AGERPRES special correspondent Adrian Tone reports: Romanian rower Ioana Vrinceanu declared on Friday, in the wake of her and her teammate Roxana Anghel winning the Olympic silver in Paris in the women’s pair event, that this medal is a “dream come true.”
“We did a good race, I don’t even know how to describe it now. We managed a better start than last time and we did our job, not of anyone else, and that’s what we kept on doing until the end. We didn’t match our effort to the other crews, we didn’t keep an eye on them. Couch Antonio Colamonici told us to keep calm and let the boat pull for us, not us pull for the boat,” Vrinceanu said.
Ioana Vrinceanu confessed that she and boat mate Roxana Anghel tried to stay focused after the medals won on Thursday by Romanian rowing at the 2024 Olympic Games: “After yesterday’s medals the atmosphere remained the same, we tried to stay focused, because we knew that we still have work to do, we still had a race ahead of us the next day. We congratulated everyone who put in so much effort, but we tried to keep our distance and stay focused on what we had to do. Now we need to recover a little, after which we will hit the water to train with our colleagues for tomorrow’s race (women’s 8+, Ed. note). We cannot promise anything for tomorrow, we just want to do a very good race, our race. We take our energy from this medal.”
“I felt the crowd in the stands from 1,000 metres, at no other competition was there such a long stand. Usually it sits along the last 250 m. Now, halfway into the race, people started screaming, yelling, but we didn’t let this distract us. We knew that we had to ramp up our effort on the last stretch. We thank everyone who supported us, because there was a Romanian flag at each corner of the stands. We thank them very much for backing us regardless of the result. I saw them after the race, because during the sprint we don’t get our heads out of the boat,” Roxana Anghel commented in her turn.
The Romanian crew of Ioana Vrinceanu and Roxana Anghel won silver in the women’s pair on Friday, at the Olympic Games in Paris, after pulling off a remarkable finish.
