Irish rowers chasing final tickets for Tokyo Olympics 

Daire Lynch: Attempting to become the first Irish sculler to qualify for the Olympics since Sean Drea in Montreal in 1976.

Seven Irish rowers will have Tokyo in their sights this weekend, when they compete in the final Olympic qualification regatta in Lucerne, Switzerland.

Four of Ireland’s crews have already earned their places at the delayed Games by finishing with a ranking position at the World Championships two years ago in Austria.

But the women’s four, and the lightweight women’s double failed to make the cut and, with an entry from Clonmel’s Daire Lynch, Ireland is also breaking new ground in attempting to qualify a men’s single sculler for the first time since Seán Drea raced at the Montreal Games in 1976.

The best chance of success must come from Aifric Keogh, Eimear Lambe, Fiona Murtagh, and Emily Hegarty in the women’s fours, where there are two slots available from the field of eight crews.

The quartet, who took silver behind the Netherlands at the European Championships last month, will gain confidence after beating five of the other Olympic contenders at that regatta.

Coached by Giuseppe de Vita they have been raced in different combinations over the last two years and are built on the nucleus that won silver at the Under-23s in Florida two years ago.

But the dark horses in the field will be China, never to be underestimated, who have gathered four athletes from their senior squad in 2019 and who will be racing together as a unit for the very first time.

The other unknown quantity is the Czech Republic, who were absent from the Europeans, and are boating a group of their development athletes from their Under-23 squad in 2018.

By contrast Aoife Casey and Margaret Cremen are going to have a tough battle in the lightweight women’s double sculls, where a field of 16 will battle it out for the last two tickets to Tokyo.

Like the four, Casey and Cremen come into this regatta knowing that they’ve beaten five of the other contenders at the Europeans but one of those was the 40-year old German veteran Marie-Louise Drager and her partner Katrin Volk. Draeger has a string of world championship medals going back 20 years, and she and her partner will have learned from the experience, and will come back for more.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world has yet to show its hand for 2021, including Sarah Pound and Georgia Nesbitt, the Australians who missed qualifying at the Worlds by the tightest margin. Also looking to be in the mix will be the Americans. Marty Reckford and Michelle Sechser, and the South Africans, Kirsten McCann and Nicole van Wyk.

The biggest uphill battle will be faced by Daire Lynch, who has to beat 24 other scullers in the competition, where the favourite is Natan Wegrzycki-Szymczyk. The Polish sculler, who won the B final five years ago in Rio, has built up his rowing pedigree with student years in California and at Cambridge, where he rowed in the Boat Race, and the scramble to join him in Tokyo will be intense.