Australian women’s rowing coach Jason Lane said that his quad sculls were not used to dealing with the level of noise created by Team GB fans and that he was concerned it was going to cause problems in tomorrow’s final.
The coach said that his crew had told him they are having trouble hearing each other in the boat. “You don’t often see that in rowing,” he told the Telegraph.
Toby Lister, cox of the Australian men’s crew also commented on the noise made by British Olympic rowing fans.
“The gyus have got to be really tunnel-visioned and just listen to my voice,” Lister said.
“It’s not too bad the first half of the race, you can’t really hear the crowd, you hear a slight buzzing noise but nothing overly exhausting, but I think come Wednesday it will be pretty wild, so we will have to be prepared for that.”
The sculling sloth
Meanwhile, Niger’s Hamadou Djibo Issaka, the London 2012 novice rower who has been dubbed the “sculling sloth” has vowed to up his game ahead of tomorrow’s showdown.
The Sculling Sloth was given a wild card to the Olympics, allocated to ensure all 204 National Olympic Committees can take part even if no athletes have qualified. However, the gardener and swimming-pool attendant had only trained for three months and admitted, “I don’t have any technique.”
Despite trailing laughably behind his competitors, Sculling Sloth was cheered on warmly by the crowd and has become something of an Olympic anto-hero.
