,
he broke the lightweight
men’s record for the first
time and the following
year smashed >
