‘It’s all about setting a marker,’ says Ellie Piggott ahead of winter assessments
Reigning World Champion Ellie Piggott is looking forward to the first of three GB Rowing Team Winter Assessments as a chance to set a personal marker.
Piggott (far left) won 2016 World gold
Reigning World Champion Ellie Piggott is looking forward to the first of three GB Rowing Team Winter Assessments as a chance to set a personal marker.
Unlike some who fear these double-header tests – a 2km ergo test and a 5km on-water time trial which pit team-mate against team-mate – Piggott says: “It will give me a marker to move off from through the season, something to improve from.
“I love racing and having just done the British Championships, it’s another chance to race and racing is what we do all of this for”.
Winner of lightweight women’s quadruple scull gold in Rotterdam two months ago, Piggott is part of a strong squad based at the national training centre near Caversham which features returning Olympians and talented rowers from the U23 ranks who are making the step up.
The Wallingford RC rower could be amongst the top finishers in Boston, Lincolnshire, this weekend in the lightweight women’s division.
With 2016 Olympians exempt from the process, Leander Club’s Charles Waite- Roberts and Zak Lee Green, of Agecroft Rowing Club, are amongst the rowers who could show well in the equivalent men’s division. World medallist and world cup winner Joel Cassells, of Oxford Brookes University BC, will also race in this event but is only recently back to training after a post-Worlds break.
Oli Cook and Callum McBrierty will be two more World Champions in action at the weekend. They took open men’s coxed pair gold in Rotterdam with cox Henry Fieldman. Cook races for Oxford University this weekend whilst McBrierty represents Leander Club.
Reading University BC’s Mathilda Hodgkins-Bryne, a World U23 Champion in the open double scull, and Holly Nixon could also be names to watch. They race in the open women’s single event. Leyden, winner of world gold with Hodgkins-Bryne, has been forced out of the Assessment by a heavy cold.
Tom Barras and Nick Middleton, both of Leander Club, will be amongst the open men’s single scullers seeking to impress as they aim to join GB’s strong “returning” Olympic contingent of men’s scullers including Jack Beaumont, Angus Groom, John Collins, Jonny Walton, Peter Lambert and Graeme Thomas.
Tests on the indoor rowing machine (ergos) take place on Saturday, 5 November with 5km on-water time-trials on Sunday 6th.
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