World rowing champions to flex oars on Tauranga Harbour

After the storm that has raged around New Zealand's world champion rowing crews all week, the smooth waters of Tauranga Harbour will bring welcome respite tomorrow.
Six of New Zealand's seven world champions will be at Memorial Park tomorrow for the annual 500m sprint regatta (8am-noon).
Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell, Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater and Juliette Haigh and Nicky Coles all claimed world titles at Gifu, Japan, in one of the greatest days for New Zealand rowing.
Mahe Drsydale also claimed the men's single sculls _ although the former Tauranga oarsman is in London.
The world champion rowing teams are likely to be on the wrong end of a log-jam for places in the team of the year category at the annual Halberg Awards, to be held early next year.
With nationally-identifiable teams the All Blacks, the Kiwis, and the Silver Ferns all performing outstandingly well this year, it seems near impossible for all three world champion rowing teams, nominated for the award, will make the cut.
Rowing New Zealand chief executive, Mount Maunganui's Craig Ross, remained confident all three teams would make the final four.
"It was a truly outstanding achievement on a world stage, there are 115 international rowing federations and I don't know how you could top that. We feel it would be extremely unusual for any world championship-winning team to be left out, in fact I don't know if that's ever happened before," Ross said.
Rowing NZ had nominated each of the three teams separately but only after having its request to nominate the entire world championships rowing squad, which was the wish of the rowers themselves, turned down.
However, Halberg awards event manager and Commonwealth Games chef de mission Dave Currie said the idea of including the whole rowing team as one nominee was "not sensible".
He said there were two ways of qualifying as a team _ by way of the "traditional" team as in cricket or rugby, or as in rowing's case, "a team doing the same thing at the same time".
"We are really sympathetic to their (RNZ's) view. They see themselves as a team, and rightly so, but we haven't found any way we could do it," Currie said. "If they had won an official team title, accumulative over the world championships, that would've been a different story."
Rowing's CoachForce development officer Mark Elphick said the six world champions would add lustre to the Tauranga regatta, which had attracted 500 entries.
"It's great and when you add in Rowing NZ's summer training squad, a squad from St Andrew's College in Christchurch, Westlake Boys' High from Auckland and all our club and school crews from around the Bay, it's shaping to be quite a regatta," Elphick said.
Elphick said preliminary discussions had been held with the Tauranga City Council about shifting the regatta to The Strand, doubling the length of the course.