KEY POINTS:
On the eve of his second straight K1 1000m showdown today, Ben Fouhy reckons there are good and bad aspects to having already raced an Olympic final.
Fouhy won silver at Athens four years ago, an event at which he arrived as defending world champion.
So while he
knows what to expect, he also has vivid recollections of what the Athens race took out of him.
"It was the hardest race I've done in my life and I think it damaged me psychologically," he said.
"I haven't been able to dig as deep again. It's been on my mind and pressured me because I know how much I had to step up after Athens and probably over-baked everything."
Fouhy and Steven Ferguson and Mike Walker in the K2 1000m will shoot for medals today, while Ferguson put himself in tomorrow's K1 500m final with a strong display in winning his semifinal yesterday.
Ferguson, 28, will contest the single-seat event in which his father, Ian, won back-to-back Olympic golds in 1984 and 1988. Dad was waiting with a congratulatory hug on shore when he parked up at the pontoon yesterday.
In a close-run race, Ferguson was fourth at the halfway mark but maintained a relentless pace to cross marginally ahead of Anders Gustafsson of Sweden, winning in 1m 42.238s.
Gustafsson was .171s back, with Britain's Tim Brabants taking the final spot for tomorrow by finishing third in 1:42.530.
The other two semifinal winners were world champion Adam van Koeverden of Canada, fractionally slower than Ferguson's time, and Croat Stjepan Janic, who had the fastest time of the day, 1:41.689.
Ferguson used the speedy Gustafsson alongside him as his yardstick down the course.
"I saw him die, took my opportunity, kicked as hard as I could and finished strong - with wobbly arms."
Erin Taylor, in just her second full year as a canoeist, finished a creditable fifth in her K1 500m women's semifinal yesterday.
Taylor was slow out of the blocks but picked up ground in the second half of the race to clock 1:54.300, .488s behind the third placegetter, Slovenian Spela Ponomarenko, who took the last spot in tomorrow's final.
Fouhy will kick off New Zealand's three-pronged attack on the medals today and he has talked of how "four years of my life hinges on 3 1/2 minutes".
Life since Athens "hasn't always been a bundle of joy" but the man who has admitted to being plagued by self doubts felt he had made progress in his semifinal on Wednesday.
"I think it's more of a mental thing at this stage. I get pretty stressed but I've worked really hard on trying to not let it get to me as much [as in the past]."
Being in the Olympic village had been an enriching experience, he added. Discovering other athletes who had been through grim times not dissimilar to his own battles had given him a fresh perspective, he said.
Ferguson and Walker admitted they deliberately eased off on the finish line in their semifinal because they wanted to draw lane one, where they suspect there might be a whiff of favourable wind.
It was a tricky manoeuvre which they pulled off cleverly. They'll now hope it pays a healthy dividend today.
