RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil won 9 gold medals, Uruguay 2 and Peru 1 on the first day of the South American Rowing Championship being held between Tuesday and Wednesday on the 2,000-meter Olympic track of the Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon in Rio de Janeiro.
Brazil, the tournament host, swept the first of the two days of the competition, winning 9 of the 12 gold medals, as well as 2 silver and 1 bronze medals.
Uruguay followed with 2 golds and 5 bronzes; Peru is provisionally in third place with 1 gold and 1 silver, followed by Ecuador (3 silvers and 3 bronzes), Paraguay (1 silver and 1 bronze) and Panama (1 bronze).
With the exception of the Brazilians, the only gold medalists on Tuesday were Uruguay’s Bruno Cetraro, who won the lightweight single sculls, and Zoe Acosta and Nicole Yarson, who won the junior women’s double pair, as well as Peru’s Sandro Gardella Bozzo, winner of the junior men’s single skiff.
Cetraro had already shone in Rio de Janeiro last Friday when, along with his compatriot Felipe Klüver, he won the lightweight men’s double skiff event at the Pre-Olympic of the Americas, which guaranteed both rowers a place in the Tokyo Olympic Games.
The Brazilian gold medals on Tuesday were won by Vanessa Cozzi (lightweight women’s single skiff); Milena Viana and Maria Clara Lewenkopf (W2-), Mariana Funari and Shaianer Ucker (JW2-), Fabio Moreira and Alef Fontoura (M2-), and Robson Radmann and Facundo Duart (JM2-).
Brazil was dominant in the large boat events with gold medals won by Milena Viana, Agnes Nadine, Maria Clara Lewenkopf and Yanka Britto (W4-), Heitor Araújo, Luiz Felipe Faria, Iago Rodrigues and Vitor Falcon (LM4-) and Breno Robert, João Vinicius Ferreira, Tomás Levy and Gustavo Oliva (JM4x).
Of the 12 finals on Tuesday, one was Paralympic, the men’s single sculls, with victory for Brazilian René Campos, with a time of 10 minutes, 32 seconds and 48 hundredths.
The South American Rowing Championship includes 21 races in the male and female categories contested by boats from 6 countries in the region: Brazil, Ecuador, Panama, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.
The rowers from Argentina and Chile who last week competed in Rio de Janeiro in the Pre-Olympic of the Americas, in which each country guaranteed a place in the Olympic Games in Tokyo, preferred to return to their country as the South American tournament was deferred by four days due to the health measures imposed to tackle the covid pandemic in Brazil.
As the organizers had already established that the Pre-Olympic winners of the men’s single skiff (M1x), women’s single skiff (W1x), men’s lightweight double skiff (LM2x) and women’s lightweight double skiff (LW2x) events would automatically be crowned South American champions, these events were excluded from the competition schedule.
The respective South American champions in these categories, which last week guaranteed spots in Tokyo, were Brazil’s Lucas Ferreiro Verthein (men’s single skiff), Mexico’s Kenia Lechuga Alanis (women’s single skiff), Uruguay’s Bruno Cetraro and Felipe Kluver (men’s light double skiff) and Argentina’s Milka Kraljev and Evelyn Silvestro (women’s light double skiff).