Winning a gold medal is hard. Repeating as gold medalists is even harder. At the 2012 Summer Olympics in London, the eight women rowing for the United States... were heavy favorites to reprise their winning ways from Beijing four years earlier.
"This is me training myself to be still and slow. That's what I struggle with. I will spin out at top speed. My struggle is always just pullback."
In December 2017, a two-time Olympic rower from Groningen in Holland called Rogier Blink, was scrolling through his Twitter feed one night when he segued to a story by Liam Gorman in The Irish Times: "In a letter to the Board of Rowing Ireland last month, a group of athletes, including Paul and Gary O'Donovan, Mark O'Donovan and Shane O'Driscoll, and Denise Walsh and Sanita Puspure - all of them World Championship finalists - expressed dissatisfaction about the methods of Antonio Maurogiovanni."
Jake McCarthy kept the medals coming for Ireland at the World Rowing Championships in Shanghai. The 28-year-old matched the bronze medal won by his twin, Fintan, on Friday in the double with a well-judged performance in the lightweight single sculls final. In very high temperatures, Turkey's Halil Kaan Koroglu set a blistering early pace, but the eventual medal winners kept their cool.
