(thanks to Henrik Sivling and Florian Eigenmann for the pictures)

Background: After the HORR in London, two out of eight from our crew were leaving the country, and unfortunately also the team. We had therefore not planned to go to Lugano, until I spoke to Melchior Bürgin from Stämpfli Racing Boats. Melchior is a former world champion, and was - according to himself - so fast, that he was already in the shower when his opponents were crossing the finish line. He and Andi Beer from Rudergesellschaft Zürich offered to row with us. The offer - especially the part of how fast he is - was promising, and we decided to enter the regatta in the eights in the Masters category. The whole winter we had only been training low rate rowing - mainly as a preparation for the HORR. We had exactly four trainings in the eight to increase the rate with 10 strokes per minute...

Here is the preparation for the race - rigging the boat. Once again we are using our brand new boat Sleipner.

Impression from the regatta. Lots of boats in a very small room.

The boat is going on the water. As you can see - the weather is grey - but the water is flat!

Henrik S. will be ready to row in a moment...

This is after the race...
We only had one opponent - some spaghetti-eating-siesta-sleeping Italians from Como.
They were starting very fast, and had the lead after 250 m.
We then decided to keep on pushing and kept the starting pace all the way until 500 m.
We passed them, and as you can see from the picture, we are on our way to the landing stage to get our medal!!!
Martin in the front, Stephan behind him.

From left to right:
Stephan, Sebastian and Fredrik with their medals - very satisfied!!!

Here the famous world champion gets his medal.
Please observe that he is rowing in the Nordiska racing suit!

From left to right:
Andi, Henrik S and Henrik P getting their medals.
Also they look very satisfied...

Henrik S and Henrik P almost look to fresh so little time after the race.
Did they really push hard enough???

The team photo after the race.
From left to right:
Top:
Martin, Stephan, Henrik S, Fredrik, World Champion.
Bottom:
Nicklas, Henrik P, Sebastian, Andi.

After the race in the hotel.
Some friendly fighting going on (this is quite normal...).

On sunday, the race was cancelled because the other team had a cox - amongst friends - and after the regatta - even amongst enemies - called Steve Wonder... They crashed their eight into a quadruple four 5 minutes before the race... The race was delayed, but due to upcoming wind in the afternoon, the regatta was stopped.

Here are some pictures from Florian Eigenmann from Sunday:

A nice overview of Caslano, where the regatta was held.

Zooming in on the place where the boats were.

Zooming even closer in. This white house could do as summer recidence for Nordiska...

The "harbour" of Caslano, seen from the medal seremony landing stage.

This beautiful view we had on sunday...
Who wants to go back to rainy, grey Zürich then???

More pictures from sunday might follow later.

The crew that participated (from bow to stroke):
Henrik Persson
Henrik Sivling
Andi Beer
Melchior Bürgin
Fredrik Nilsson
Sebastian Sedvallson
Stephan Haferl
Martin Skrikerud
Nicklas Johansson (cox)

Last modified 10.4.01.