Louisa Sawers is relishing racing on the World Cup circuit again and is adamant Britain’s new women’s canoe sprint K4 crew can be successful as they build towards the Rio 2016 Olympics.
Sawers joined forces with Jess Walker, Rachel Cawthorn and Angela Hannah in the K4 500m at the London 2012 Olympics last summer, the quartet going on to finish fifth in the final at Eton Dorney.
The new British K4 combines two of the Olympic quartet with two new faces as Sawers and Hannah link up with Hayleigh Mason and Lani Belcher with the latter being assigned seat one in the boat.
They came together after the Nottingham selection event and subsequent rigorous testing the week after at Eton Dorney with their first international outing this week’s World Cup opener in Szeged.
They will also race at the second World Cup of this year in the Czech Republic venue of Racice a week later and Sawers believes it will be the start of plenty of success in the future.
“It’s exciting to have a new crew and it’s a strong crew,” said Sawers, who also competed in the K2 500m at London 2012 with Abigail Edmonds, finishing third in the B final.
“We’ve got Hayleigh who is powerful and a tough cookie, Angela is also very powerful and I’m consistent in the back of the boat.
“Lani has mainly done K2 in the past so it’s good that she has moved to K4. She has driven K2s for the past five years internationally and she paddles her K1 with good rhythm, so that makes it easy to transfer it into the K4.
“It’s exciting that it’s come around again and it’s nice to be going away and racing on a different course against the people that you have been lining up against for the past four or five years.
“Although this year is about seeing where we are and developing the K4 again, we have a plan for Rio and leading up to that, the aim being to make the podium continuously at World Cups through to 2014 and 2015.
“World Cups give us the chance to see how good we are and how good our winter training was. It will be good to see how fast we can make the boats go.”
© Sportsbeat 2013