they did last year in Shanghai<\/a>, and throughout this week’s regatta on The Bosbaan lake, the Kiwi pair claimed an early lead and were never challenged.<\/p>\nTaylor and Welch were about one second faster than their Australian rivals through each of the first three quarters before the gap closed slightly over the final 500m.<\/p>\n
It was reminiscent of double Olympic champions Bond and Murray in their pomp, who dominated races with apparent ease throughout an exceptional reign in the early 2010s, featuring six world titles.<\/p>\n
Welch had mixed feelings about being compared to the crew who developed the household name, the ‘Kiwi Pair’.<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of talk around that. It’s pretty awesome to be in the same conversation as them,” he said.<\/p>\n
“But we kind of do our own thing. We don’t feel like we need to live up that, we just do the best we can and see how it goes.”<\/p>\n
Taylor said becoming back-to-back world champions felt “pretty awesome”.<\/p>\n
“I guess it was the goal at the start of the season, and I feel that we stayed in that direction the whole way, but there’s always one last race that can knock you over.<\/p>\n
“We were pretty confident during the week that we could do it. But you never know on the day, so we’re pretty stoked to get it done.”<\/p>\n
Taylor said the pair would enjoy a small celebration before preparing to play their part in the New Zealand eights campaign.<\/p>\n
World Rowing is allowing athletes to “double up” in crews in Amsterdam, which has allowed New Zealand to form men’s and women’s eights over the closing days of the regatta.<\/p>\n
In earlier races over night, the women’s pair of Juliette Lequeux and Katie Lush placed third in their B-final while the men’s double of Ben Mason and Finn Hamill were fourth in their B-final.<\/p>\n
The men’s four of Matt Macdonald, Oliver Maclean, Fred Vavasour and Harry Fitzpatrick have qualified fifth fastest for tomorrow’s A-final.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ben Taylor and Oli Welch are backing away from comparisons with legendary New Zealand duo Hamish Bond and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583341,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-583340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583340\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}