Fermanagh rowers Ross Corrigan and Nathan Timoney flew out to Italy for the World Cup Rowing I early on Tuesday morning but whether the duo would feature at all was hanging in the balance right up until last week.
After shelving the Olympic trials due to Timoney’s back injury, the obstacles kept coming for the pair in recent weeks, explained Corrigan.
“Nathan hurt his back and we had been in and out of the boat and it wasn’t worth the risk.
“I did the 2K (erg test) on the rowing machine and Nathan was training away on the bike and he was doing a lot of volume and he ended up getting sick for nearly two weeks and we were out of the boat for even longer.
“It was actually looking like we weren’t going to go to the World Cup in the end. We put the entry in and everything and it was only last Monday that we changed our minds on it – that we were going to go,” said the Kinawley man.
“The coaches had a chat with Nathan about how he felt personally and he felt good and he still feels good, so we’ll get this week’s training done now.
“We did a speed test there on Thursday gone by just to see where we are against the rest of the team and give us a good idea what speed we have at the minute and see if we’ve lost much and we were very happy with that.
So then we’re like ‘right, full steam ahead for the World Cup’.”
While it hasn’t been ideal preparation for the Irish Men’s Pair, Corrigan says the World Cup presents a lot of the unknown;
“In a lot of ways it is a gauge and we’re just taking it as a bit of a stepping stone.
“We had and have all these expectations before these rocky few weeks and then you’re having to readjust but we don’t know what the Brits have been doing, what the Swiss have been doing – they could’ve had a worse time than us, maybe haven’t done as much prep. You don’t really know until you go.
“It’s a good way of seeing where we’re at. If we go and get a medal – brilliant, and we obviously want to go and win the thing but we’re lucky that we have a strong entry; the other two world medallists from last year, the Swiss and the Brits and then we have the Croatians who were the Olympic Champions from 2021 and the Danish who were the Olympic bronze medallists from 2021,” explained Corrigan.
“So we have four crews there that could very well be in the final along with ourselves in a couple of months and it’s definitely about going and seeing how fast they are right now, how fast we are.
“We know we’re not at our absolute best, which is in a way a good thing. That said, we could end up medalling or winning the thing because you never know what everyone else is doing.”
The competition gets underway for them on Friday morning in Varese and the main aim for the Fermanagh pair is to reach the A Final on Sunday.
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