Campbell eyes a podium finish

With the pressure of Olympic selection behind them Coleraine’s Alan Campbell and Richard and Peter Chambers can concentrate on racing this weekend as the World Cup season draws to a close in Munich.

The next time the world’s best get together it will in six weeks time at Eton Dorney when the Olympic regatta gets under way.

While results this weekend don’t matter in the longer term goal of London 2012 Campbell would like a podium finish to re-establish a little self confidence after his fourth place in Lucerne three weeks ago.

The lack of finishing speed over the final 500m was concerning but Campbell was in the middle of a heavy period of training and after taking some time with his coach Bill Barry to assess the performance he wasn’t going to push any panic buttons.

He’ll clash with long term rival Mahe Drysdale from New Zealand but Olympic silver medalist Ondrej Synek misses the regatta having raced in Holland last weekend.

“Whoever is in Munich I will race,” said Campbell.

“I will use the event to try and lay down a marker myself. I’m not going to be holding back huge amounts of reserves and be happy with coming here, I want to finish in the best possible position I can.

Peter Chambers returns to the Great Britain lightweight four boat after missing the Lucerne regatta with a minor back problem. Along with brother Richard, Chris Bartley and Rob Williams they’ll be looking to follow up a silver and bronze medals in the two world cups so far.

“We know what our speed is and we’ll be concentrating on our performance. There’s a lot of boats out there that can win such as the Danes and Chinese but we know what to expect,” explained Peter.

Older brother Richard added, “At the minute we are in the position that we can win the world cup series in an Olympic year and that’s what we want to do. We want to win, we want to learn from the performance and take that with us into the final run in to the Olympics.”

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