I am sure there is not a single sportsman in the world that enjoys losing. There are probably only a handful who don’t mind losing.

Pete and the crew put the work in to little reward in Lucerne.

For me, the toughest thing to take is the feeling that you were not good enough or you under-performed.

This disappointing and irritating feeling has stayed with me this last week since our defeat in Lucerne. At this second World Cup, we raced without our selected stroke-man (Andrew Triggs Hodge) and bow-man (Tom James).

They were both on a recovery programme with back injuries so we decided to race the coxless four as planned with 2 ‘substitutes’ onboard. I use inverted commas here because it is not right to call these guys subs: Colin Smith (at stroke) and Tom Lucy (bow seat) have so many strengths. They are both world bronze medalists from 2007 in the coxless pair and eight respectively.

Although we had found some good speed in training and raced right on the red line, we just couldn’t find enough to make the A final, missing out by just 0.2 seconds to the World Champions, New Zealand.

In the B final the next day, I have no doubt that we all put our heart and soul into the race again to prove to ourselves that we could race against the best times of the A final. We just didn’t have enough speed, efficiency and power after the flat out racing to finish the race off – ending up a disappointing 8^th overall.

Having been back in the UK for a week I am pleased to say that things are back on track with Hodge and TJ. I’m already looking forward to the next chance to set the record straight.