Paris (AFP)

In trouble on the start of the 2019 season after a beautiful 2018 campaign, the French rowers compete from Sunday the World Rowing Ottensheim in Austria, the hunt for places for the Tokyo Olympics 2020.

On the Danube, 200 kilometers from Vienna, the water of Ottensheim in the industrial heart of Austria will allow the Blues to see more clearly at one year of the Olympics 2020, after exits withdrawn (Cups in Plovdiv, Poznan and Rotterdam, and European Championships in Lucerne).

"Sometimes we have had good intermediate results in the past, it gives us confidence, and when we are in the situation we are in, which is theirs, there is obviously more doubt and it creates a little more pressure, difficulty, "said the national technical director Patrick Ranvier.

"And then the competition is up, we're in the pre-Olympic year, there are lots of rowers who have been cutting for two years, doing two-year Olympic cycles and coming back," says Samuel Barathay, head of the men's sector.

On the eleven Olympic hulls hired this week in Upper Austria, five short boats (two rowers) can claim the qualification for Tokyo-2020, since these World Championships will award nearly 60% of the tickets for Japan in the summer next.

For the recalted, the final race in Lucerne from 17 to 19 May 2020 will be the last chance to hang the ticket Paris-Tokyo two months later.

In previous pre-Olympic World Championships, in 2015 at home on Lake Aiguebelette, the Blues had qualified to qualify six boats for Rio-2016, with the difference that the places for Brazil were more numerous for some boats than those who send directly to Tokyo.

- Lightweight shaped -

The two boats in light weight, in the men's with Olympic champion Pierre Houin associated with Hugo Beurey, and in the ladies with the 2018 world champion skiff (non-Olympic) Laura Tarantola and Claire Bové, must take one of the seven first places to see Tokyo.

In cash on the Lucerne Basin for the European Championships and 4th of the World Cup in Poznan, Claire Bové and Laura Tarantola represent one of the main French podium chances.

"On the international stage, the French boat is doing the best, it's our strongest boat," said Christine Gossé, head of the women's sector.

This crew is stable for two seasons, if we put aside the complicated period known by Bové in the summer of 2018, which forced him to a break during which Tarantola took gold at the Worlds and Europe alone.

However, this is not the case for the men's lightweight two-seater, a medalist in the big league between 2014 and 2017.

Pierre Houin is looking for the right combination, since the retirement at the end of 2017 of his buddy Jérémie Azou, with whom he won the Olympic gold in Rio in 2016 and the world in Sarasota (Florida) two years ago.

The association with Hugo Beurey is recent, with a first competition together in Poznan -12th place in the final- and then a World Cup in Rotterdam encouraging -7th and winner of the final B.

"Today, we are on a boat that takes more pleasure, which seems more fit and especially who wants to go on the attack," said Houin.

Last year's two-man world champions in Plovdiv, Matthieu Androdias and Hugo Boucheron are still looking for their form last year, after finishing 11th at the last World Cup in Rotterdam.

© 2019 AFP