One of the fiercest rivalries in Australian sport is set to continue at the Regatta Centre on Saturday, 23 March, when the titans of national rowing, NSW and Victoria, will go head-to-head to secure the coveted King’s Cup, the symbol of interstate men’s eights supremacy since 1920.
While NSW will start as favourites in the men’s event on home water, Victoria have the leading crews in the women’s eight.
Kim Crow, double Olympic medallist from London 2012, will also represent her state in the Women’s interstate single scull.
In the Kings Cup, both NSW and Victoria’s eights contain several Olympic medallists and the pundits are predicting the race will go down to the wire, just as it did when the event was last held at Penrith in 2008.
On that occasion NSW got home by the barest margin in a titanic struggle that saw the crews separated by less than a second over the entire 2000metre course.
Adding fuel to the competitive fires is the fact the light blue crew are on the brink of breaking their record for consecutive wins, having won the event for the past five years.
Victoria, however, will go into the race with a superior overall record.
The dark blues recorded a remarkable twelve year winning streak between 1985 and 1996, and if they prevail on Saturday it will be their fortieth win to NSW’s 26.
Adding drama is that the race draw — the two crews are placed in adjacent lanes, in the centre of the seven-crew field.
Other interstate events being contested on Saturday are the men’s and women’s single sculls, the women’s quad sculls, the men’s lightweight fours, and the men’s and women’s youth eights.
The interstate events are part of the 2013 Sydney International Rowing Regatta, the biggest ever held in Australia.
The regatta also comprises the Australian Open Rowing Championships, the Australian Open Schools Rowing Championship and the first Samsung World Rowing Cup event ever held in the southern hemisphere.