Horrie blasts into final, more NSWIS rowers hit water

Triple world champion Erik Horrie produced a flawless first hit out at Lagoa Stadium to progress straight to the A-Final of the AS men’s single sculls, on the opening day of the Rio Paralympics rowing regatta.

Racing in the second of two heats, the 36-year-old Sydney father set the pace from the start to easily win his heat, posting the second fastest time of the preliminaries behind Ukrainian Roman Polianskyi.

Great Britain’s Beijing 2008 Paralympic champion Tom Aggar kept the pressure on the Horrie for the first half of the race, but the NSWIS star’s superiority shone through in the latter stages, the London Paralympic silver medallist finishing a comfortable five seconds in front of his British challenger to earn a day off ahead of Sunday’s medal race.

“It doesn’t change anything, tomorrow I’ll be in the boat so it’s just basically got that one out of the way and just focus on Sunday,” Horrie told the Australian Paralympic Committee’s media team.

“We’ll go over the data and look at different bits and pieces. Tomorrow we’ll come out and do a training session (and) just go from there.”

NSWIS trio Kate Murdoch, Jeremy McGrath and cox Jo Burnand were joined by their teammates Brock Ingram and Davinia Lefroy to finish fourth in their heat of the LTA mixed coxed four. They will now race off in the repechage at 10:50am (11:50pm AEST on Saturday) for a place in the final.

It was a valuable experience for the crew, with all five members making their Paralympic debut with McGrath conceding they weren’t at their best.

“We probably got a bit too carried away and a bit too caught in the moment off the start, and we didn’t go ahead with other crews and just tried to catch up the rest of the race,” McGrath said.

“We left too much work at the end unfortunately, but we’ll learn (from) that for the repechage and we can improve on that.”