Katherine and Vicky headed to Lucerne with enthusiasm after Bronze medals in Varese and Poznan.
However after catching a crab in the early stages of the race, the pairing missed out on a place in the the Womens double scull A final, finishing 5th in their semi-final in a time of 7:29.36.
In the BBC highlights programme, John Inverdale asks Katherine’s former double scull partner Anna Watkins to explain what ‘catching a crab’ is all about.
“If someone is going to catch a crab, it is probably going to happen at the beginning or the end of a race when the crews are going their fastest, when they are trying to do 45-50 strokes per minute, you’ve got to be so dextrous at that point to get the blades cleanly in and out of the water. When they don’t come out cleanly they end up parallel to the boat and you cant get the oar out to take a stroke so you have to bring it to a complete standstill in order to get the oars out and start again and it is a disaster. They will have had to sprint then, to catch up with the rest of the race and then that spent all of their oats and they had nothing left for the rest of that semi-final.”
The top three crews in the semi-final go on to the A Final and therefore on Sunday the GB double sculls crew lined up for the B final. Twitter fans suggested this was Katherine’s first B final since 1999. Grainger and Thornley led the crews to take a clear win in 06:58.87 ahead of Finland in 07:00.80.
A Final Results
Gold New Zealand 06:53.9
Silver Australia 06:54.62
Bronze Belarus 06:55.27
4th Germany 06:58.98
Highlights of the regatta are available to view on the BBC Iplayer here