Australia’s Men’s and Women’s Eights are both headed for the repechage in their bid to make the Paris Olympic final.

The Men’s Eight finished second in their heat behind Great Britain and now move to the repechage at 6.20pm AEST on 1 August where the top four boats will qualify for the A Final on 3 August.

The crew of Ben Canham, Joshua Hicks, Spencer Turrin, Angus Widdicombe, Jack Hargreaves, Alex Purnell, Angus Dawson, Jack O’Brien and Kendall Brodie finished with a time of 5mins 37.04secs. The US was the fastest crew through in 5mins 29.94s.

“We had a good race in that we certainly hit some points that we wanted to execute but there are always points we want to improve on,” Kendall said.

“Throughout our campaign we’ve changed our seating a little bit and we haven’t actually raced that much with our current line up, so I think it’s a really good thing moving into the rep that we get another chance to practice that line up.”

The team is relishing the challenge ahead of them.

“I’m kind of happy to be going through the rep to be honest, it gives us another race here to improve ourselves,” Ben said.

“We’ve put our eggs in one basket here and given the pressure on us I think it’s good because it helps keep us honest.”

The Women’s Eight was also second in their heat which was won by Great Britain.

Katrina Werry, Lucy Stephan, Bronwyn Cox, Georgie Rowe, Jacqui Swick, Giorgia Patten, Sarah Hawe, Paige Barr, Hayley Verbunt finished in 6mins 18.61secs with Romania setting the fastest time of 6mins 12.31secs.

They will race their repechage at 6.10pm AEST on 1 August ahead of the A Final on 3 August.

“We had a really good training block in Italy and to come here and execute a good race we’re really happy with that, the British crew obviously had a ripper start and something for us to work on,” Georgie said.

“It was pretty close at the end so we have a couple of days to look back and focus on our first half of the race and just build on that.

“The conditions don’t really affect the way that we row, we always want to maintain our framework and we have our technical cues and our cox did an awesome job at keeping us on those, and it was a longer race and a headwind so we were prepared for that.”

The Women’s Quadruple Sculls of Ria Thompson, Rowena Meredith, Laura Gourley and Caitlin Cronin were third in their repechage and are into the B Final at 8.14pm AEST on 31 July.

The Men’s Pairs of Patrick Holt and Simon Keenan finished fourth in their repechage in 6mins 53.40secs and did not progress.

Reece Homfray