Rowers open Youth Olympic Games campaign

Fresh from their medal-winning exploits at the World Junior Championships a week ago in Racice, Britain’s quartet of rowers opened their Youth Olympic Games campaign by winning their heats in Singapore earlier today.

Oxford’s Georgia Howard-Merrill and Fiona Gammond, gold medal winners a week ago in the women’s eight, and Durham’s Ed Nainby-Luxmoore and Yorkshire’s Caspar Jopling – men’s four silver medallists – are competing at the Marina Reservoir in Singapore in the women’s and men’s pair events respectively.

Howard-Merrill said:  “We did what we needed to do to get into the semi-final, but we think we can go a lot faster than we did, especially in the last 500m, so we are feeling confident.”

Jopling said:  We’ll be doing a lot of stuff different in the semi-final.  But we have got some good race experience and we can try and sort out the areas we had problems today and hopefully make it work in the semi-final.”

All four will now race in Tuesday’s semi-finals.  For biogs, more information and full results (if you can download the  necessary plug-in) are at:   http://www.singapore2010.sg/public/sg2010/en/en_games/en_games_results.html