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Olympic hopes: NZ coxless four
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New Zealand coxless four have had their fair share of misfortune, but the waters are never too calm in the rowing competition, and they will still be a big hope for gold in Beijing.
Hamish Bond was the biggest recipient of bad luck, as he was hit by a truck whilst out cycling late in 2007, which caused unfixable shoulder damage.
Bond's right shoulder is no permanently affected, but his rowing is not and there is still the power there to help him and his three team-mates to pull together in search of Olympic medals.
"I separated my shoulder (when he was hit while out cycling)," says Bond.
"Basically my collarbone isn't attached to the shoulder blade but it doesn't really bother me."
Team-mates Carl Meyer, James Dallinger and Eric Murray have had their problems too, but Bond's accident cost them the most time training on the water.
Trials
The world champions still managed to win a host of national trials to book their place as New Zealand's coxless four for the Olympics.
"Yeah, we had a bit of time out from training together while he recovered," said bowman Meyer, who has the job of setting the pace.
"Then Dally (Dallinger) had an operation and we had little pieces of this and that but we got back into the boat and had a pretty good summer considering."
Only brought together last March, the World Championship win in September came after they managed to harness their instant speed with some team-work.
"There was speed there straight away," said Murray. "There was a good dynamic but it was all a matter of our techniques coming together.
"I think that was the key to our success, making it a lot easier than we had before."
Success
"Last year if you made the final you automatically qualified for the Olympics.
"So our main focus was qualifying for the Olympics and once we did that we changed our focus around and said: 'Hey, why don't we try and get a medal here?' because we had been going well all the way through.
"But we did not think: 'I'm going to win this today'. We just said: 'Let's do what we can and see what comes out of that'."
Despite being world champions the team know that they will not find it easy and are ready to start from scratch to earn Olympic glory.
"Every year when you go overseas, it's a totally new year," said Murray. "It's not as if you can go and say: 'Everyone catch us', because you're back to square one again.
"You don't know what anyone else has been doing.
"Other crews might have done something different in their training. They could be faster, they could be slower. So we go there on scratch and see how it goes."
