ROWERS WIN MORE MEDALS AT DORNEY

The local trio all came away with Silver medals from Sunday’s World Cup meeting at Eton Dorney. Campbell showed a strong return to form in tough windy conditions that produced choppy water, Campbell led the man who beat him to silver at London 2012 Ondrej Synek with 500m remaining.

But the talented Czech rower, who recently won the European title, closed Campbell down and overtook him with 250m to go and won by just over three seconds with Campbell holding off the rest of the field for second.

“I felt good, I went all for it off the start and tried to get a good lead and I thought if I could get the momentum that would really help me because I knew the conditions were going to be tricky. Unfortunately in the last 250m I hit three bad waves and it killed my sprint finish so instead of challenging for a gold I had to hold on for silver,” explained Campbell.

“I’ve definitely enjoyed being back and I’m happy with the result and it’s a reflection of where I should be and hopefully now I can go on and challenge at the world championships.”

It was another silver medal at Eton Dorney for brothers Richard and Peter Chambers following another thrilling finish.

As half the GB lightweight four last August they were nipped on the line by South Africa for Olympic gold and the finish yesterday to the lightweight double sculls was eerily similar.

Sculling together for the first time in international competition as a duo they blasted off the start and led at all the timing markings but they began to tire in the closing stages and the Polish crew of Artur Mikolajczewski and Milosz Jankowski began to row them down and edged ahead with around 100m remaining.

The Coleraine siblings couldn’t respond with Poland winning in a time of 6:17.13 and the Chambers brothers just 1.13 seconds behind with Norway a mere five-hundredths of a second adrift in third.

Despite the defeat they were still taking positives from their performance.

“I think it succeeded what we thought might happen and we fought as hard as we could. We showed from the start what speed we had but with 250m to go the wheels fell off but we are a new combination and we will learn from this,” said Richard.

“It’s disappointing we didn’t win but we’ve laid things in place this weekend for the long term. We’re actually quite pleased with the way we went about this. It was about racing hard and we did that,” added Peter.

All three rowers will head to Henley in a fortnight’s time followed by the final world cup regatta in Lucerne in July as the preparations for the world championships in Korea at the end of August really begin to ramp up.