The women of the pair
The pair is a peculiar boat to row. There are just two of you, one oar each, and every move is
absolutely reliant on your crewmate being wholly with you. The power application and timing
at the catch and finish have to be in sync to help the boat go straight.
For the top contenders leading up to the London
Olympic Games, they can be considered true
masters of the idiosyncrasies of a rowing pair
and word has it that none of them claim to have
fallen out.
So how do these athletes match up with each
other?
was in an eight for the first time. Scown admits
that lack of success at high school helped her
continue. “School rowing often puts people off,”
says Scown. “For me it wasn’t that intensive and
we didn’t do very well.” Now both women are
World Champions and full-time athletes.
World Rowing talked to the three crews that
appear to be the frontrunners in the quest for
gold in London. They finished first, second and
third at the 2011 World Rowing Championships
in Bled, Slovenia, and hail from three of the
best rowing nations in the world – Great Britain,
New Zealand and Australia. In Bled, the win came
down to a photo finish between Great Britain
and New Zealand, with New Zealanders
Juliette Haigh and Rebecca Scown inching out
the British. Helen Glover and Heather Stanning
of Great Britain were 8/100th of a second back.
Australia’s Sarah Tait and Kate Hornsey came
through in third.
New Zealand athletes Haigh, 29, and Scown,
28, both started rowing at high school with
varying degrees of success early on. Haigh
recalls the boat flipping at the dock when she
The Kiwi duo has been rowing together since their
selection as a crew in 2010. Haigh, a two-time
Olympian in the pair, had taken a year off from
national team rowing after Beijing and thus >
The podium of the
women’s pair at the
2011 World Rowing
Championships in Bled,
Slovenia, with Helen Glover
and Heather Stanning
of Great Britain taking
silver, Juliette Haigh
and Rebecca Scown
of New Zealand taking
gold and Sarah Tait and
Kate Hornsey of Austalia
taking bronze.
Having also won the 2010 World Rowing
Championships, again ahead of Great Britain’s
Stanning and Glover, Haigh and Scown look to
have a slight upper hand as the final path to the
Olympics begins.
