NZ rowing pair line up third dais visit

Out-duelling a couple of eastern bloc legends has given New Zealand women's pair Juliette Haigh and Nicola Coles the perfect boost in their mission to win a third world rowing championships medal.

The 2005 champions and 2006 silver medallists could well be climbing the dais again at Munich this weekend judging by their belligerent row in the heats on Sunday.

Victory gave them direct passage to Thursday's semifinals and forced Romanian greats Georgeta Damian-Andrunache and Viorica Susanu into a repechage.

The Romanians clearly didn't want the extra race but couldn't haul in the fastest qualifying New Zealand pair in a riveting battle over the last 500m.

It was a rare hiccup for the Olympic champions, who came out of retirement this year after claiming an outstanding double at Athens in 2004, winning gold in the pairs and eights.

Between them they share more than 20 Olympic and world championships medals.

Reputations do not mean a lot to the New Zealand pair, but Haigh admitted they did a double take when they heard the Romanians were returning to the sport.

"Each year we've been waiting for them to come back. It's funny because this year we'd kind of forgotten about them and suddenly here they are," Haigh said.

"They were pretty amazing in what they did at Athens, we have a lot of respect for them for that and we're still keeping an eye on them.

"But we've trained pretty hard ourselves these last three years so we're pretty keen to knock them off."

Susanu and Damian-Andrunache helped the Romanian women's eight to a comfortable win the opening heats yesterday, heading off the fifth-placed New Zealand crew by more than 10 seconds.

While the European veterans were dangerous, Haigh said she and Coles could not afford to focus on any one crew as the class had grown considerably stronger this year.

They were pipped into second at the Amsterdam World Cup regatta in July by China's Zhang Yage and Gao Yulan. The Chinese weren't at Lucerne three weeks later when the New Zealanders charged to gold.

As they did in 2006, defending world champions Darcy Marquardt and Jane Rumball, of Canada, skipped the World Cups and loom as the crew to beat this week.

"It could be like last year that we won't meet them for the first time until the world championships final," Haigh said.

The New Zealanders were delighted with the seven weeks of "hard out" training since Lucerne under coach Dick Tonks and hoped the benefits were about to be unveiled.

- NZPA