Jennings has her heart set on a golden moment

ROWING NEWS:SINÉAD JENNINGS goes into action on today's first day of the World Championships in Linz/Ottensheim in Austria with her eyes firmly fixed on taking gold come Sunday.

The event is a chance for athletes who have not qualified for Beijing to end the season on a high note, and the Donegal woman looks set to do this.

The 2001 world champion has taken a tortuous route to this point.

Her event, the lightweight single scull, is not featured at the Olympics, but in the seven years since her glorious win at Lucerne she has teamed up with a number of partners in the Olympic-class lightweight double scull but never achieved the breakthrough she sought.

This season she hoped to go to Beijing in a heavweight boat: she tried the double scull, and was entered in the heavyweight single for the Olympic Qualifier. It all came a bit late. Ireland coach Harald Jahrling refused to sanction her entry in the Qualifier, prompting a bitter riposte from Jennings, for which she later apologised.

With Beijing off the agenda, the Donegal woman can complete the arc of gold from Lucerne to Linz. She has no shortage of reasons to believe she can do it.

At the 2004 World Championships in Spain she was set for gold only to hit a buoy in the closing stages and fall out of the medals to fourth.

When she came back into this boat this season in the final World Cup regatta in Poznan in Poland she was a close second behind Lindsay Jennerich of Canada.

Jennerich and Jennings may well shoot it out for gold again here, although Michaela Taupe-Traer of Austria is also a realistic contender.

The reigning world champion, Marit van Eupen of the Netherlands, is out of the picture as she is competing in the lightweight double in Beijing.

Ireland's two other crews, the men's coxed pair and the lightweight men's pair, also go into action in today's heats. Alan Martin was a stalwart in the men's four until Jahrling rejigged the unit this month and left him out of the boat for Beijing. He teams up with James Wall and cox RuadháCooke in an all-NUIG unit which could do well.

Eugene Coakley also had his eyes on Beijing - in the lightweight four - until he lost his place just before the Olympic Qualifier. He forms a pair with younger brother Richard.

The brothers from Skibbereen are not on the official entry because of a technical fault in the system, but they could be high up on the results sheet by next weekend.