World rowing championships - first days and exhibition race

Finally, we've made it to Rotterdam. Fist impression: it's so HUGE! There are boats as far as the eye can see, alphabetically ordered by nation.
1900 Athletes, as we learnt at the opening ceremony in the city center of Rotterdam, are going to compete on this first ever combination of senior, U23 and junior world championships. As a consequence, this is going to be the biggest world rowing event ever held with about 1900 participants (as a comparison: 1300 athletes on last years' senior world rowing championships, which was a record participation).

However, if you look around the venue, it becomes clear that if any venue is able to host such a mega-event, it's certainly the brand new Willem-Alexanderbaan in Rotterdam. Besides being in the middle of nowhere and thus featuring a lot of space around for boat storage, car park etc, it is also offering a lot of room on the water:  The venue features 10 lanes as well as a seperate 3-lane canal for warm-up and cool-down. So during training, once you've made it to the water, you can actually row quite well. If you can cope with all the wind.

Making it to the venue, however, has proven to be a little difficult during the first days. Somehow, we managed several times to book shuttles that did not exisit  in the official schedule. Consequently, we waited half an hour for the actually scheduled bus. But as known from Amsterdam, the shuttles are always punctual, fast and have friendly drivers :-)

So... exhibition race today...
As mentioned above, the wind is a big factor here. To say it in the words of the regatta course homepage:
The rowing course as a whole is open under the sky, surrounded only by small reed beds. The wind can admittedly take its course, but affects all lanes equally. It makes the Willem-Alexander Baan rowing course to a fair race track.
Copyright: Seyb/ meinruderbild.de
Well, the winds affectig us today had a strength of about 4-6bft, but fortunately it was more or less tailwind. This means we had to cope with an uncomfotable wave. (Although admittedly everbody else had to as well.) We started regularly, the Brits being half a length ahead of us, but China, USA and Canada dropping back right from the beginning. After half the course, we had not only crashed our fingers several times into the riggers (Empacher, please, may we have a real quad instead of that overloaded pair next time?), but also closed the gap to the british team. Unfortunately, we came to a sudden stop due to a crab shortly afterwards, did not find back into our rhythm completely and passed the finish line on 2nd position. Well, room for improvment I'd say, but all in all not too bad. Tomoroow, our boat will take a day of - we're planning to cycle to the beach and to start to prepare for our final on saturday starting from wednesday. Stay tuned!
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