The four of us made up the Great Britain Visually Impaired coxed four rowing squad.

We formed and trained at Hereford Rowing Club in 1995 and rowed together until the end of 1996.

 

Originally we were supposed to be rowing against the French national squad at Royal Henley, but they bottled it and failed to appear on the day. So instead we ended up rowing against some olympic medal winners and through sheer power over technique, we whipped their asses in all catagories.

 

 

 

By the way, the black lab is Ken's guide dog Artie. And no, he didn't come in the boat with us!

 

We rowed as coxed pairs as we'd lost touch with Pete & Ken by this time.

The laugh was, that we'd done absolutely no rowing training for 4 years since the first boat race at Henley.

Infact, we rowed with a hell of a hangover after spending the whole day and night before the race at a barbeque. We stayed up till 3am watching the rugby then travelled to Henley to row at 9am.

Unlucky for us, we were the first race!

 

We had only been brought in to give the Spanish some reasonably good opposition and we were never expected to win anything! So needless to say, everyone was shocked when we wiped the floor with the Spanish Elite in every single race!

When the Spanish team coach asked us in the club house, how long we'd been training for the day? We could only reply "a wee while!"  We could hardly tatally shatter the guy by telling him we'd done bugger all training and were at a party til 3am and the only bit of practice we'd had in 4 years was limbering up to the starting position!