Tom James' Blog by Tom_James

Well it looks like all the hard work paid off! But before I give you the gold medal glory post, I thought I would update you on all the preparation that led to the success we achieved yesterday! On day 1 of the World Championships in Bled, we raced in the opening heats of the coxless fours event and we won comfortably over the French, which is always a good feeling. However, we then had the pretty bizarre situation of waiting 5 days for the semi-finals to take place, before racing the semi and final on successive days. By the time the week ended, it felt like we were competing in a separate regatta. In their infinite wisdom the FISA rowing officials have again left us clueless about any logic behind their actions.

The stage for this year's worlds was an alpine, turquoise lake in the middle of Slovenia, surrounded by layers of forest and mountains. The town of Bled could be the backdrop to numerous fairytales and romance novels. It's a model village that can't really be faulted. There are two main centre pieces of the town, a castle perched precariously on top of a high rock prominence above the lake and a large monastery taking up the whole of a small island smack in the middle of the water. Hopefully the photos do them both justice. I've never found the venues we race at particularly inspiring or beneficial in some way to a performance, but here you couldn't help but feel uplifted and inspired by the surroundings.

The night before a race is never particularly nice, it's like the night before your driving test. All you want to know is the result, but to get it, you have to go through a certain amount of mental anguish and pain. For some reason I've always tended to forget what this feels like quite soon after a race. You always kick yourself when it's a big race, as though somehow you've tricked yourself in to doing this silly race where you could actually be watching at home from the comfort of your TV. Of course that's the reason it means something to you, if you didn't get nervous before racing then you're not human or you don't care about the result. God knows what London is going to be like.

The 5-day wait for the semi-final consisted of training and preparation. It can be a little testing for everyone around this time. We'd just spent the last few weeks together on camp, training hard and testing ourselves. Now that the event was upon us, people can get quite twitchy and a little more sensitive than usual. When you wait for a semi in particular, it's a little tense, because this is where the negative feeling of 'just don't screw up' comes in to play. If you don't get in to the first 3 you don't get that chance of getting a medal or hopefully even winning the event.

If you want have a real look at rowing, then check out the official rowing website. However if you can navigate around it to find the right results then you're smarter than me - another genius ploy of FISA. Anyway stay tuned for the next installment and how it really felt to win gold!